Hannah Lant Receives 2024 Swogger Award
The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce that Assistant Instructional Professor Dr Hannah Lant is a recipient of this year’s Glenn and Claire Swogger Award.
The award recognizes outstanding teachers with college appointments who introduce students to habits of scholarly thinking, inquiry and engagement in the Core Curriculum—the College’s general education program.
In an announcement recently run on the UChicago website, they write:
Each year, Assistant Instructional Professor Hannah Lant teaches nearly 500 students, and cherishes getting to know each one. An instructor for several courses, including General Chemistry, a capstone lab for majors called “Experimental Physical Chemistry,” and a Core class designed for non-STEM students, Lant said she treats her students as colleagues, and collaborates with them to expand their knowledge and interests.
“UChicago students are creative, curious, and resilient, and it is thus a pleasure to work with them,” she said.
The University of Chicago campus is another reason she deeply enjoys her work. Any General Chemistry textbook, Lant explained, will refer to at least several ground-breaking developments in chemistry that took place right here at the university. She appreciates that she can teach in the same setting where these experiments, which helped lead to the modern-day conception of the atom, occurred.
“It’s a wonderful thing to teach students, for example, about the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, and then be able to say, ‘it happened down the street,’” she said.
Whether she is teaching her non-STEM or her Experimental Physical Chemistry students, Lant guides them towards reaching the ever-rewarding ‘Eureka!’ realization. In these moments, she feels her students can most appreciate the challenges of lab work.
At the end of the course, though, it’s the progress that matters most to Lant. She witnesses firsthand her students’ trajectory from tackling the basics of the subject to wading through much more complex ideas of chemistry.
“As a professor, I can show them the road, but they ultimately are the ones to walk the path,” she said. “I like to encourage them on the last day to turn around and see how far they have come.”