Please join us in congratulating NAI Principal Investigator Ariel Anbar of Arizona State University who was recently named a 2013 ASU President’s Professor. He is one of three ASU faculty receiving the honor this year.

President’s Professorships honor faculty members who have made substantial contributions to undergraduate education at ASU. The awardees are chosen based on a variety of criteria: mastery of subject matter, enthusiasm and innovation in the learning and teaching process, ability to engage students both within and outside the classroom, ability to inspire independent and original thinking in students and to stimulate students to do creative work, innovation in course and curriculum design, and scholarly contributions.

Anbar has made a sustained and substantial contribution to earth science and chemistry general curricula from the introductory to the specialized level. Most recently, Anbar led the development of the innovative Habitable Worlds online course. Engaging to students across the board, they learn about the search for life on other worlds as a context for learning basic concepts in biology, chemistry, geology and physics in an integrative manner. More than 1,000 students have taken the class, learning through inquiry-driven exploration that science is not just a body of facts but is the process by which important questions are explored.

Habitable Worlds utilizes teaching tools such as the “Habitable Hunt” – where students search for an inhabited world in a personalized, randomized field of stars, as well as an intelligent tutoring system and virtual field trips. Anbar was asked to do a TED-Ed video about the class and recently received National Science Foundation funding to enhance the course as a platform for teaching scientific reasoning. In addition to Habitable Worlds, his student evaluations and the opinion of his peers hold Anbar in the highest regard as he seamlessly integrates his research and teaching portfolios.