Professor Daniel J. Bodony and Professor Timothy Bretl are among this year’s recipients of awards that honor outstanding faculty in the College of Engineering.
Bodony will receive the Everitt Award for Teaching Excellence, established in honor of former Dean William Everitt to annually recognize one engineering faculty member for outstanding undergraduate teaching. Bodony joined the Aerospace Engineering faculty in 2006. He received the Teacher of the Year Award from the local AIAA student section in 2008, 2010, and 2012 and has been named to the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent every semester that he has been teaching. This alone is a remarkable achievement considering that many of the classes he teaches are relatively large, approximately 90 students in each of the undergraduate courses.
Among the courses Bodony has taught are Incompressible Flow, Compressible Flow, Aerospace Propulsion, Viscous Flow and Heat Transfer, Aeroacoustics, and Computational Aerodynamics.
Bretl, who also joined the Aerospace faculty in 2006, will receive College of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award. He is known for an engaging, project-based teaching style. Bretl doesn’t lecture for the entire class period, rather, he leads his students in a discussion of the day’s material.
In teaching junior- and senior-level courses in dynamics and controls, Bretl has a proven track record of revamping courses thought of as overly theoretical and disconnected and transforming them into courses that are still challenging but also relevant and exciting. Along the way, he also manages to learn all of his student’s names--approximately 100 per course.
Bodony and Bretl will be honored at the University of Illinois College of Engineering’s 54th annual Faculty Awards Ceremony on Monday, April 23 in the auditorium at the National Center For Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The awards ceremony will begin at 6 p.m. with a reception following in the NCSA lobby.