Engineering Now .: Volume 3 - Edition 7 .: February 2007

Ladak receives 2006 R. Mohan Mathur Award for Excellence in Teaching

Hanif Ladak, jointly appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Medical Biophysics, has been selected as the winner of the 2006 R. Mohan Mathur Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Faculty of Engineering. This annual award recognizes superior teaching performance of faculty members in the Faculty of Engineering.

Ladak has been a faculty member at Western since April 2000, and is a joint appointee in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Medical Biophysics (MBP). He is also a core faculty member in the Biomedical Engineering (BME) Graduate Program. Ladak is hands-on with his teaching methods, outreach actives and research. The excerpts below from his nomination package provide further explanation.

“Hanif uses active teaching strategies in the classroom. In essence, he presents important concepts in the first 15-20 minutes when attention is most focused and then engages students in small group problem solving exercises to keep their interests high and to ascertain that they have truly mastered the material.”

“Hanif has been an enthusiastic participant in the WE Phone Campaign by fielding questions and offering advice to high school students. Last year, he voluntarily participated in internship site visits, reflecting his philosophy that professors must act as good ambassadors for Western and counsel students who are away from campus.”

“Hanif’s research is highly interdisciplinary, and he attracts highly qualified applicants equally to all three graduate programs (ECE, MBP and BME). His former graduate students have been extremely successful, and all of them are now either working in industry in the area of medical imaging or conducting research in the same area at the doctoral level.”

“Hanif designed the course Introduction to Digital Image Processing (ECE 445a/b). A modified version of this course is also offered to graduate students as ES 551, BME 509 and MBP 509. He created the notes, assignments and quizzes from scratch. Hanif’s teaching philosophy is to work all the way from theory to implementation to application. There is no single textbook that covers all three aspects well, so designing lectures and assignments to cover all three was quite a challenge.”

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