boyles web

May 8, 2018

Associate Professor Stephen Boyles was recently selected to receive The University of Texas at Austin's 2018-2019 Dads’ Association Centennial Teaching Fellowship in recognition of excellence and commitment in the teaching of undergraduates. 

The Dads' Association Centennial Teaching Fellowships were established in 1983 by The University of Texas System Board of Regents using funds raised by the UT Austin Dads' Association and matching funds under the Centennial Teachers and Scholars Program. Appointees are nominated by the deans of their college or school and must be actively engaged in teaching freshman undergraduates. 

Boyles teaches the department's undergraduate introductory course, CE 301 Civil Engineering Systems, which lays the foundation for basic communication and computing skills and inspires passion and excitement about the importance of being a civil engineer. 

For this course, Boyles developed a plan to implement active learning and open-ended problem solving to provide a context for the technical content the students would be learning throughout their undergraduate years. He created a semester-long “cornerstone” project for the students to work in teams and learn how technical (e.g., physics, chemistry, math, mechanics of materials and fluid dynamics) and non-technical (e.g., sociology, public policy and communication) skills are applied to real world problems in civil engineering. These cornerstone projects provide a bookend to the final capstone projects the students work on as seniors.

Boyles also teaches the undergraduate course CE 311S Probability and Statistics for Civil Engineers and CE 367R Optimization Techniques in Transportation Engineering. His research includes static and dynamic traffic assignment, network models for urban parking, multiscale network modeling, and planning for innovative vehicle technologies (such as electric or autonomous vehicles).

The last faculty member from the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering to receive this teaching fellowship was Professor David W. Fowler in 1993-1994.