Teaching Interests
Professor Risbud’s Teaching Experience and Innovations:
- Established outstanding reputation as an educator with a distinguished record of classroom teaching and mentoring of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. Regularly teach and create innovations (e.g. flipped classroom) in Introductory Materials Science courses for engineers, and courses on Thermodynamics, Electronic and Optical Materials, and Diffusion.
- Pioneered new Career Discovery Group and Freshman seminars on topics of universal interest. Examples include: “What in the World Will You Do?; “An Cradle to Grave Look at Materials; “Nanomaterials for Bioapplications; and “Indian Classical Music”.
- Taught Integrated Studies course “The Way Life Works” to Honors Challenge students. Invited to teach a new interdisciplinary course “Amorphous Solids” at Stanford University.
- Author of well-known textbook Introduction to Phase Equilibria in Ceramics that enjoys an international audience in over 30 countries.
- Undiluted commitment to undergraduate and graduate education and love for teaching at all levels. Student feedback uniformly in praise, particularly citing clarity and ability to stimulate class interest by giving examples from experiences in industry and research.
Some comments from UC-Davis students:
“Professor Risbud rises beyond the call of duty for his students for one sole reason: because he genuinely cares about them, believes in them, and wants to see them succeed”
“Professor Risbud was very helpful. He believes that no student should ever be left behind. Nearing the end of the quarter, I just needed to ask for the help I required, and he set aside his own time to make sure I aced the final in order to pass the class. A very friendly professor who’s not afraid to help”
“The absolute best professor in the world! He really cares about every single student, he does his best to learn names, always tries makes himself available outside of class if students need additional help! He deserves an award for being the best.”
“Great professor! Lectures are very interesting–he adds a lot of his own experiences from the field which are intriguing…Very readily available for outside help.”