SIMIODE

The annual Distinguished Teaching Awards at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY) celebrate faculty for their scholarship and research, their leadership and inspiration to their peers, and their innovative pedagogy that yields clear evidence of student learning gains.

The Distinguished Teaching Award honorees for 2019 include Chris McCarthy, Associate Professor, Mathematics.

Chris is a member of the SIMIODE Board of Contributing Advisors and early conversations with him caused us at SIMIODE to initiate SCUDEM. We are proud of his work and so is BMCC/CUNY!

The awardees were selected from more than 400 nominations submitted by students, faculty and staff at BMCC.

Chris McCarthy is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at BMCC and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center. Professor McCarthy is a member of the “BMCC Designing for Success” Pedagogy Committee, a faculty mentor in the BMCC Teaching Academy, and has just joined the BMCC CETLS Advisory Board. A long-time supporter of the Open Educational Resources (OER)/ Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) movement, he was a member of BMCC’s pilot OER workshop in 2015.

Professor McCarthy has collaborated with colleagues on research in a number of areas. These include the project Virtual Pascal’s Triangles: The Ballot Problem and the Method of Images(RJMT, June 2017) with BMCC Mathematics Professor Johannes Familton; Solid Wastes as an Eco-Friendly Alternative for the Decontamination of Wastewaters(C3IRG-Round 12) with BMCC Science professors Abel Navarro and Kibrewossen Tesfagiorgis, and numerous papers and projects related to teaching and modeling with differential equations, with USMA West Point Mathematics Professor Emeritus Brian Winkel.

With Professors Terrence Blackman (Dean of Sciences, Medgar Evers College CUNY) and Familton, McCarthy initiated the American Mathematical Society’s Special Session on Quaternions at the 2017, 2018, 2019 (and forthcoming in 2020) Joint Mathematics Meetings. He serves on the Board of Advisors of SIMIODE, which promotes the teaching and learning of differential equations with mathematical models, and has served as co-editor of special issues of PRIMUS (Taylor and Francis) dedicated to differential equation models.

So far at BMCC, Professor McCarthy has mentored student researchers in 30 projects, and through programs including the BMCC Honor’s Program, CRSP, CSTEP, and MSEIP.

“One of my favorite roles as a professor is mentoring student research,” he says. “However, I also believe it is very important to try to help students who have difficulties in math; to build up their confidence, to help them to realize that they can do it if they don’t give up. I am very proud of all my students.”

And we are proud of Chris! Congratulations to Chris!