Rupesh Kariyat Honored With November 2024 Cordes Chair

Associate professor Rupesh Kariyat was recognized as the Wally Cordes Teaching and Faculty Support Center's November 2024 Wally Cordes Chair.

As an associate professor of entomology and plant pathology, Kariyat teaches in both the classroom and the lab. Having taught students in Zurich, Switzerland, to the southern tip of Texas, he has mastered a variety of strategies to connect and make learning meaningful for his students from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of needs. In his address, he proposed, Can Bringing Personal Experiences to Classrooms be One of the Strategies for Making Teaching Semi-Joyful?  

In keeping with Wally Cordes, for whom the honor is named, Kariyat goes above and beyond to create a personal connection with his students. He and one of his graduate students, Soumya Unnikrishnan, have coined the term Spyder3 as an acronym to describe his approach: Short videos, Personal, Your voice, Democracy, Exam fun, Role play, Response time, Rewards. He shared with faculty how he utilizes each of these techniques to increase engagement and ensure his students understand that he cares about them. His student-friendly approach has won Kariyat a number of awards including, most recently, the Entomology Society of America National Award for Distinguished Teaching. 

Kariyat received his B.S in agricultural sciences from Kerala Agricultural University, Vellanikkara, India; M.S in agronomy from the University of Wyoming; Ph.D. in plant biology with a focus on insect-plant interactions from The Pennsylvania State University; and post-doctoral training from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. Before arriving at the U of A, he was a faculty member at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Kariyat has an active and productive lab and has graduated 14 M.S. students and currently advises four Ph.D. and three M.S. students.

About the Cordes Chair: The Wally Cordes Teaching and Faculty Support Center recognizes six outstanding teaching faculty each academic year as Wally Cordes Chairs. Faculty are selected as Cordes Chairs because they embody the student-centered teaching excellence that late University Professor Emeritus Wally Cordes exhibited throughout his more than 40-year career at the University of Arkansas. 

About TFSC: TFSC invests in faculty excellence, promotes innovation in teaching and learning, and supports programs to advance student success. The center provides educational opportunities for faculty such as teaching and learning workshops, teaching symposia, and new faculty orientation. TFSC offers competitive teaching and learning grants for faculty, celebrates effective teaching with several awards and an awards reception, and promotes faculty-to-faculty mentoring through classroom observation. More information about TFSC can be found at their website or by following them on LinkedIn.