Jun 26, 2007 8:00 AM

Gold Shield winner empowers undergrads

Shortly after he began teaching at UCLA in 1994, Electrical Engineering Professor William J. Kaiser noticed that undergraduate students were extremely eager to be mentored about their future careers while learning more about research in engineering and science. The problem was, there weren't enough mentors to meet the huge demand.

So in the summer of 2003, after experimenting with different approaches, Kaiser began having graduate students and seniors mentor junior, sophomore and first-year students. This has resulted in an innovative undergraduate research group in which more than 30 undergraduates work together on a single mission every summer: developing and deploying a one-of-a-kind environmental robot as well as developing biomedical computing devices that are revolutionizing the emerging field of "telehealth."

Kaiser's student research group, the subject of two television programs in 2004, is just one of the reasons why he was awarded the prestigious 2007 Gold Shield Faculty Prize at a meeting of the Academic Senate June 6. Given out since 1986, the prize honors exceptional accomplishments in research, undergraduate teaching and service to the university and beyond.

In a partnership between the College of Letters and Science and Gold Shield, Alumnae of UCLA, the award has been bestowed alternately on faculty members from the north and south campuses. The prize carries a $30,000 cash award given in two annual installments.

Students adore Kaiser. In 2003, a student organization Web site (www.uclaprofessors.com) voted him one of the top 10 faculty members across the entire campus in terms of "highest effectiveness." He was ranked third among the "most recommended" and first among faculty who have the "highest concern" for students. "He constantly seeks new ways to reach out to students," Joan Maxwell, Gold Shield Faculty Prize chair, said at the award ceremony, referring to Kaiser's outstanding efforts over the years to make gateway courses for undergraduates truly effective and satisfying.

In 2005, Kaiser collaborated with several of his undergraduate students and with Gregory Chung, a senior researcher at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, to develop a software program that allows instructors to gauge students' difficulties and monitor their problem-solving abilities in the classroom simultaneously in real time.

The result was "Individualized, Interactive Instruction" (3I), a program that employs text-messaging and other tech tools to give instructors private and anonymous access to the work of as many as 90 students.

"This tends to be inviting and encouraging to students, and we find that their participation is very high," explained Kaiser, who received the 2005 Copenhaver Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology for his role in using the 3I program.

Meanwhile, the research that Kaiser conducts with his students is being used to address one of the world's most pressing issues: finding and exploiting new sources of water in an energy-efficient fashion.

And it's a sign of this professor's firm commitment to his students that he plans to use his Gold Shield cash prize to fund stipends for his undergraduate research group.

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