Omer Inan and Jeffrey Davis were announced as the 2019 Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Awards honorees on April 12 at the annual Eta Kappa Nu Spring Picnic, held at the Texas Instruments Plaza adjacent to the Van Leer Building. The recipients of these awards are determined by a majority vote of the senior class of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). 

Inan received the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Junior Teacher Award and is an associate professor in the School. He teaches two highly interdisciplinary courses at Georgia Tech: one focused on biomedical sensing systems in the fall and the second on biosystems analysis in the spring. These courses involve students from ECE, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. 

Inan often has students work in small teams of diverse backgrounds to design, build, and demo novel sensing systems for health and wellness applications. He uses graduate-student-led, hands-on workshops and problem-based learning modules to help students from a variety of engineering disciplines grow enthusiasm and excitement in applying their technical skills to address real-world health problems. 

Outside of the classroom, Inan involves many undergraduate students in his lab's research through programs such as Opportunity Research Scholars (ORS) and through independent research problems. He has been previously honored for his teaching with the Georgia Power Professor of Excellence Award in 2019, the Lockheed Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016, and was named a Class of 1969 Teaching Fellow by the Center for Teaching and Learning in 2016-2017.

Davis received the W. Marshall Leach/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Senior Teacher Award and is an associate professor in the School. Over the years, he has taught 17 different classes in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum in ECE. Davis likes to use a variety of communication and educational technologies–such as Slack, Kahootz, and Deskle–to help him get to know his students, to help his students be highly active in the classroom, and to help his students connect with each other. Currently, Davis helps to lead the teaching effort for ECE2036: Engineering Software Design, where he strives to develop engaging programming and embedded microcontroller labs to help motivate and train the students to be effective and efficient software engineers. 

Davis is also the faculty co-director of the Grand Challenges Living Learning Community (GC LLC) where he guides 220 freshmen every year to find real-world problems with a grand challenge focus that students can work on while at Tech. Using an experiential learning paradigm, Davis and the GC LLC team help these students to develop a “problem-based” and rapid “ideate-build-validate” mindset to make them battle-tested, team-based innovators who try to solve some of the most pressing issues facing our society. This educational endeavor creates a curricular and co-curricular experience for undergraduates across all majors at Georgia Tech to augment their traditional education. 

Davis is a past recipient of the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Junior Teacher Award in 2007 and the Georgia Tech Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award in 2005.