Professor Victor C. Yang is congratulated by, left to right, P-4 Duong Nguyen; P-2 Melinda Tran; and P-4 Suprat Saely at the College’s 2008 Recognition and Awards Banquet. Yang, a College of Pharmacy faculty member since 1986, received the College’s 2008 Teaching Excellence Award. Nguyen garnered her own share of honors at the Banquet, receiving both an Elise Katz-Rouhier Memorial Scholarship and the Tom D. Rowe Memorial Scholarship.
ictor C. Yang, PhD, Albert B. Prescott Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, is the 2008 recipient of the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy’s Teaching Excellence Award.
Selection criteria include: clear and logical presentation of material, fair and appropriate evaluations of student performance, ability to motivate students, responsiveness to the students’ needs, and innovation in teaching methods or content. A College of Pharmacy faculty member since 1986, Yang’s research spans areas of drug therapy ranging from bioreactor-based detoxification to innovative drug delivery systems including transdermal, targeted, and prodrug delivery approaches, and synchronized magnetic resonance imaging and drug chemotherapy to treat various types of cancers. He teaches Pharmaceutics 463 to PharmD students and Pharmaceutical Sciences 753 (Current Topics in Biotechnology) to graduate students. Recognized worldwide for his research achievements, Yang also has mentored 12 PhD students and 23 postdoctoral fellows, 40 percent of whom have become faculty members in the U.S. and abroad.
Yang summarizes his teaching philosophy as follows: “What makes a good teacher, good, has less to do with how much he knows than it does with how well he connects with students and inspires them to learn.”
In nominating Yang for the Award, students cited his great enthusiasm for his lecture material and his “ability to see through clouds of information, into the heart of the problem.”
E-mail: vcyang@umich.edu
