The American Society for Engineering Education has awarded Professor John Falconer the Lifetime Achievement Award in Chemical Engineering Pedagogy.
The award recognizes a sustained career of contributions to engineering education and scholarship that creates substantial, innovative changes and inspires other educators to adopt new behaviors that also benefit chemical engineering students.
The ASEE Chemical Engineering Division presents the award as merited, not necessarily annually.
Falconer joined the department in 1975 and served as department chair from 2007-11. Along with CU Boulder colleagues, he developed LearnChemE.com, a website that teaches chemical engineering concepts through screencast videos and interactive simulations. The site now includes approximately 1,350 videos that have been viewed more than 13.5 million times.
Falconer’s instructional efforts have earned him other national honors, including the 2015 Warren K. Lewis Award for Chemical Engineering Education and the 2015 AIChE David Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education.
“As his colleagues, we have witnessed John’s contributions to teaching, both in ChBE and to chemical engineering in general, and have been inspired by his passion for and dedication to teaching,” department Chair Charles Musgrave said. “Our students—and now chemical engineering students everywhere through screencasts—have been fortunate enough to have learned chemical engineering from him for over four decades.”
Falconer will officially accept the award June 26 at the ASEE annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio.