Activities

CAP Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

The CAP Medal for Excellence in Teaching honours faculty members who

  • have a comprehensive knowledge and deep understanding of their subject
  • who possess an exceptional ability to communicate their knowledge and understanding in such a way as to
  • lead their students to high academic achievement in physics.

All forms of undergraduate teaching may be considered including classroom lecturing, small group teaching, laboratory instruction, consultation with individual students, Honours Thesis supervision, design and development of courses, laboratory experiments and classroom demonstrations, introduction of innovative teaching methods, and production of educational materials such as textbooks, journal articles on teaching, films and videos.

The 2013 medal was awarded to
Dr. Mona Berciu, University of British Columbia, for her exceptional ability to communicate knowledge and understanding and lead students to high academic achievement in physics through her own example, for her leading role in the Welcome Women (WOW) initiative to recruit female students and for her efforts to generally improve the quality of physics teaching through such work as undertaken by the Carl Weiman Science Education Initiative.

The next medal will be awarded in the year 2014. The deadline for nominations is November 15, 2013.

Nomination Criteria

  • The nominator must be a member of the CAP. 
  • The nominee must be a member in good standing of the CAP or a Council-approved Canadian professional science society (see list below) in order to be nominated. 
  • The nominee must have spent the major part (i.e. more than one-half) of his/her working career in Canada or must have made a major contribution to the teaching of physics after returning to a permanent position in Canada. 

Council-approved Canadian professional science society

The nominee must belong to one of the following societies to be eligble for the CAP Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching:

  • Canadian Association of Physicists
  • Canadian Astronomical Society
  • Canadian Geophysical Union
  • Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
  • Canadian Organization for Medical Physicists
  • Canadian Society for Chemistry