Victoria Goodrich, associate teaching professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, is the recipient of the Notre Dame College of Engineering’s 2022 Outstanding Teacher Award.
The annual award honors an engineering faculty member, selected by engineering undergraduates, for excellence in teaching and overall positive influence on student formation.
Students on the nomination committee said Goodrich “leads with grace, humor, and understanding while pushing her students to their maximum intellectual capabilities.” They noted that she provided “a comfortable environment for women engineers to ask questions about their own lives and paths in STEM.”
Students praised Goodrich for her “deep commitment to ensuring that her students prosper academically, while doing everything in her power to ease stress in a major that can be very challenging.”
Goodrich directs the undergraduate laboratory courses for junior and senior chemical engineers and teaches the first-year curriculum. Her teaching is creative, hands-on, and experiential. In her class Food Design and Chemical Engineering, students study chemical reactions in yeast, polymer formation in pasta, and crystallization in chocolate.
“The course was developed because there are a huge number of chemical engineering processes that go into creating food,” said Goodrich. “The class has been a great way for students to connect their chemical engineering knowledge to everyday experiences with food.”
Goodrich serves as faculty advisor to Notre Dame’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. She served as director of the First-Year Engineering Program for seven years after joining the Notre Dame faculty in 2011.
Goodrich has received Notre Dame’s Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2019-20) and the Thomas P. Madden Award (2015-16) for a faculty member who has contributed the most to the teaching of first-year students. She also has received the Notre Dame Women in Engineering Impact Award (2016) and the SAO Club Advisor of the Year (2019-20).
— Karla Cruise, College of Engineering