Classroom stars
Five stellar faculty members win distinguished teaching awards

24 April 2002 | Five faculty members will join the campus’s elite ranks of teaching excellence when they are honored next week with the 2002 Distinguished Teaching Award.

The award is the highest honor for instruction given by UC Berkeley. Only five percent of those who have taught at the campus since 1959 — when the awards began — have received this award. This year’s recipients bring the total number of award winners to 207.

This year’s honorees are Tyrone Hayes, associate professor of integrative biology; Usha Jain, a senior lecturer of Hindi language and literature; Jeffrey Knapp, associate professor of English; Leslie Kurke, associate professor of classics and comparative literature; and Stephen Welter, professor and division chair of insect biology.

They will be honored at 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 30, at a public ceremony in Zellerbach Playhouse.

“People automatically think of UC Berkeley as a premier research institution, but what too often gets overlooked is the incredible dedication and prowess of our faculty as teachers,” said Richard Kern, chair of the award selection committee and associate professor of French.

“The Distinguished Teaching Award allows us to publicly acknowledge the importance of teaching at Berkeley, and the high teaching caliber of our faculty, by celebrating the talents of a few of our very best each spring,” he said.

Tyrone Hayes
Usha Jain
Jeffrey Knapp
Leslie Kurke
Stephen Welter