2 ECE Professors Receive Outstanding Faculty Awards
The College of Engineering has recognized two professors from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with Outstanding Faculty Awards. Assistant Professor Billy Putnam has received the Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award and Professor Jeremy Munday has received the Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Award.
These annual awards celebrate faculty members ensuring the future of engineering through excellence in teaching and research, with recipients selected by the college's Faculty Awards Committee.
Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award
Billy Putnam, Electrical and Computer Engineering
In an undergraduate course like electromagnetics, notorious for lengthy calculations with complex vector calculus, it is telling that students under Billy Putnam say they were excited to come to class.
This is due to Putnam's knack and enthusiasm for teaching, but also to his commitment to a collaborative learning process. Putnam has innovated a series of pedagogical techniques to support group learning, such as problem-solving sessions where teaching assistants work directly with students to understand the key concepts of every lecture. These sessions also provide students with the opportunity to work together and receive feedback. This tactic has been so successful that other instructors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have adopted it.
Beyond teaching undergraduate electromagnetics, Putnam has created an interdisciplinary graduate course on nonlinear and ultrafast photonics, pulling from his extensive expertise in ultrafast laser physics and nonlinear optics. The course has received substantial praise from students in the college and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, showcasing the breadth and impact of his teaching style.
Before joining UC Davis in 2018, Putnam received his bachelor's degrees in physics and electrical engineering and his master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from MIT.
Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Award
Jeremy Munday, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Since Jeremy Munday's early research days, earning his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and doing postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology, he has made a name for himself as an esteemed contributor to the fields of quantum engineering and nanophotonics for advancing clean energy.
Munday has worked to observe and explore the Casimir force — a strong quantum mechanical effect that draws small objects toward each other — across nanoscale gaps between materials. His lab recently demonstrated several new methods for controlling it, which could lead to designing and engineering next-generation nanomechanical technologies.
In the field of nanophotonics, Munday researches both fundamental and applied aspects, and how they might be used to enhance clean energy via applications like thermophotovoltaics, which convert heat to electricity and could increase the efficiency of solar panels when used in conjunction with a specially engineered optical emitter.
Since joining UC Davis in 2019, he has led several multi-institutional DARPA projects and been elected to Fellow of SPIE and Optica. A prolific and impactful researcher, Munday has authored and co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has been cited over 9,000 times.
