Allen Taflove Recognized as McCormick Teacher, Advisor of the Year

December 1, 2006

Allen Taflove, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been honored as McCormick’s Teacher of the Year and Advisor of the Year for 2005-06. He is the first faculty member to receive both awards in a single year – and according to the many students who nominated him, it’s a well-deserved honor.

Student nominators lauded Allen for his excellent teaching and dedication to students. His review sessions for Engineering Analysis are well known across the school. As one student described, “Students from all the other sections would rearrange their schedules to attend a 50-minute review that somehow clarified all the points covered in the last two weeks.” The nomination goes on to say that the sessions are so popular that students “were left standing around the sides of the room, but it was always worth it for the information gained.”

Allen is known for going out of his way to help students. “Prof. Taflove cares more about his students than any other professor I’ve met here at Northwestern,” writes one nominator. “His office door is always open and he will rearrange his schedule in order to help students.”

“Taflove is an inspiring man who has built initiative and excitement into the hearts of all his students,” writes another student. “It was a pleasure to have met this man and I only hope that more people experience the opportunity to be a part of Taflove’s magic.”

Allen is the faculty advisor of Northwestern’s Undergraduate Research Journal and McCormick’s Honors Program in Undergraduate Research, Undergraduate Design Competition, and the student chapters of the Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi honor societies. His accomplishments as a teacher and mentor were previously recognized when he was named McCormick’s Advisor of the Year for 1990-91 and a Northwestern University Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence for 2000-03. In addition, he was selected to Northwestern’s Associated Student Government honor roll of best teachers for 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005. From 2000-05, he also served as the faculty master of the Lindgren / Slivka Science and Engineering Residential College.

An alumnus of Northwestern (B.S. McC’71, M.S. McC’72, and Ph.D. McC’75), Allen joined McCormick’s faculty in 1984. He is recognized for having pioneered finite-difference time-domain computational electrodynamics, which has emerged as one of the most powerful and widely used methods to solve the fundamental Maxwell’s equations for scientific and engineering problems. He is one of only 28 Northwestern faculty listed on ISIHighlyCited.com, a compilation of the world’s most-cited researchers. His most exciting current research is in collaboration with Prof. Vadim Backman of McCormick’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. This work studies how deadly human cancers of the colon (and potentially the lung) can be detected essentially noninvasively at a very early stage via measurement of the spectrum and direction of light backscattered from a few living cells shed by the affected organ. If this research is successful, many lives will be saved.