Golden Owl for D-BSSE Professor Karsten Borgwardt

The Golden Owl honours lecturers who have provided exceptional teaching and motivates them to continue with their excellent teaching. Karsten Borgwardt is very pleased about the award: "Teaching has been extremely important to me from the very beginning of my academic career - I taught my first course as lecturer during my PhD studies in Munich. I am therefore very happy and honored to receive this award for my teaching activities."

The Golden Owl is awarded by the VSETH - ETH Zurich’s students association, who are also the initiators of the award. All ETH members with a teaching assignment can be nominated for the Golden Owl. One lecturer per ETH Zurich department is selected for this honour and receives the prize for the popularity of his / her classes. At the end of the spring semester, an online survey created by VSETH is sent to all students asking them to rate the teaching style of their lecturers. The results are given to the respective student association. They look at a further list of criteria to choose the winner of their department.

Karsten Borgwardt’s Data Mining courses at D-BSSE introduce Master's students of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology to the booming field of Data Science: "The big challenge is to present the material in a way that makes it both understandable and interesting for an audience from diverse undergraduate backgrounds. The success is shown by the fact that now not only students from D-BSSE, but from various ETH Zurich departments enroll in these classes."

The Golden Owl was first awarded in 2005 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the ETH Zurich. Since then, VSETH confers the prize yearly on ETH Day. This year’s ETH Day took place on November 18 at the ETH Zurich Main Campus.