Farghalli Mohamed Awarded Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching
Professor Farghalli A. Mohamed, Ph.D., Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, has been named the 2011-2012 recipient of UC Irvine’s Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching. The Distinguished Faculty Awards are given to Academic Senate members who have achieved excellence through their activities in research, teaching and service.
Mohamed has been a strong advocate of incorporating undergraduates in graduate research programs through UC LEADS (Leadership Excellence through Advanced Degrees), Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), California Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP) and The Henry Samueli School of Engineering Research Fellowship.
He has been very successful in attracting undergraduate students to participate in research in his laboratories. His contribution to the careers of undergraduate students has gone beyond merely making his laboratories available to them in order to gain research experience. In supervising undergraduate students, he made special efforts to encourage students to consider future graduate education and to motivate them to perform well in their studies. As a result of these efforts, several undergraduate students, who worked under his supervision, joined graduate programs at UC Irvine and other leading institutions (Stanford, MIT, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, and UC San Diego). Additionally, Mohamed mentored and advised the first legally blind female student as an undergraduate in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and later as a Ph.D. student in the interdisciplinary Materials Science and Engineering Program in The Henry Samueli School of Engineering.
In addition to his excellent teaching and effective mentoring, Mohamed has made enormous and long-lasting contributions to engineering education at UC Irvine. When he joined UC Irvine in 1980, no materials science and engineering educational program existed in the School.He founded the Materials Science and Engineering degree program (MSE) in the Samueli School and created an interdisciplinary Materials Science and Engineering graduate concentration, a fully accredited MSE major and an MSE minor.
During the past two decades, MSE has become an important component of modern engineering education, partly because of the increased level of sophistication required of engineering materials in a rapidly changing technological society, and partly because the selection of materials has increasingly become an integral part of almost every modern engineering design. In fact, further improvements in designs are now viewed more as primarily a materials issue.
Mohamed earned his B.S. from Cairo University in Egypt and went on to earn M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.
