General Notices

The UWI/Guardian Group Premium Teaching Awards under the theme, Innovative Strategies for Teaching Excellence in Lean Times took place on Friday September 28.

Check out this year’s crop of awardees which include the following UWI lecturers:

• Dr. Paul Balwant from the Department of Management Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS)

• Dr. Jovanca Smith from the Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering (FOE)

• Dr. Elaine Monica Davis from the Department of Pre-Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Medical Sciences (FMS)

Gain inspiration from their bios below:

About Dr. Paul Balwant

Paul Balwant has been lecturing at the Department of Management Studies at The UWI for seven years. He lectures undergraduate and postgraduate courses on leadership, organizational behaviour, and human resource management. Paul holds a PhD in Management from The Institute of Work Psychology at The University of Sheffield, and has been the recipient of prestigious scholarships for his undergraduate and doctoral studies. His studies on instructor-leadership and student engagement have been published in internationally recognized educational journals. In the 2014 Academy of Management Meeting, Paul was awarded the Best Paper in Management Education Award for the paper that offers the most significant contribution to management education.

About Dr. Elaine Monica Davis

Dr. Davis’ UWI employment has spanned more than a quarter century. She considers one of her most significant personal achievements was to have conceptualised, organised and conducted the first ‘high-stakes’ OSCEs which were required for Phase I students to progress to Phase II in 1996 March (FMS, St Augustine) and 1997 May (Manipal, India). An inextricable part of the medical education component of Dr. Davis’ career, was the creation and publication of booklets to assist students to prepare for the examination, viz. History Taking Skills Manual for First Year Medical Sciences Students (1995) EM Davis & SA West and Guidelines for Skills training for the School of Basic Health Sciences (1996 & 1997).

About Dr. Jovanca Smith

Dr. Jovanca Smith joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine as a Lecturer in October 2015. Dr. Smith is a graduate of Morgan State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Northwestern University with a BSc, MSc, and PhD respectively, in Civil Engineering. She also earned a Postgraduate Certificate in University Teaching and Learning from UWI. Her research focuses on numerical modeling of concrete, fracture mechanics of concrete and concrete forensics. She was a GK-12 fellow of the National Science Foundation, and a graduate fellow of National GEM Consortium in the USA. Dr. Smith’s core belief as an educator is to empower students for a world beyond the degree. 

For more about The UWI/Guardian Group Premium Teaching Awards, please click here.