Dr. Varada Kolhatkar awarded UBC Killam Teaching Prize

UBC awards the Killam Teaching Prize annually to select faculty members who demonstrate outstanding teaching. This year, UBC honours Dr. Varada Kolhatkar,  Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Computer Science and Co-Director of the Master of Data Science program, for her contributions to the teaching and learning community. She is one of 28 faculty members recognized this year across the university. Award recipients will be celebrated at the upcoming May graduation ceremony.  

“I’m deeply honoured to receive this award,” says Dr. Kolhatkar. “I find meaning and joy in teaching and learning — especially in making complex ideas in applied machine learning and computer science more approachable without losing their depth and rigour. I feel very fortunate to be able to do this work at UBC. Some of my favourite moments are when a student goes from ‘This is intimidating’ to ‘Wait, this actually makes sense, and I can use it in my own domain.’”  

Dr. Kolhatkar joins an extraordinary group of Killam Teaching Prize recipients at UBC Computer Science, including most recently Drs. Margo Seltzer, Oluwakemi Ola, Cinda Heeren and Elisa Baniassad.  

Since 2018, Dr. Kolhatkar has been teaching at UBC’s Department of Computer Science, starting as a Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow and later becoming an Assistant Professor of Teaching. Her excellence in teaching has also been recognized by the department with a Faculty Teaching Award in 2022.  

Dr. Kolhatkar’s teaching focuses on applied machine learning, with an emphasis on helping students with diverse backgrounds confidently and responsibly apply these tools to their own fields. She is also deeply committed to creating accessible learning resources, developing open educational materials and introductory YouTube videos on applied machine learning that support students both inside and outside the classroom. With an intensive and demanding program such as UBC’s Master of Data Science program, Dr. Kolhatkar launched an initiative to foster a more supportive and compassionate environment. She has been leading weekly meditation sessions for students and faculty and begins her classes with a short breathing exercise, encouraging moments of pause in otherwise demanding schedules. 

“Ultimately, I hope to see an academic environment that supports not just intellectual growth, but also our emotional well-being,” she says. 

Prior to coming to UBC, Dr. Kolhatkar was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, the University of Ottawa and Privacy Analytics. She received her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a Master’s in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Duluth. 

Photo credit: Paul H. Joseph