Associate Professor Dezhi Zhou of the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute (UM-SJTU JI, JI hereafter) has been awarded First Prize in the Associate Professor Group of the 6th SJTU Teaching Innovation Competition.
The SJTU competition concluded recently with 55 courses from 24 schools across the university entering the event. Participants competed in five categories: Senior Professors, Associate Professors, Junior and Below, Curriculum Ideological and Political Education, and Industry-Academia Integration. The contest included online and onsite evaluations, with scoring based on classroom teaching recordings, innovation achievement reports, and presentations on innovative teaching design. A total of 12 First Prizes, 15 Second Prizes, and 27 Third Prizes were awarded.
As one of SJTU’s key platforms for advancing teaching reform and innovation, the Teaching Innovation Competition encourages faculty to pursue excellence in teaching and contribute to high-quality talent development in higher education.
Biography
Dezhi Zhou is an associate professor and doctoral supervisor at JI. Recognized under the Shanghai High-Level Talent Program, his research focuses on physical modeling and AI algorithms for reacting flows and high-fidelity numerical simulations of advanced engines. He leads several national and municipal research projects and has published more than 50 SCI papers, including 25 as first or corresponding author in journals such as Combustion and Flame and Proceedings of the Combustion Institute. His undergraduate course Combustion has been recognized as a key course in Shanghai and part of the Ministry of Education’s Industry-Academia Cooperation Collaborative Education Program. He has also guided students to win national bronze awards in international innovation and entrepreneurship competitions and to publish five papers in leading journals.