2025 TEACH Awards
Innovative Teaching Award
Muhammad Ismail Khalid Yousaf, MBBS
Internal Medicine
The Innovative Teaching Award recognizes the use of new teaching strategies or the implementation of existing strategies in new ways to enhance learning. Innovative teaching encompasses teaching students from diverse learning backgrounds, a passion and enthusiasm for meaningful teaching, application of teaching technologies, and creativity in engaging students.
(Left to Right) Mariah Rudd, MEd; Serkan Toy PhD; Aubrey Knight, MD
Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Award
Serkan Toy, PhD
Basic Science Education
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award recognizes outstanding achievements in research, scholarly activity, and creative accomplishments that focus on the effectiveness of teaching methods. Recipients will embody the Environment of Inquiry related to teaching by systematically investigating questions associated with learning and the conditions under which it occurs in order to improve outcomes.
Feedback Award
Inna Massaro, DO
Emergency Medicine
The Feedback Award recognizes the skill of effectively incorporating feedback into daily routines that focus on specific behaviors, assess performance, guide reflection, promote expertise, and identify a learner’s readiness to change.
(Left to Right) Aubrey Knight, MD; Inna Massaro, DO; Mariah Rudd, MEd
Excellence in Feedback involves key principles of “Good Feedback” which include aligning goals, feedback that is well-timed, regulating and limiting feedback to remediable behavior, and maintaining a focus on specific performance, decisions and actions. Recipients will have provided invaluable and supportive academic feedback, in both content and delivery method, which helps others to develop and excel in their work. Nominees for this award should utilize feedback as an integral part of the daily partnership between the learner and teacher and deliver both timely and constructive feedback allowing for improvements before the next assessment.
(Left to Right) Aubrey Knight, MD; Amanda Murchison, MD; Mariah Rudd, MEd
Educator Mentorship Award
Amanda Murchison, MD
OB/GYN
The Educator Mentorship Award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated excellence in counseling and guidance towards another’s teaching practice and/or educational research. Mentorship is a long-term commitment to the education and advancement of learners and/or faculty at VTCSOM and RUC.
Rising Star Award
Michael Ferguson, MD
Psychiatry
The Rising Star award recognizes emerging leaders in health professions education whose teaching experience demonstrates ongoing and promising growth in contribution to teaching and increased levels of teaching leadership and responsibility.
Photo of Michael Ferguson, MD
Recipients of this award have at least one year of teaching experience and are in no more than their fifth year of continuous service as a faculty member. This award is intended to acknowledge faculty members who show extraordinary potential at the beginning of their academic careers.
*Photography by Ryan Anderson, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine
*Headshots from Carilion Clinic website