Professor Of The Year Awards Ceremony

Introductory Comments By Sarah B. Wheeler

There are tremendous opportunities for uses of technology in science education. There are new ways to present science that is more engaging to students and technology provides an efficient way to learn so much more about what students are learning or not learning.  Technology can make education more effective and more efficient at the same time.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to introduce Professor Carl Wieman, this year's recipient of the CASE and Carnegie Foundation's award for Outstanding Doctoral and Research University Professor.  In a sense, my role here is superfluous; after all, a cursory internet search would tell you more quickly than I the seemingly relevant facts: that Professor Wieman is currently a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder; that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 along with Eric Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle for their achievement of the Bose-Einstein condensate; that he is, not surprisingly, the recipient of numerous fellowships, awards and honors, and that his work is highly respected throughout the international scientific community.

All this information, however, would fail to convey Professor Wieman's most essential and perhaps remarkable quality, what in particular draws us here together to honor him today - and that is simply this: that Carl is a throwback.

Now, before you begin to wonder if that isn't damning with faint praise, let me remind you that it was nearly 2500 years ago that Plato recorded for posterity the now well-known Allegory of the Cave, and told us about the flight of a few from an underworld of shadows and ignorance into a world illuminated by the light of Truth, which revealed the basis of reality itself. But those who were then able to perceive the world directly and clearly had a weighty decision before them: whether or not to return to the world of the cave and try to impart this knowledge to its prisoners shrouded in darkness: to people who would at best be slow to understand, would most likely mock and ridicule, and at worst might even conspire against anyone with such foreign ideas - true as they may be.  

An atmosphere, one could argue, not unlike that of a lecture hall filled with students for an introductory course on, let's say, Physics for Non-Scientists.

So you see, as many of his students will attest, what is truly remarkable about Professor Wieman is that despite having experienced the satisfaction of unique and distinguished scientific research and having attained the highest accolades that the world can confer, he nonetheless chose to return to the classroom, to teach those who had little or no aptitude or perhaps interest in grasping even the basic principles of his life's work. What is even more remarkable, is that with humility, creativity, clarity, perseverance, good humor, a mean PowerPoint presentation, a band of loyal assistants and his very own brand of Socratic dialogue, Professor Wieman not only did everything in his power to enable us to learn something about physics, he taught us something of the truth about ourselves.

It is one thing to teach a subject matter, and to teach it well, it is another altogether to communicate the insight that the resources to solve life's most complex and demanding problems are not necessarily to be found in a library or a lecture hall, or even a scientific laboratory, but rather within oneself. It is this invaluable gift, one which by word and example he gives generously to all his students, that makes Professor Wieman a truly outstanding educator, and a timeless one.