Morrow Receives the 2003 Distinguished Teaching Award

Professor James (Jim) Morrow was one of seven UW faculty chosen to receive the 2003 Distinguished Teaching Award, the University's highest award for teaching. This is the third time in the past five years that a member of the Mathematics Department has received the award - Professor David Collingwood won in 1999, and Professor Ronald Irving in 2001.

The award was given in recognition of Jim Morrow's many outstanding contributions to education. The NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at the UW, which he and Ed Curtis started in 1988, is among the most successful such programs in the nation. Jim started the Math Study Center in 1991; the idea has since been adopted by other departments on campus as well as by other universities, and it has become a cornerstone of our calculus program. The UW modeling team, which Jim coaches, has achieved international recognition, winning three prizes in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling in the past two years. He has organized our annual Mathday event for a number of years; Mathday is regularly attended by over a thousand high school students from around the state. More recently, Jim was instrumental in crafting the proposal for funding the Summer Institute for Mathematics at UW (SIMUW) for high school students. In addition to all of this, Jim continues to be an inspiring teacher in the classroom, regularly teaching the second year of our honors advanced calculus course (Math 334/5/6) as well as a variety of upper-level math courses.

For more of an idea of the impact Jim Morrow has on the life of the department, see this article for more on the modeling contest; go here for a description of last summer's REU program; SIMUW is here; and Mathday is described here.

Tom Duchamp