Colleges announce teaching award winners

The undergraduate colleges of the University of Notre Dame have selected their outstanding teachers for the 2005-06 academic year.

In the College of Arts and Letters, Christian Moevs, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures and a fellow in the University’s Medieval Institute, has been named recipient of the 2006 Sheedy Award for excellence in teaching.

Endowed by an anonymous donor, the award has been given annually since 1970 in memory of Rev. Charles C. Sheedy, C.S.C., former dean of the college.

Moevs’ scholarly interests include Dante, medieval Italian literature, lyric poetry and poetics, and the intersection between literature and philosophy. The author of “The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy,” he is currently working on projects on Dante’s mystical-philosophical sources and the hermetic tradition in the Renaissance. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1994.

In the College of Engineering, Edward J. Maginn, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has been named Outstanding Teacher of the Year.

Maginn’s research focuses on developing a fundamental understanding of the link between the physical properties of materials and their chemical constitution. Much of his work is devoted to environmentally related applications, both in remediation and environmentally benign chemical processing. The main tool he employs is a molecular simulation approach in which a detailed geometric and energetic model of the material of interest is created and then simulated using large-scale high performance computing. He has been a member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1995.

In the College of Science, A. Alexandrou Himonas, professor of mathematics, has been chosen as the recipient of the Shilts/Leonard Teaching Award.

Himonas joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1989 and specializes in the regularity of solutions to linear partial differential equations (PDE), and in the Cauchy problem for nonlinear evolution equations. He recently has been working on the regularity theory (analytic, smooth) for degenerate elliptic PDE, in particular PDE that are sums of the squares of vector fields. On non-linear PDE, he is working on the well-posedness of the initial value problem for evolution equations.

Established in 1993, the Shilts/Leonard Award recognizes outstanding teaching in memory of Rev. James L. Shilts, C.S.C., a longtime Notre Dame astronomy and astrophysics professor who died in 1982. The award was endowed by Eugene T. Leonard, a surgeon and 1940 alumnus of the University.

In the Mendoza College of Business, Shane A. Corwin, associate professor of finance, has been selected to receive the college’s undergraduate teaching award, which is sponsored by the British oil company BP. The recipient is chosen each year by the graduating class.

Corwin joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2000 and specializes in investments, market microstructure and investment banking. He is the author of a number of papers on such topics as trading behavior, initial public offerings and New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq trading halts. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s of business administration degrees at Mankato State University and his doctorate from Ohio State University.

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