Saurabh Amin receives 2025 Common Ground Excellence in Teaching Award

Saurabh Amin has received the 2025 Common Ground Excellence in Teaching Award. Amin is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and a member of the Operations Research Center and Center for Computational Science and Engineering.

The Common Ground Award for Excellence in Teaching recognizes exceptional contributions in teaching classes with substantial computing content that are both broadly-applicable and cross-fertilized across disciplines.

Amin is recognized for his conception and execution of the course 1.C01/1.C51 (Machine Learning for Sustainable Systems), which was first offered in Spring 2021. As part of a hub and spoke model where all students take 6.C01/6.C51 (Modeling with Machine Learning: from Algorithms to Applications) to learn the basics of machine learning and then explore discipline-specific material in spoke classes. 1.C01/1.C51 was the Civil and Environmental Engineering spoke.

From the award evaluations, one student stated, “I’m confident that without this class I would have been lost. Even with 6.C51(Modeling with Machine Learning: from Algorithms to Applications), 1.C51 (Machine Learning for Sustainable Systems) was much better at reinforcing the concepts and providing the necessary context for me to understand its potential applications.”

In addition to continuing this successful Common Ground class, Amin will be teaching in C57 Optimization Methods next year, as well as launching a new Common Ground course called “Computational Methods for Engineering Sustainable Systems.”

“We appreciate Saurabh’s partnership in helping Common Ground classes reach students across the Institute,” says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Established in 2023 by the Schwarzman College of Computing, this award is given to an individual or group of faculty or lecturers who have positively impacted students by offering a subject in the Common Ground for Computing Education, and carries a cash prize of $5,000. Common Ground courses taught in Spring and Fall 2024 were considered for this recognition.