Dr. Christine Schmidt
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Although Dr. Christine Schmidt has been teaching at UT since 1996, she feels somewhat like a beginning faculty member. This fall, the new biomedical engineering (BME) undergraduate program is underway and Christine is one of the faculty members. No longer are her course notes and materials in chemical engineering going to be put to use, for she is now developing new biomedical curriculum.
Christine’s research area is in biomedical and her teaching of BME 314 (the foundations course) is requiring her to integrate many topics. However, Christine notes, she “likes teaching and the educational process.” She describes her classes as interactive environments where students “who are shy have to get over it right away.” As a young faculty member, she attended a NSF Scholar’s Teaching Seminar and heard the mantra, “coverage is the enemy.” Christine believes that teaching using a problem-based approach is demanding because it can be hard to manage and time consuming with lots of student involvement. However, her learner-centered approach gives students the tools and the basic fundamentals that allow them to come to deeper understandings.
Dr. Schmidt earned her undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at UT. She takes great pride in her Longhorn heritage and says that when she was looking for faculty positions, she found that the UT engineering faculty spoke positively about teaching. This “positive balance on research and teaching” wasn’t evident at many of the places Christine interviewed. While Christine is an accomplished researcher, she relishes teaching and has been recognized with teaching awards including the Student Engineering Council Recognition for Teaching Excellence (2000) and the El Paso Energy Foundation Teaching Award (2002).