NEWS The plant geneticist and lecturer at the Department of Plant Physiology, Nathaniel Street, is awarded the pedagogical prize from the Faculty of Science and Technology. The prize jury motivated its decision due to his outstanding ambition, good organization and strong interest in developing new ways of teaching. Nathaniel Street will receive the prize during the Spring graduation ceremony of Umeå University on the 19th of May.
“I was in the Ski lift and checked my emails when I found out that I was awarded for the prize”, tells Nathaniel Street. “I was so surprised that I had to read the message twice to be sure that it was true. It is fantastic to know that the efforts made for teaching are acknowledged and appreciated. I really did not expect this, especially because there are so many other excellent teachers in our institute.”
Nathaniel Street came as a postdoc to Umeå University in 2007. In 2011, he became Assistant Professor and is since January 2016 Associate Professor at the Department of Plant Physiology.
During his time at Umeå University, he has fast developed his teaching skills further. He became the course leader of the department’s genomics courses in 2011 and has refined the course since then. Nathaniel Street is also teaching on the courses Bioinformatics and Genome Analysis and Microbiology and Basic Molecular Biology at Umeå University as well as the course Plant Biology for Future Forestry at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).
The prize motivation emphasizes Nathaniel Street’s extremely careful preparation of his teaching. He gives well prepared and clear lectures that are greatly appreciated by the students and he is continuously improving his teaching methods. Among other things, he has introduced interactive and student-led discussions, new practical classes in the lab and discussions on ethics. Several of these initiatives have subsequently been taken over by other teachers at the institution.
“He involves both his own research group and the bioinformatics platform at the Umeå Plant Science Centre in his work and successfully creates extremely smooth ways of teaching, that not only allow the students to get in contact with actual research, but are also very interesting for the research itself”, is stated in the prize motivation. “His high competence in both plant biology and genetics as well as in advanced computing has made this possible.”
Nathanial Street focuses his research on finding the genes that control natural variation and he is analysing microbial communities that are living close together with forest trees. His ambition is to combine his research interest with his educational ambition and strong willingness to develop his teaching methods further.
“My hope is to convey my own fascination and interest in my research area. It can be a challenging area to teach because it is changing very fast, but I try to keep the courses up to date. I do not want the students to just sit and listen to me. It is fun to think of new ways to motivate the students to learn together and from each other and to help them develop skills to learn independently in the future. The courses I have attended at the University Education and Teacher Support (UPL) have been a great inspiration for this.”
For more information, please contact:
Nathaniel Street, Associate Professor, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Plant Physiology, Umeå UniversityPhone: 090-786 54 73
E-mail: nathaniel.street@umu.se
Editor: Anna-Lena Lindskog