The Excellence in Structural Engineering Education Award celebrates innovative and effective teaching techniques to improve student learning at a tertiary level.
After an extensive judging process, we are pleased to announce the winner of the 2021 Excellence in Structural Engineering Education Award (ESEEA) is Professor Richard Walls from Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Huge importance to the engineering profession
In his entry, Richard showed a real passion for engineering and change that could affect understanding of structural engineering across a whole continent. The judges praised Richard’s entry for being educational, intuitive, and of huge importance to the engineering profession worldwide.
Runner up
The final judging panel would also like to highly commend the runners' up, Luis Neves and Barbara Turnball of University of Nottingham. Their entry was given high praise for providing graduates with invaluable experience when leaving university and creativity.
A word from the winner
Speaking on his entry, Richard said:
"There is a great need for enhancing engineering capacity in the developing world, particularly in specialist safety fields and also in the area of structural design. Teaching work in structural and fire engineering at Stellenbosch University has sought to provide innovative approaches to engineering education through a variety of approaches. New capacity and courses in structural fire engineering and fire design have been produced in an online format. These courses are now being used by engineers across the African continent. In addition, significant amounts of freely accessible online technical content have been developed, with almost 400,000 YouTube views of the engineering videos created. In this way larger numbers of students and practitioners are being helped. The world’s first fire safety engineering guideline for informal settlements has been produced and is available for free download. Training material is currently being developed to accompany this guideline to assist those making the world a safer placed for the poorest in society. Access to university educational courses has been sponsored for multiple universities, along with NGOs working in relief efforts in many poor countries, such that we can engineer a better world together."
Richard Walls pictured in front of one of his experiments