Temenoff Awarded 2010 Jr Faculty Teaching Excellence Award

Atlanta (February 22, 2010) — Johnna Temenoff, Ph.D., has been selected to receive the 2010 Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award from the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Georgia Tech. This award, offered through the joint support of CETL and BP America, provides Georgia Tech with the opportunity to highlight excellent teaching and the educational innovation that junior faculty bring to campus as they discover new knowledge through their research and choose teaching methods that make their knowledge accessible, applicable, and exciting to the learners they connect with in their classrooms and beyond.

Temenoff, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, has affected education on several levels including co-authoring a text book on biomaterials, innovating cross-disciplinary engineering education initiatives, promoting teaching and leadership training for graduate students, engaging undergraduates in the classroom as well as the laboratory and developing a graduate class.

During her first three years as an assistant professor, Temenoff dedicated a large portion of her time writing and editing a textbook that she co-authored with Anthony Mikos entitled, Biomaterials: The Intersection of Biology and Materials Science. While writing, Temenoff used this experience as a way to intertwine the content from this book and redesign the department’s introductory undergraduate biomaterials course. In the first two years of this course, a course-notes version of the textbook was classroom-tested with these students, and many of the homework problems developed for those classes are now found in the final version of the textbook. In addition, student feedback during that period provided invaluable guidance on aspects of the final text.

In the subsequent years, Temenoff continued to develop new problem sets for homework to further challenge her students and provide them with opportunities to integrate the lecture material in situations relating to “real-world” biomedical devices. Moreover, to promote active learning and student engagement in the lecture material, Temenoff has designed several case studies that create opportunities for students to debate ethical and public policy issues surrounding development and manufacture of biomedical devices.

Temenoff has committed herself to teaching biomaterials,not only in her ownclassroom and laboratory at Georgia Tech, but on campuses across the nation. Her dedication to biomaterials education has helped to establish new standards and teaching materials in the field of BME, which will have a long-lasting impact on the field and the way that it is taught. Although only available for approximately two years, this book has already been adopted in over 40 universities, including several top-tier biomedical engineering departments in the U.S as well been printed in two international editions.

In addition to authoring the biomaterials book and bringing this experience to her classroom, Temneoff has contributed to multidisciplinary education in other ways including serving on the BME undergraduate curriculum committee, BioE Program graduate committee, and as frequent guest lecturer in many classes.

Temenoff Lab Website