The University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus is pleased to congratulate Dr. Stephen McNeil on receiving a 2023 West Coast Teaching Excellence Award. This award recognizes Dr. McNeil’s significant impacts on the culture of teaching and learning at UBC Okanagan and beyond.
Stephen has been an integral member the campus community since the founding of UBC’s Okanagan campus in 2005. He has been recognized for his teaching excellence by students and peers across UBC and within the chemistry discipline as a whole. He is a recipient of UBC Okanagan’s two most distinguished teaching awards, the Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence and Innovation in 2009 and the Killam Teaching Prize which he won in 2018.
He has also received national recognition, earning the 2018 Canadian Society for Chemistry Faculty Advisor Award and, most recently, the Chemical Institute of Canada’s Award for Chemistry Education in 2019.
Stephen’s passion for teaching along with his leadership skills has reached far beyond UBCO and he has regularly shared his gained knowledge with the larger teaching community through conference presentations, invited talks, and peer-reviewed publications, says UBCO Provost and Vice-President Academic Dr. Rehan Sadiq.
“Whether teaching a class of hundreds of first-year undergraduate students or mentoring individual students in chemistry education research, Stephen’s commitment to creating an engaging and inclusive learning environment inspires both his students and his peers,” said Dr. Sadiq. “His commitment to teaching and learning transformation and innovation—at the course, program and discipline-wide level —is grounded in ongoing reflection on his teaching practices, the feedback he receives from students and peers, and his active participation in scholarship of teaching and learning.”