Celebrating excellence in the Faculty of Science

The Faculty of Science Excellence Awards recognize faculty and staff members who make outstanding contributions to the Faculty’s mission and community. While there are many talented and hardworking faculty and staff who make UVic Science excel, each year we recognize a few for their outstanding contributions in three categories: teaching excellence, research excellence and staff excellence.

The 2023-24 Faculty of Science Excellence Awards winners are Jeremy Wulff (Teaching Excellence), Kristan Jensen (Research Excellence) and Ed Wiebe (Staff Excellence).


Maximizing student success and student experience

Jeremy Wulff receiving his award from Dean of Science Peter Loock
Chemistry professor Jeremy Wulff received the Faculty of Science Teaching Excellence Award in recognition of his ability to create an exceptional student experience in challenging organic chemistry classes.

If you’ve taken multiple organic chemistry courses at UVic in the last 18 years, there’s a good chance you’ve had Jeremy Wulff as a professor. The chemistry professor has taught organic chemistry at all levels, from first-year to graduate level courses, and improved every course he’s taught along the way. Wulff is widely considered an excellent professor and is known for making challenging courses enjoyable. He was recently recognized with the 2023-24 Faculty of Science Award for Teaching Excellence.

Wulff approaches his courses with the goal of creating the best experience for students and is constantly adapting courses based on student feedback to ensure maximum student success while maintaining a high academic standard. He has brought many new pedagogical innovations to existing courses, including producing a 21-video video series for CHEM 432, Advanced Organic Synthesis, to remind students of concepts previously taught, and introducing a capstone project that requires students to propose a total synthesis for a complex natural product.

Wulff has been praised by former students for conveying complex concepts in an accessible manner, encouraging active participation and critical thinking, creating an atmosphere where students feel empowered to explore ideas and ask questions, and being genuinely passionate about the subject matter.

Several courses within the department of Chemistry exist due to the efforts of Wulff. Alongside Fraser Hof, he co-created CHEM 437, Biological and Medicinal Chemistry, a course which now has the largest enrollment of any 4th year chemistry course. While only offered for one term pre-pandemic, Wulff also created a special topics course that offered students a unique research-enabled learning opportunity. In this course, undergraduate students designed, synthesized and tested a series of kinase inhibitors in partnership with a major pharmaceutical company.

Wulff also led the creation of the Chemistry for Medical Sciences program, which has been a remarkable success, expanding the range of opportunities available to chemistry students and driving increased student satisfaction.


Furthering our understanding of the laws of nature

Kristan Jensen receiving his award from Dean of Science Peter Loock
Physics professor Kristan Jensen has made significant and enduring contributions to theoretical physics. He was awarded the 2023-24 Faculty of Science Research Excellence Award at an awards ceremony in late November.

Kristan Jensen is less than 15 years into his career as a theoretical physicist, but he is already making a name for himself in his field. His accomplishments were recently recognized with the Faculty of Science Award for Research Excellence, which celebrates excellence in research by a faculty member who is at an early stage of their career.

Jensen, whose research deals with understanding the laws of nature at the most fundamental level known to humanity, is well-known and well-respected among fellow physicists. He has made significant and enduring contributions to various areas of theoretical physics, including lower-dimensional quantum gravity, novel hydrodynamic transports from quantum anomalies, relativistic hydrodynamics with parity violation, physics of strongly coupled quark-gluon plasmas and quantum many-body chaos.

“Kristan is a gem among scientists, someone who has consistently demonstrated exceptional creativity and originality,” says David Tong, professor at the University of Cambridge. “His work is characterized by a stunning clarity of though, often cutting through the complicated mathematics to reveal the key physics underneath.”

Jensen’s single author paper establishing a connection between a decades-old model of magnetism and a theory of quantum gravity has received over 600 citations.

Jensen was hired as an Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy at UVic in 2020, and promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. He also spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at UVic from 2010 to 2013. 


Behind-the-scenes of labs, the weather network, and computing

Ed Wiebe receiving his award from Dean of Science Peter Loock
SEOS senior lab instructor Ed Wiebe provides computing and lab support to the department and manages the Vancouver Island Weather Station. He is the recipient of the 2023-24 Faculty of Science Staff Excellence Award.

Ed Wiebe has been a critical member of the School of Earth & Ocean Sciences (SEOS) since 1997, first working in the lab of Andrew Weaver, and since 2017, working as a Senior Lab Instructor. He is the recipient of this year’s Faculty of Science Award for Staff Excellence, which recognizes a staff member for demonstrated excellence in their support of the teaching and/or research missions of the Faculty and/or for their contributions to civic engagement.  

“Ed is one of the most thoughtful, helpful and collaborative individuals I have ever had the opportunity to interact with at UVic,” says Andrew Weaver, professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Wiebe’s former supervisor and employer. “He is generous with his time, always willing to assist, and approaches each new challenge with enthusiasm and vigour. What’s more, he has a collegial demeanour and an infectious sense of humour.”

For years, Wiebe has been a key source of computing support for faculty members within the department, some of whom have extensive computing facilities. He helps keep operating systems and software up-to-date, installs specialized software, and advises students on strategies for effective scientific computing. A generation of climate science students, post-doctoral fellows and faculty members have relied on Wiebe for the success of their research, and his computing knowledge was key in a successful 2019 NSERC Research Tools and Instruments proposal.    

In 2017, Wiebe’s role shifted and he took on the coordination of EOS 110 and its 10 teaching assistants. Working closely with Roberta Hamme, he updated and enhanced the labs in the course, adding several new activities. More recently, he took on responsibilities for EOS 130: Climate Change, developing all the labs for the brand-new course. When the lead instructor of EOS 130 went on leave mid-semester, he also stepped up to teach the course for the remainder of the term.

Wiebe is in many ways the public face of meteorology at UVic. He manages the Vancouver Island School-Based Weather Network, a very popular website with thousands of daily visitors. Wiebe maintains the network, travelling up and down Vancouver Island to solve instrument problems or set up new stations, and is the main contact for data requests and knowledge mobilization associated with the network. He frequently speaks in local schools and to the media about climate and weather, and also regularly coordinates school class tours on campus.