The Ruth and Joel Spira Awards for Excellence in Teaching rotates among five engineering departments at MIT. This year’s award went to CEE’s Professor Heidi Nepf. One of many letters of nomination said: “Professor Nepf is an outstanding instructor. She is so knowledgeable and her focus as a professor is to make sure everyone in the class understands the material and puts it into long term memory. She makes it easy to do well by having students practice problems and critical thinking throughout lecture. She is extremely engaging and truly cares about how well her students are doing. She is by far the best professor I’ve had at MIT and I wish she taught more undergraduate classes; I would take them all.”