It is our pleasure to announce that Dr. Nathan Scott received the 2015 Johns Hopkins University Alumni Teaching Award at convocation. The award recognizes excellence in teaching and inspiring our undergraduates in both our Junior Design Course and our Capstone Senior Design Course.

“We should create an environment for our students in which they get a good balance of theory and practice, and the practice part should be, where possible, like an active engineering design consultancy. Young students should work alongside older ones, and alongside university and industry experts, as all solve real or realistic problems. Universities generally, and Hopkins in particular, do produce this environment,” says Scott.

He continues, “Every young engineer should have to spend a fair amount of time developing technical, hands-on capability. Fixing cars and washing machines. Learning to make things out of metal, wood and plastics. Electronics. Doing art and sculpture. Every one of them should develop a love of making things, and a personal collection of tools and skills. Prototyping, to explore design ideas, should become a strong, endemic skill in our student body. The aim is not at all to produce technicians, but to produce engineers who can connect advanced ideas and models to the real world, and who can get designs to actually work.”