UT Professor Frederic Schuller elected to the Academy for Excellence in Higher Education

Frederic P. Schuller, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS), has been inducted as a foreign member into the Academy for Excellence in Higher Education (Akademie Ausgezeichnete Hochschullehre).

Members are widely recognised for their exceptional teaching skills and innovative teaching approaches. The Academy is a community and network of such outstanding teachers from different disciplines, types of higher education institutions and status groups. Members are united by the conviction that higher education teaching is a central place for shaping the future of society, and that innovations in teaching are most effective when they are shared, further developed and disseminated.

Our members share what works and develop it further together. Professor Schuller will enrich this exchange in Germany and, at the same time, connect the Academy to the Netherlands and the University of Twente.

Professor Schuller received the 2016 Ars Legendi Prize for Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Germany’s top national university teaching award. His teaching displays a unique combination of mathematical rigour and an engaging lecture style, which has attracted sustained worldwide attention over the past decade. This is particularly evident in his three extensive mathematics lecture courses on differential geometry, quantum theory and general relativity, which successfully guide students from fundamental principles to the frontiers of research in these fields and have familiarised a total audience of well above 100,000 devoted students, who completed his courses, with highly demanding material. His lectures on these topics have become standard references. 

With the admission of Professor Schuller to the Academy, the University of Twente gains international recognition for its excellent university teaching. At the same time, the expertise of the entire academy flows back into courses, programme development and exchanges with colleagues at the University of Twente as concrete impulses, and thus sustainably strengthens the quality development in studies and teaching at the university. 

The admission of Prof. Dr. Schuller as a Member of the Academy is a special honour and asset for our university. Our students benefit directly from his superb lectures in mathematics from a very early stage in our Applied Mathematics programme and in our faculty-bridging Honours programme. His election as a Member of the Academy for Excellence in Higher Education promises even further strong stimuli for our teaching development and exchange across subject and location boundaries.