Amos Winter receives 2025 Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching

Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the 2025 Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, given annually to a faculty member whose contributions to education have been characterized by dedication, care, and creativity.

Professor Winter leads the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center, which “characterizes the unique technical and socioeconomic constraints of emerging markets, then combines these insights with engineering science to create high-performance, low-cost, globally-relevant technologies.” His research interests include engineering global development, design for highly constrained environments, and machine and product design.

At GEAR Center, Winter and his team are working on technologies that aim to have a positive impact on the world, including home-use and village-scale desalination, drip irrigation, small farm mechanization, prosthetic legs and feet, and hydrogen trucking.

Alongside his impactful research, Winter is a dedicated teacher with a particular love for 2.007: Design and Manufacturing I, an iconic MIT class that has run for over fifty years.

“The class is gratifying because it is most students’ first time engineering and building something of their own design,” Winter said. “We see so many students transform as their confidence and competence as engineers grows throughout the semester.”

All of Winter’s 2.007 lectures contain two highlights to help drive the content home, keep students engaged, and provide a break. The first he calls “Gearhead Moments of Zen,” where he shows a car doing “something amazing” and follow up with a description of how the feat is possible using content from his lecture. The second he calls “Profiles in Design and Innovation,” where he highlights a diverse group of individuals to celebrate their ingenuity and achievements related to the lecture topics.

An accomplished and effective teacher, Winter’s passion for the course is apparent and infectious.

“I deeply love teaching 2.007 and have done my best to make it exciting, engaging, and fresh for the students over the past 12 years,” he said. “I hope I can teach 2.007 for many more years. It is a highlight of my job!”

Winter’s overall teaching style emphasizes an example-first approach to build on students’ intuition before then bringing in the theory that describes their understanding. He believes that, to understand the content, students need to apply it to a real-world problem first.

“This teaching approach engages a much larger fraction of the class than if I led with theory then presented examples,” Winter said. “Mechanical engineers are lucky because many of the concepts in our discipline are experienced regularly by everyone. Friction, forces, and power transfer are things we start physically feeling and building an intuition for from when we are babies. I teach by trying to build on this innate intuition we all have.”

As an undergraduate student at Tufts University, Winter was fortunate enough to have a teacher who impacted his approach as an educator as well: Chris Rogers, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Winter worked with Rogers as an undergraduate researcher, making Lego demos for elementary school kids to learn about STEM principles. Rogers also supervised Winter’s undergraduate thesis, for which he built a BattleBot fighting robot.

“The experience building Lego devices enabled me to be creative, as well as learn that I love teaching,” Winter said. “For my thesis, Chris encouraged me to take on what felt was an audacious project at the time, but which gave me confidence to be ambitious with my initiatives—something that has served me well in my career. He also inspires me through his own enthusiasm and energy for the topics he teaches. Chris is still a very close friend and mentor. I often seek his advice.”

Winter has been a member of the MIT community since 2003, when he began pursuing his master’s degree in mechanical engineering. He continued on to receive his PhD at MIT in 2011 and has been a professor of mechanical engineering for thirteen years.

When asked what receiving the Bose Award means to him, Winter said, “I have poured my heart and soul into 2.007 and it feels good to be noticed for doing so.”