VSE Associate Professor Vadim Marmer

Congratulations to VSE Associate Professor Vadim Marmer, winner of a 2013-2014 UBC Killam Teaching Prize! The prestigious and competitive prize recognizes all aspects of outstanding teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

“I am very honoured to receive this prize,” says Vadim. “I love teaching and feel very privileged to have this opportunity to share my knowledge and passion about my work with students.”

Vadim came to UBC in 2005 after completing his Ph.D. at Yale University. He teaches at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and has taught nearly 1,000 students at UBC since 2005. Vadim’s main area of research is econometrics, a difficult but vital subject for any economist to master. Econometrics is concerned with causality. It is a set of tools and ways of thinking which allow economists to extract causal relationships from the vast array of data available in today’s information economy in order to understand economics, and more broadly, human behaviour.

“From the start, Vadim has been exemplary as a teacher and mentor, a colleague who shows by example that he understands the importance of integrating teaching and research,” says Prof. Hugh Neary, VSE Associate Director. “He is an active and accomplished researcher with a real passion for his subject. He shows this passion in every lecture, in his many informal activities outside the classroom, in his well-defined and ambitious learning outcomes, and in his research collaborations with students.”

Vadim’s research focuses on topics of misspecification, weak identification, estimation and inference in auctions, and nonlinear and non-stationary time series. Since 2005, he has published ten scholarly papers – including seven papers in the Journal of Econometrics, a leading scholarly journal in econometrics.

“I believe that teaching is closely connected to research,” Vadim notes. “Interactions with students inside and outside the classroom force me to look differently at familiar topics, thus inspiring new research. Indeed, teaching is the best way to learn.”

Numerous current and former students, and fellow faculty, submitted letters of support for Vadim’s nomination for the Killam Prize. Here are just a few excerpts from student testimonials:

• “What amazed me most is that he managed to treat the subject as one continuous ‘narrative’. Each lecture continued on from the one before; by the end of the semester you felt like you had listened to one long story… and you somehow understood the plot”
• “Prof. Marmer masters the difficult task of making a degree requirement that can be tedious and abstract into an enjoyable, engaging, and empowering experience. His absolute respect for his students was unwavering. I truly value how he believed in me and all of his students.”
• “We were highly encouraged to participate during lectures. Part of how he encouraged participation was his earnestness in replying to our questions. His manner was never dismissive… his style of teaching helped me become a more flexible learner.”
• “Prof. Marmer’s excellence as a teacher is not just confined to his abilities in the classroom. As a learner I genuinely felt he was invested in our success.”