Ramadge wins President's Award for Distinguished Teaching

Written by
Office of Communications
May 24, 2022

Peter Ramadge, the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Engineering and professor of electrical and computer engineering, was one of four recipients of the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

The detailed lecture notes that Ramadge distributes every week are legendary. They have proved to be indispensable to the many students who have taken his courses over the years since Ramadge, whose scholarship focuses on signal processing and machine learning, joined the faculty in 1984.

“The level of preparation and care he puts into his lectures is unparalleled,” one graduate student said. He makes the material “accessible for all students, yet interesting and engaging at the deepest levels.” Another agreed: “Professor Ramadge has an extraordinary ability to break down technical material in a way that is easy to understand.”

An undergraduate with a casual interest in machine learning took Ramadge’s class and found it to be “one of the most mathematically rigorous and conceptually challenging courses that I have taken in my Princeton career.” Nevertheless, he ended up relishing the challenge and elected to write his thesis on the subject, with Ramadge as his adviser.

Ramadge is also known for frequently revising his course materials. “Peter never stops improving the class,” said one of his graduate students, who, when serving as a teaching assistant, realized that Ramadge had made teaching “look effortless. Peter has been one of my greatest inspirations when it comes to teaching.”

An advisee who is pursuing a Ph.D. was grateful for his incisive feedback. “He spends a tremendous amount of time reading my paper drafts and comes up with crystal-clear writing,” he said. The long journey of graduate school “would not have been possible without the support from my adviser, Professor Peter J. Ramadge.”