For the last several years, West has led a team of faculty, funded by a grant from the Strategic Instructional Initiatives Program (SIIP), to improve the department’s TAM 200-level courses. The state-of-the-art pedagogical and technological solutions introduced by the team of 10 faculty have resulted in dramatic improvements in class attendance, student engagement, and comprehension of the material.
Since 2013, West has also co-led MechSE’s summer GAMES camp – Girls Building Awesome Machines – engaging dozens of high school girls in the fundamentals of mechanical engineering.
West was an Education Innovation Fellow with AE3 from 2013 to 2015, and was named a University Distinguished Teacher-Scholar for 2014-2015. He has been included on the university’s “List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students” every semester but one since 2010, both in TAM and ME.
West joined MechSE as an assistant professor in 2008 and became associate professor in 2012. He is also an affiliate of the Computational Science and Engineering program at Illinois. He was previously an assistant professor in the department of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, and an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University. West earned a bachelor’s degree in pure and applied mathematics in 1996 from the University of Western Australia, and a PhD in control and dynamical systems in 2004 from the California Institute of Technology.
The Collins Award is funded through a generous donation from W. Leighton Collins, a former engineering faculty member (1929-1965) and pioneer who helped shape engineering instruction in the U.S.