Recently, Professor William Li (Professor of Management at SAIF) was awarded with SJTU's Excellent Educator Award for his impressive and professional teaching style.
As one of the highest honors at SJTU, the Excellent Educator Award is set up to honor distinguished faculty who have made remarkable contributions in teaching and talent cultivation. They are also rewarded for their leading role in developing "value-added" education.
Before joining SAIF in 2018, Professor William Li was a tenured full professor and Eric Jing Professor in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He won the Excellent Teaching Awards five times in Minnesota. Professor Li has extensive teaching experience in the field of experimental design and is a co-author of Applying Linear Statistical Model (5th edition) — which is widely used by top business schools and has been also cited many times in academia. In 2013, he was awarded to be a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA).
After joining SAIF, Professor Li made outstanding contributions to the academic development and talent cultivation of SAIF. In addition, with his deep and solid theoretical background and a sense of innovation, he applies statistics to the field of finance and studies Chinese issues actively.
His courses combine theory and practice, and international frontiers together with Chinese actualities — which improves SAIF's teaching system greatly. These courses include "Big Data Analysis and Experiment Design", "Statistical Analysis Methods" and "Data Analysis and Decision Making". These courses have been highly praised by students, with an average score of 9.8 in class evaluation. In 2019, he won the third SAIF Teaching Award.
In addition, he shared his teaching experience with young teachers unreservedly. In 2021, he also took the initiative to offer systematic teaching training to help young teachers improve themselves through lectures on pedagogy, lecture evaluation, one-on-one feedback and consultation, question and answer, and summary sessions. Among these, lectures on pedagogy are also now accessible to Ph.D. students, enabling students who are interested in education to have the opportunity to learn some teaching methods.
In 2019 and 2020, Professor Zhan Jiang (Term Professor, EED Programs Academic Director and Executive Director at SAIF) and Professor Feng Li (Associate Director of CAFR, Co-Director of SAIFR, and Professor of Accounting at SAIF) were awarded SJTU's Excellent Educator Award, respectively.
