Meet the Scholarly Teacher Award winner from Engineering

The annual Stellenbosch University (SU) Teaching Awards acknowledge and reward outstanding teaching at the University. The awards are offered in three categories: Leaderly Teaching Scholar, Scholarly Teacher and Teaching Collaboration.

The 2022 Teaching Awards have been received by:

  • Prof Faadiel Essop (Centre for Cardio-metabolic Research in Africa (CARMA), Division of Medical Physiology, BMRI, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences) (Category: Leaderly Teaching Scholar)
  • Prof Herman Kamper (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering) (Category: Scholarly Teacher)
  • Ms Mareli Rossouw (School of Accountancy, Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences) (Category: Scholarly Teacher)

Prof Herman Kamper is Associate Professor and Postgraduate Coordinator in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering. He is a Professional Engineer registered with the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA).

On the recognition, he says: “As part of the award, I had to prepare a teaching portfolio. Firstly, reading through other lecturers’ portfolios showed me the quality and passion of the lecturers here at Stellenbosch, making this award really humbling. Secondly, it made me realise again what a privilege it is to teach some of the best students in the world.”

Prof Kamper is also an NRF Y1 rated researcher. He was named the Faculty of Engineering’s Upcoming Researcher of the Year in 2019 and received the IEEE ICASSP Outstanding Reviewer Award in 2022. He is the co-founder and organiser of the seminar series and discussion forum Maties Machine Learning (MML), 2017 to present.

Prof Kamper’s teaching philosophy aims at enabling students to grasp the threshold concepts in his course, and to learn the skills through which these concepts are applied to solve real problems. He accomplishes this by

  1. getting students excited so that they are motivated to engage with the subject matter,
  2. giving students the lay of the land, so that they have the bigger picture, and
  3. equipping students to build their own knowledge by showing them where to find and how to process the relevant resources.

The Faculty of Engineering congratulates Prof Herman Kamper on his success.

Read the full article, here.

Photograph: Prof Herman Kamper presenting an online teaching session.