8/17/2020 Joseph Park, Illinois ECE
Illinois ECE Assistant Professor Arijit Banerjee was named as the recipient of the 2020 Everitt Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence, recognizing one engineering faculty member for outstanding undergraduate teaching.
Written by Joseph Park, Illinois ECE
Illinois ECE Assistant Professor Arijit Banerjee recently won the 2020 Everitt Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence. In honor of Dean Emeritus William L. Everitt at the time of his retirement, the Everitt Teaching Award annually recognizes one engineering faculty member for outstanding undergraduate teaching and is one of the most coveted awards available to faculty. It serves to emphasize the importance attached to good teaching in the college. The award is made possible through an endowment contributed by the personal and corporate friends of Dean Everitt.
"I am humbled that my students and colleagues considered me to be worthy of this prestigious award," said Banerjee. "I will continue to seek my goal of giving students the best learning experience.”
"Professor Banerjee applies boundless creativity and energy to stimulate curiosity in students, to show them amazing concrete examples of technology, and to then inspire them to create and build on their own, limited only by their imagination,” said Illinois ECE Department Head and Professor Bruce Hajek, Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Endowed Chair in Engineering.
“Arijit is very passionate and a committed teacher who spares no effort in providing the highest quality educational experience for his students," added Illinois ECE Professor Naresh R Shanbhag, Jack S. Kilby Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "His classroom innovation is the result of striving to answer the question ‘what am I bringing into the classroom that the students cannot find elsewhere?"
"Professor Arijit Banerjee is an excellent teacher — he is fun to listen to, full of enthusiasm, and he develops and brings wonderful demos to his classes to show how things work in real life," said Illinois ECE Professor Erhan Kudeki.
Banerjee received his B.E. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, in 2005 and his M.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 2007. He earned his PhD in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016.
Banerjee's research focuses on creating new paradigms of electromechanical energy conversion systems while working at the combined domains of electromagnetics, power electronics, and control.