University Distinguished Professor 2000: Students Enthralled by Impey's Excitement for Astronomy

Lori Stiles
May 11, 2000


(NOTE: See a video profile of Christopher Impey at http://uanews.org/movies)

"Simply stated, Chris Impey is the best teacher in our department, and ranks with the best instructors any of us have encountered in our careers," say astronomers who nominated Impey for a University Distinguished Professorship.

He is one of the toughest instructors in the department in terms of grading and the amount of work he expects from his students, they add. Yet students consistently rank him as one of their best and favorite teachers. Typically, half the students in Impey's classes -- introductory through advanced -- rank his teaching in the very highest grade in all categories. His enormous popularity with students results from his extraordinary energy and enthusiasm for teaching, as well as his remarkable competence at it.

"I teach because the universe is so cool, and the simple laws that govern it are so elegant, that it makes you want to shout it from the rooftops," Impey said. "So that's what I do at night, during the day -- I teach. Also, seeing young people get excited about science is a constant motivation. Most of the energy and enthusiasm comes from them."

Impey consistently volunteers for more than his assigned teaching load, and he consistently carries the highest undergraduate teaching load among the astronomy faculty. He concurrently maintains a vigorous, world-class research program. He recently was awarded a sizeable five-year research grant from NASA. He has maintained six to eight concurrent grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the past decade.

Impey is deputy department head and directs all academic programs in astronomy. He is one of the department's most active supervisors of students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He created two new courses, an honors astronomy course and a graduate extragalactic astronomy course. He produced course materials for the introductory Astronomy 100 course, the basis for a text that he and Bill Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute turned into one of the most widely used introductory astronomy textbooks in the world.

But Impey's most recent and ambitious project is potentially his most important, colleagues say. Impey created a World Wide Web site for introductory astronomy classes and developed Internet-accessible learning for general education astronomy courses. The approach is novel because it incorporates the strengths of traditional classroom-based learning and interactive learning. The site has already been used and evaluated by 2,500 students.

Other contributions include:

  • service as associate director in the UA/NASA Space Grant Program, which provides UA undergraduate and graduate students varied opportunities in science education and research;
  • co-investigator of the NSF-funded ASSIST program, which awarded master's degrees to about 30 high-school teachers through an intensive, three-year training program;
  • an ongoing study of science literacy among college students, which is a rich source of information on scientific knowledge, attitudes and opinions reported in nearly 4,000 surveys; and,
  • service on numerous teaching committees, search committees for senior administrators, Faculty Senate and to the American Astronomical Society.

 

Impey has won virtually every teaching award given by the UA, including the Faculty of Science Distinguished Teaching Award (1988), two Provost's Teaching Improvement Awards (1989, 1992), the Burlington Resources Foundation Award (1991), and the College of Arts and Sciences General Education Teaching Award (1992).

Colleagues who nominated Impey said "a top-rank researcher who has the dedication to share his knowledge with students, and who has the ability to inspire and motivate students to follow in his footsteps." Peter Strittmatter, Robert Kennicutt, Jr., James Liebert and John Bieging nominated Impey for the award.

A raft of award recommendations came from students who had taken Natural Sciences 102, "The Physical Universe," a general education course for non-science majors. A sample of comments:

  • "Dr. Impey made this course the kind of class a student would not want to miss, hoping to see what he would come up with next and to learn what other amazing fact of astronomy he would have to tell us about."
  • "Of all the classes I have taken here at the U of A, (this one ) with Professor Impey was definitely one of my favorites and one of the most worthwhile."
  • "I had a lot of fun — I learned so much information that I thought I would never learn or be interested in — It wasn't easy, but Mr. Impey gave everyone a chance, and it was up to the student to get a good grade. That's how it should be."
  • "I have taken over 150 credits at two different universities over the course of eight years. Only a handful of classes stand out in my mind, and Dr. Impey's class is the only one of those few that was not part of my (humanities) major. I have remained interested in astronomy — not as an astronomer — but as a student, a writer, and even a parent."

 

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