The University of Ottawa’s Excellence in Education prizes recognize educators of exceptional quality, who provide outstanding teaching while maintaining a solid research program. Profiles of each of the nine prize winners in 2007 will appear in the Gazette.
Marie-Claire Dubé
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Originally from Sorel, Québec, Claude D’Amours knows his way around Ottawa, particularly the University of Ottawa, where he completed his bachelor’s degree (1990), master’s degree (1992) and doctoral degree (1995) in electrical engineering, his field of choice. This year, the University of Ottawa is recognizing his talent in teaching as one of this year’s recipients of an Excellence in Education Prize.
Professor D’Amours’ teaching abilities also earned him the J. V. Marsh Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006, and he has been vice-dean, academic in the Faculty of Engineering since March 2007.
A specialist in wireless telecommunications, Professor D’Amours focuses more specifically on the physical layer of wireless communication networks, which provides the technologies required for connection, for example, modulation, encoding and multiple access.
As a teacher, D’Amours helps simplify what students may find complex, through examples, humour, analogies and discussion. He believes that in teaching, as in other areas of life, you have to find your own “voice,” and he is not afraid to put his personality into his teaching, which his students appreciate right off the bat. He even thinks of his students as peers: “I am still a student myself, one with more experience and knowledge, that’s all.”
In the classroom, D’Amours tries to make concepts more concrete. He is an expert in Simulink software for Matlab, which he uses as a teaching aid in his introduction to telecommunication courses. “Telecommunication is by definition a system,” he explains, “and this software allows my students to understand the theory behind encoding using a visual. Students can see with their own eyes the signal, the channel, the wave generator, noise, signal fading, the type of receivers…” It is an opportunity for them to visualize everything before even stepping foot into the lab. Professor D’Amours makes his model available on his Web page, where students can manipulate it however they like.
“After all,” he explains, “the fundamentals of telecommunication are very simple: just a few trigonometric identities, that’s all there is to it.”
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