MechSE profs. Nick Glumac, Kyle Smith, and Brian Mercer won the Two-Year and Five-Year Alumni Effective Teaching Awards, as voted on this year by the classes of 2021 and 2024.
Written by MechSE News
Professor Nick Glumac, Associate Professor Kyle Smith, and Lecturer Brian Mercer were named as this year’s recipients of the 2026 MechSE Alumni Effective Teaching Awards. Glumac and Smith tied for most votes for the Five-Year Alumni Effective Teaching Award, and Mercer won the Two-Year Effective Teaching Award.
For more than 50 years the MechSE Alumni Board has sponsored two Alumni Effective Teaching Awards. The awards were established so that alumni two and five years into their professional careers have the opportunity to honor faculty whose teaching they now perceive as having had the greatest impact on their careers. They are voted on by former undergraduate students – this year, the classes of 2021 and 2024 – to recognize truly outstanding teaching in the department.
In recent years, Mercer has taught Mechanical Design II, Engineering Materials, Finite Element Analysis, Introductory Solid Mechanics, and Computational Mechanics. He joined the MechSE faculty in 2018.
Over the years, Glumac’s courses have included Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer , Intermediate Heat Transfer, Combustion Fundamentals, and Engineering Spectroscopy. Glumac has been on the Illinois faculty since 2000.
Brian Mercer
Smith’s instruction has included Heat Transfer, Numerical Thermo-Fluid Mechanics, Physicochemical Hydrodynamics, and Heat Conduction. Smith joined MechSE as an assistant professor in 2014.
All three faculty were recognized at the MechSE Awards Banquet on April 17.