Outstanding Faculty Teacher Award
This is an alternating award given every 3 years to a faculty member who has excelled in teaching, research, or advisory service.
This year's winner of the Outstanding Faculty Teacher Award is Mary Fabrizio.
Mary embodies a commitment to quality instruction in all her interactions with students, both inside and outside of her formal courses. Her patience, enthusiasm, and dedication to her craft are inspiring and make learning from her a real joy. Mary’s course, Linear and Generalized Linear Models in Ecology, is a key component of the VIMS curriculum for the way it helps students build statistical literacy and the confidence needed to both evaluate models in the literature and dive into analyzing their own data. Mary has an uncanny ability to take a complicated, daunting subject and distill it into the key components necessary for understanding, and her blend of technical information with practical lab exercises makes for a powerful learning experience.
Her course is the stepping stone many students need to move from an understanding of statistical principles to using methods to actively contribute to the fields of fisheries science and ecology. In the classroom and in her lab, she fosters an inclusive and welcoming environment that encourages students to ask questions, critically examine results, and pursue alternative ways of thinking. Generations of VIMS students have been made better scientists because of her kind and engaging teaching. We are truly lucky to have Mary here at VIMS!
Congratulations, Mary!