Miriam Blaauboer is Applied Sciences’ Educator of the Year 2024
Miriam Blaauboer has been elected Educator of the Year 2024 of the Faculty of Applied Sciences (AS). She received the award on 17 June 2024 during the faculty's annual Education Day. Here, Director of Education Chris Kleijn also announced the Educators of the Year for each programme. The seven nominated lecturers were chosen by AS students. Miriam will represent the AS faculty at Delft University of Technology's upcoming Educator of the Year election.
Educators of the Year per programme
Educator of the Year: Miriam Blaauboer
For more than 15 years, Miriam Blaauboer has excelled as a great lecturer in, and mainstay of, the Bachelor's and Master's programmes in Applied Physics. In recent years she has taught Electromagnetism in the bachelor's and Advanced Quantum Mechanics and Fairy Tales of Theoretical Physics in the master's programme. In the new Master's programme in Quantum Information Science & Technology (QIST), she teaches the course Fundamentals of Quantum Information. In addition, Miriam was and is active as supervisor of the Quantum Information Project in the QIST master, and the Electromagnetism Honours Class in the bachelor's degree.
I asked Miriam a question in class, and she gave me an answer I was convinced by. Later that week, I received an unexpected, detailed email from her expanding on her explanation from class. I was already satisfied with her initial response, so she didn't have to do this. The fact that she remembered my question (there were 50+ students in class with all kinds of doubts!) and went out of her way to ensure I understood the concept meant a lot to me. Miriam is awesome!
Master student QIST
Source of inspiration for all students
As a teacher, Miriam excels because of her super clear explanations, her sparkling enthusiasm, her empathy towards students, and her disarming kindness. Miriam gives her lectures with so much enthusiasm that it inspires the students to delve into the subjects. Her passion and knowledge are contagious and ensure that students enjoy coming to her lectures. Miriam is always open to questions and discussions and likes to continue conversations with students outside of the lectures. Thanks to Miriam's efforts, students feel supported and motivated to achieve their academic goals. Miriam's dedication and enthusiasm make her an indispensable force within the QIST programme and a source of inspiration for all students.
Miriam Blaauboer receives the ‘Educator of the Year of Applied Sciences 2024’ award from the hands of Director of Education Chris Kleijn
Having spent quite a time with her across multiple courses, I can confidently say she’s a wonderful lecturer and a very kind person. She goes out of her way to help students, even for stuff that she’s not well versed with and that speaks a lot. I am grateful to have her as a lecturer and luckily, she’s our program director as well!
Master student QIST
Driving force behind pioneering educational programme
In the last three years, Miriam has been the driving force behind and initiator of our new master's programme in QIST: a joint degree programme of the faculties of EEMCS and Applied Sciences in Delft, the Faculty of Science in Leiden and the research institute QuTech. As Director of Studies, Miriam successfully led and inspired the team that – from scratch - gave shape and content to this, globally new and almost unique, Master’s programme.
Miriam is a unique mix of 'management' and 'hands-on', which means that she not only knows how to steer the process in the right direction, but also consults with lecturers about their courses. Characteristic is her open, positive and contagious way of communicating, which means that Miriam knows how to enthuse colleagues like no other. She strikes just the right balance between the ambition to set up a unique and pioneering educational program and the realism to take into account the possibilities of all the people involved.
Connector
Miriam is a connector, who is able to get people on board with an idea, after which she does a lot of work herself to get it properly implemented. She knows how to deal flawlessly with the differences between Delft and Leiden, the uniqueness of each of the disciplines involved and the diversity between various personalities. This has given us a unique education programme, in which not only physicists, but also mathematicians, computer scientists and electrical engineers can participate, and therefore also carries a special form of interdisciplinarity. The QIST mater’s programme would not have existed in this form without Miriam.
When Miriam speaks with students, she speaks with friendliness, openness, and gives them her full attention. This creates an atmosphere that students feel comfortable learning in and makes her a fantastic lecturer. People clearly felt comfortable not only asking questions in her class but also answering them, and I think this speaks to her high ability as a teacher.
Master student QIST
The Faculty of Applied Sciences seeks to educate engineers, scientists and science teachers who can assume responsible positions at the heart of society. Therefore, we strive to be a learning community that has state-of-the-art education and outstanding teachers. Through our annual Educator of the Year election, we highlight excellence in education.
The seven nominated lecturers were chosen by students from the programmes. The winner is chosen by the faculty’s Management Team based on nominations by the study associations and input from the Directors of Studies.