Professor Ariel Chan receives the 2022 Wighton Fellowship - U of T Engineering News - U of T Engineering News

Professor Ariel Chan (ChemE) has been chosen arsenic the 2022 recipient of the Wighton Fellowship. Awarded by the Sandford Fleming Foundation to conscionable 1 recipient nationwide each year, the fellowship recognizes excellence successful the improvement and teaching of laboratory-based courses successful undergraduate engineering programs.  

An adjunct prof successful the teaching stream, Chan has made exceptional contributions successful modernizing undergraduate laboratory acquisition astatine U of T Engineering. She is the superior teacher for 2 cardinal laboratory courses that consolidate laboratory components from each third-year chemic engineering halfway courses. Chan wholly redeveloped these courses truthful that the labs integrate concepts that students person learned successful the schoolroom to date. She besides pivoted from accepted ‘recipe-driven’ laboratory exercises into open-ended, problem-based projects conducted implicit respective weeks.  

Chan created much than 40 inquiry-based laboratory projects covering 5 large chemic engineering concepts. These are based connected real-life consulting assignments, projects co-developed with concern partners, tract trips oregon on-site assemblage chemic cognition facilities. She incorporates computer-aided plan and drafting software, familiarizing students with modern engineering tools they volition apt beryllium utilizing successful their aboriginal careers.   

She besides oversees the Unit Operations laboratory, which was precocious refurbished with enactment of the Dean Strategic Fund. When the University shifted to online learning during the pandemic, Chan and her squad mapped retired the full abstraction to make a virtual laboratory tour successful close-up presumption that tin beryllium accessed by mobile devices and virtual world headsets. This allowed students learning remotely to replicate the acquisition of conducting a laboratory experiment, right down to putting connected a laboratory overgarment and gloves.   

Chan besides developed a bid of experiments that tin beryllium done astatine home, specified arsenic drainage piping investigation, stove/cooktop vigor transportation modeling and bioethanol accumulation by yeast fermentation. Combined with her online virtual laboratory tools, these experiments supply unsocial at-home learning opportunities for students and stress that engineering is each astir us.  

In 2019, Chan received ChemE’s Diran Basmadjian Teacher of the Year Award for Small Classes. She has besides garnered a Dean’s Emerging Innovation successful Teaching Professorship and a Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) Fellowship. 

“Professor Chan’s achievements successful revamping the Unit Operations laboratory curriculum, processing virtual acquisition tools and creating a cutting-edge hands-on learning abstraction person greatly enhanced the learning acquisition for our students,” says Christopher Yip, Dean of U of T Engineering. “On behalf of the Faculty, my warmest congratulations to her connected this richly deserved recognition.”