Three faculty members named Bing teaching fellows
Three faculty members have been selected as Bing
Fellows in recognition for their excellence in teaching.
The new fellows are David Beach, professor (teaching)
of mechanical engineering; Albert M. Camarillo, professor
of history; and Sharon R. Long, professor of biological
sciences.
The awards are for a three-year term and carry a
stipend of $10,000 a year. Fellows can use one-third of
the money for any purpose, while two-thirds is designated
for the support of projects designed to improve teaching
or the curriculum.
The fellows were selected from nominations made by
faculty in Humanities and Sciences, Earth Sciences and
Engineering. Final recommendations to the provost were
made by a committee consisting of the deans of the three
schools. The awards are funded from a $5 million
endowment made by Peter and Helen Bing in 1991.
David Beach
Since he started teaching at Stanford in 1974, Beach
has worked his way up through the ranks from teaching
specialist to professor with only a master's degree. He
managed this by specializing in courses that integrate
design and manufacturing. He teaches the Manufacturing
and Design course in mechanical engineering, and
co-teaches courses in Precision Engineering,
Computer-Aided Prototyping, and Integrated Design for
Marketability and Manufacturing, a joint activity of
mechanical engineering and the Graduate School of
Business. He also directs the Manufacturing Systems
Engineering program, a collaboration between the
mechanical engineering and industrial engineering
departments.
Beach describes his approach to teaching as
"non-traditional." He attempts to create an
environment that assists students in learning how to
design and manufacture mechanical devices through the
Product Realization Laboratory that he has created. The
lab provides students with the mentorship, space,
incentive and tools they need. Among the products that
students have produced in the lab are a wearable
computer, a racy, double-action lever wheel chair, and a
pocket-sized refrigerator to carry drugs that must be
kept cold.
In 1995, Beach won the Walter J. Gores Awards for
excellence in teaching, which honored him for "his
dynamic vision in establishing the Product Realization
Laboratory, an extraordinary learning environment where
students are eager to learn, and where they are
encouraged to transform ideas into reality."
Beach received his bachelor's and master's degrees in
engineering product design from Stanford in 1972. He
worked at Hewlett-Packard and Mattel Toys before
embarking on his teaching career.
Albert M. Camarillo
A specialist in Mexican American history and widely
regarded as the principal trainer of the next generation
of scholars in Mexican American studies, Camarillo
teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in U.S.
history, with an emphasis on Chicano culture and on race
and ethnicity in the 20th century. Past director of the
Chicano Fellows Program and the Stanford Center for
Chicano Research, and former chair of the University
Committee on Minority Issues, Camarillo currently is
director of the new Comparative Studies in Race and
Ethnicity program.
In 1988 Camarillo received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel
Award for outstanding service to undergraduate education,
in recognition of his leadership in creating an
environment in which ethnic diversity is welcomed on
campus. He also was cited for exemplary service to
residential education and for imaginative
service-oriented research concerning the impoverished and
homeless of Santa Clara County.
Three years ago Camarillo also received the Walter J.
Gores Award for excellence in teaching. With the addition
of the Bing Award, Camarillo becomes the first faculty
member to have received these three major awards that the
university bestows.
Camarillo joined the Stanford faculty in 1975, after
having held faculty posts at Yale University and the
University of California-Santa Barbara. His research
activities have focused on the Chicano experience,
primarily in the barrios of Santa Barbara and Southern
California in the period 1848 to 1930. His work relies on
both traditional sources and more recent oral histories
and census materials. He has used this material to
present data about different minority groups in a
comparative way.
Sharon Long
Long has been named a member of the National Academy
of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and a MacArthur "genius" fellow.
Though she studies the roots of legumes, plants like
alfalfa and wisteria, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
recruited her as an investigator in 1994, and she is both
a professor of biological sciences in the School of
Humanities and Sciences and a professor by courtesy of
biochemistry in the School of Medicine. The reason: Long
is a pioneer in studies of how plants and bacteria work
together for mutual benefit, fixing nitrogen from the air
and converting it into a valuable nutrient. Her research
has shown how the genes in alfalfa "talk" to
those in its symbiotic bacterium to initiate changes in
both. Insights about that conversation may shed light on
mysteries of human health, including disease invasions
and cancer.
Among the awards that Long says make her proudest are
two Dean's Awards for teaching from the School of
Humanities and Sciences. She has long been involved in
curriculum reform, working to redesign biological science
courses at Stanford and serving on the National Research
Council's Committee on Undergraduate Science Education.
She has been one of the strongest proponents of the
interdisciplinary Science Core, and is a member of one of
the three faculty teams designing and teaching the first
experimental version of this three-quarter introduction
to science for non-science majors.
Long said recently that she has been thinking about
teaching in new ways since she began work on the new
Science Core project and on Science Teaching
Reconsidered, a new handbook published by a National
Research Council committee on which she serves. "I
had never thought so much about the difference between
telling what you know and teaching it," she said.
Long joined the Stanford faculty in 1981 after serving
a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. She holds a B.S.
from Caltech and a Ph.D. in cell and developmental
biology from Yale. SR
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