The Statistics Department is pleased to honour Kenny Chiu and Jonathan Agyeman with Statistics Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards.
Kenny is a first year PhD student, continuing from his MSc program in our department. He has been instrumental in the teaching of STAT 305 and STAT 404, through his excellence in teaching, in revising lab material and in introducing new material. He has been invaluable in his role of training our department teaching assistants. We look forward to Kenny’s enthusiasm for and amazing support of teaching in the coming years.
Jonathan is a fifth year PhD student who has been instrumental in our teaching mission throughout his PhD program and, before that, in his MSc program. In addition to teaching STAT 200 18 times (!), he has taught STAT 251, 302 and 305. As you can imagine, he has developed and revised a lot of course material! Jonathan is adept at WebWorks and has helped many faculty use this automated homework system. He was a team leader in the Fall Teaching Preparation Project in the COVID summer of 2020, has been part of our department's TA training team since 2018, and, since, 2019, has been active in training at the university level, as a Graduate Student Facilitator in the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. He was also a facilitator at the department’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Workshop.
We know that many department members contribute to our teaching mission, and we want to take the opportunity to not only honour these two, but also to thank everyone. Thank you to all of our dedicated teaching assistants, faculty and staff who enthusiastically support our teaching. And congratulations to Jonathan and Kenny!
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The financial component of this award is supported by the donor-funded Statistics Fund for Excellence (https://science.ubc.ca/giving/projects/statistics-fund-excellence).
To see previous GTA Award winners, see: https://www.stat.ubc.ca/statistics-graduate-teaching-assistant-award.