November 18, 2021
Virginia Naibo recognized as Professor of the Week
Virginia Naibo, professor of mathematics, was recognized as Professor of the Week at the Nov. 17 men's home basketball game.
Faculty Senate, the Office of the President, K-State Athletics and the Division of Communications and Marketing wish to recognize her contributions to K-State.
Naibo is an exceptional classroom teacher who thrives in every type of classroom. She has been successful working with pre-service elementary teachers, beginning calculus students, advanced STEM majors interested in applications, and graduate students pursuing doctorates in pure mathematics. Naibo's student evaluations are uniformly excellent no matter what she teaches. Her department head believed one of the few lucky breaks they got last year was that Naibo was coordinating the Engineering Calculus class when K-State suddenly had to shift to online instruction. She didn't just have to pivot her own teaching, she also had to work with a second lecturer and six different GTAs teaching nine recitation sections to keep the class moving forward successfully, and she did very well. Naibo adapted polls in Zoom to provide an online version of a classroom response system which let her maintain active learning in online lectures. Having her on the faculty has improved instruction in many classrooms, and not just hers. Her influence is not felt just at K-State. Because she does especially well in Math for Elementary School Teachers, she gets assigned this frequently. By now, she has hundreds of former students teaching mathematics, improving mathematics instruction all across the state and beyond.
Naibo has also been very active in curriculum development, designing an entirely new Digital Image Processing class and adding a lab component to the Applied Matrix Theory class, which has also been used by many other faculty. She has supervised three doctoral students who are now productive faculty members at other schools — and has a fourth in progress. She has supervised five undergraduate research projects and is active in supporting and developing outreach activities.