Tamara G. Kofke Earns SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching

Kofke received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, honoring those who consistently demonstrate superb teaching at the undergraduate, graduate or professional level.

Since Kofke joined the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in 2003, she has made a significant impact on the student community.

“Dr. Kofke’s teaching instills rigor in students, while providing them with full support to improve learning outcomes,” Dean Kemper Lewis wrote in his nominating letter. “She personally grades every report, typically spending 30 minutes per submission, and allows for revision and resubmission so that students learn through iteration.”

Along with her role of associate professor of teaching, where she teaches laboratory courses at the junior and senior levels, Kofke currently serves on the department’s Undergraduate Committee. In this role, she led the development of the department’s four-semester undergraduate laboratory course sequence.

“This is a program that is both rigorous and transformative, preparing students for professional practice, graduate school and lifelong success,” Lewis says. “Dr. Kofke exemplifies SUNY’s expectations for teaching and student mentorship.”

He notes that Kofke is also a dedicated scholar of education. For example, she studied LabView programming, created new exercises for students, and integrated process safety instructions after participating in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers/Center for Chemical Process Safety Faculty Workshop.

Outside the classroom Kofke serves on the department’s Pre College Outreach Committee, in which she’s helped organize and lead hands-on activities at local high schools. She also has represented the department at the annual Science Teachers Association of New York State (STANYS) conference to raise awareness of chemical engineering among science teachers. 

She was awarded the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Teaching Faculty of the Year in 2019 and was named Teacher of the Year four times by the student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering/

Prior to her academic career, Kofke worked as a senior research engineer for the Occidental Chemical Corp. Technology Center in Grand Island, where she conducted pilot plant studies in the development of new ethane-based processes. She also designed lab-scale experiments investigating by-product minimization, catalyst selection and product separation.