Professors Bertram Malle and Jamie Trost have been recognized for their teaching achievements by the Dean of Faculty. Malle has been granted the 2026 Elizabeth LeDuc Excellence in Teaching Award in the Life Sciences, named for the first woman to be a full professor in a teaching position and the first woman chair of a department at Brown. Trost has received the Dean's Excellence in Teaching Award in the Life and Physical Sciences, one of two awards across all departments presented to assistant professors/lecturers.

Malle, who has been at Brown for sixteen years, traces his teaching journey back to high school, where he would give lectures to his classes. From his undergraduate experience at the University of Graz to Stanford University, he continued to engage in learning, exploring research and teaching. He then became the first professor in the University of Oregon’s Psychology Department to use webpages—to make his course materials available online and have his research be publicly available—emphasizing that “the idea of teaching and research integration was always important to me,” Malle shared.

Malle reflected, “I want students, whether it's PhD students or undergrad students, to learn something new and not just knowledge that you can put into a multiple choice test, but skills and a way of thinking, approaching things.” “As one grows older, there's this feeling [that] there's sort of a bag of tools and I'd like my students to get those,” he added.

Malle has taught an assortment of classes, from large introductory lectures to graduate seminars, across his tenure. In all of his courses, Malle emphasized the importance of writing reaction papers, providing comprehensive feedback, and making sure that students learn “to think like a scientist. [This] means asking lots of questions, not necessarily being fully on board with the first hypothesis, even what's written in a textbook, but thinking about the evidence. What do we really know?”

Trost similarly focuses on developing a strong scientific foundation through her undergraduate and graduate statistics classes. Her journey to becoming a professor began with different–initially seemingly unrelated—teaching roles, from a live-in RA to practicing Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) to TAing a variety of statistics courses during her graduate training. 

It was through her university’s center for teaching and learning that Trost realized her love of teaching, first taking seminars to supplement her work and eventually running the seminars herself. Statistics is a field for which she developed a love during her PhD, in large part due to her statistics professor. She now works to instill that interest in her students. “[Statistics] is a topic [where] if you don't snag kids, you're going to lose them,” Trost said. “There are a lot of kids that come into a stats class already thinking they can't do statistics–[first] I have to get you to the point where you think you are equipped and then I'll get you so excited about statistics.”

Trost uses a multi-modal approach to teaching: for one semester, she teaches a typical lecture class; the next, she utilizes a flipped classroom structure. “We want to teach the skill,” Trost shared, “But more importantly [make sure that] if they go in any other situation, they know it's not verbatim what you're learning in this class, it's an application.” 

Trost has also converted her teaching into a formal research opportunity. She explained, “[My teaching] was bred out of this idea that different students learn in different ways, but now I'm looking at the nuances. I'm starting to see that the flipped classroom might be beneficial for students of a different demographic.”

Both professors emphasized the importance of Brown students’ attitudes towards learning as integral to their classes.

Trost shared, “I was told when I got here that there's this unique aspect to the Open Curriculum where students that take your class want to be in your class, and I can't believe how true that is. Having the students' enthusiasm in the classroom is phenomenal. I guarantee you, this award is less about me and more about the fact that the students are excited, because they're passionate about learning. I'm on the other side of that, passionate about teaching and it works to align itself.”

The role of the CoPsy department has also influenced the awardees. Malle emphasized the importance of “people who care about teaching” and work in collaboration with other disciplines, being in the sciences and connected to the social sciences and humanities. “Our field sits within a lot of other intellectual traditions.”

Receiving the Excellence Awards was a pleasant shock for Malle and Trost. 

Malle shared, “It was a surprise, so then getting it was great because it provides a nice perspective.” It encouraged reflection: “I've been here for 16 years. How many students have I taught? What courses have I taught? What experiences have I given them, but also what experiences have I gotten? What has changed?”

“I also read up a little bit on Elizabeth Leduc and her pioneering role at Brown,” Malle shared. “She was a beloved teacher, researcher, just an incredible person at a time when there were very few women anywhere on the faculty, anywhere on scientific organizations. She was a pioneer and she seemed to really also have had that passion—and they describe it as optimism. I'm not sure whether I'm exactly an optimist, but I do try to use passion to energize [students].”

“She became a full professor the same year I was born, so that's kind of a cute little connection there,” he added.

Trost expressed similar sentiments. “I'm over the moon,” she shared. “It's nice, when you put a lot of effort into teaching, to have it be recognized and to see the students responding to some of these things that I'm doing–whether it's my goofy sense of humor in the classroom or some of these strategies that I'm employing corresponding to feedback mid-semester and and incorporating data sets so that they can learn R.”

She also shared appreciation for her Teaching Assistants: “I'm very lucky to be able to choose my TA team every year. It's not Jamie and the TAs. It's not a hierarchy. They're resources and they're invaluable. They reframe ideas, they host the office hours, they grade exams like champs. They shine. I love them.”

Trost and Malle emphasize the importance of TAs in reaching students, as one strategy of making education accessible to those who may not be comfortable interfacing with them directly.

They also advise on the importance of continuous innovation and reaction to student needs. Trost shared, “I've got a laundry list of all the different things I want to try with classes. I think a lot about graduate education, how it differs from undergraduate education, and how I can shift that class to be meaningful for graduate students.” When her exam got snowed out during the February 2026 blizzard, Trost responded by assigning a creative project, one that she is now considering making permanent in her syllabus.

“Adapt to your students, adapt your classroom,” Trost encouraged. “Treat teaching as learning. Because you can learn something from your students, you can learn something from your classroom, you can learn something from yourself and from your teaching. It [is] an iterative process. What am I changing about this semester? I'm learning things from my classroom that are making me a better educator in the future.”

Malle also emphasized responsiveness in the context of societal challenges, from generative AI to Supreme Court verdicts, and maintaining student drive in spite of them. “Sometimes [it’s] just getting them motivated to tackle the really hard problems, the investments, the effort, and somehow convincing them that this is worth it. And if you're not showing passion, excitement, conviction as a teacher, then that's very hard.” 

When asked about advice he would offer, he shared “There's no one set of things you should do or not do, but I think you have to love what you're doing and somehow express and share that joy.”

Malle and Trost received their awards on Wednesday, April 29 as a part of the Sheridan Center’s University Awards Ceremony.