2022 Award for Excellence in Supervision: Faranak Farzan

Dr. Faranak Farzan served as an assistant professor and scientific director in Mechatronic Systems Engineering (MSE) when nominated for this award. Now, an Associate Professor, Farzan is well known for her dedication and time commitment towards her graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, guiding them through all the steps to reach their highest potential. As a result of Farzan’s extraordinary qualities, she is able to make a positive impact on the MSE community which her colleagues and students value dearly.

As an outstanding member of the MSE department, Farzan provides students with more support than is expected and has offered additional training to improve students’ professionalism and research methods. She uses her connections with other universities and associations to give her students opportunities to collaborate both within and outside of Canada.

Students and faculty members mention Farzan’s unique approaches to research using different perspectives to broaden their knowledge beyond their research topics. “Dr. Farzan is also very interested in openly communicating around some unspoken issues in academia,” PhD student Benjamin Schwartzmann says. “During our weekly meetings, we had for example, the opportunity to discuss authorship, intellectual properties, and also addressed diversity, equity and inclusion in academia.”

Aside from the expected tasks in her academic role, Farzan applies extra effort to support her students’ well-being alongside their academic growth. She organizes gatherings on special occasions, and during the pandemic, she kept her class of students connected by offering writing workshops and journal clubs. Plus, she led the development of an MSE Research Methods course that gives all graduate students in that Faculty essential training and preparation for their program, which allows them to benefit from her mentorship, even if they’re not in her program.

One of her PhD students, Raaj Chatterjee, is grateful for the impact that Farzan has had on their academic growth – a mentorship that started when Chatterjee was an undergraduate student.

“Dr. Farzan goes above and beyond by supporting me with advice, coaching, and has insight into the multitude of career paths available for interdisciplinary researchers. At the end of each meeting, she closes with words of encouragement that have the effect of motivating me until our next meeting. The positive effects of these weekly meetings compounded, and her unwavering belief in me, even through the hardest of times, inspired me to start an accelerated PhD and take my research to the next level.”

We congratulate Dr. Faranak Farzan on her dedication to thoughtful and supportive graduate student supervision, for which she is a deserving recipient of this award.

The 2024 Dean of Graduate Studies Awards for Excellence are open for nominations. Deadline for nominations is May 17, 2024.