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Joel Voldman, the William R. Brody (1965) Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), received the 2026 Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching. Given annually to a faculty member whose contributions to education have been characterized by dedication, care, and creativity, the award stands as a tribute to the late Amar Bose, a professor of EECS and the founder of the Bose Corporation.

Voldman is a dedicated teacher with a particular love for undergraduate education.

“I’ve taught a range of classes. I tend to prefer undergraduate subjects as those are often the first time a student is encountering a new field,” he says. “Recently, I co-developed and have been teaching 6.900: Engineering for Impact, which has been a lot of work but very rewarding.”

In course 6.900, which he co-developed with EECS Senior Lecturer Joe Steinmeyer, students work in teams to engineer hardware/software systems that solve important, challenging real-world problems. In pursuit of these projects, students engage at every step of the full-stack development process, from printed circuit board design to firmware to server to industrial design. Teams design and build functional prototypes of complete hardware/software systems.

“I try to architect the classes I teach to ensure that every lecture, PSET, lab, and activity is oriented toward the primary learning goals of the class,” Voldman says. “And with those activities, I often try to show how the concepts we are learning enable the students to do amazing things.”

Voldman is a principal investigator in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and Microsystems Technology Laboratories, where he focuses on BioMEMS and applies microfabrication technology to illuminate biological systems, ranging from point-of-care diagnostics to fundamental cell biology.

His research builds upon various disciplines: electrical engineering, microfabrication, bioengineering, transport modeling, biology, and medicine. His group takes a quantitative approach to designing technology, using both analytical and numerical modeling to gain fundamental understanding of the technologies that they create.

Voldman received his BS in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. As an undergraduate student, he was fortunate enough to have a teacher who impacted his approach as an educator as well: John Brehm, who was a Professor of Physics at UMass.

“John Brehm taught physics classes that I took at UMass,” Voldman says. “I first encountered him my freshman year and ended up taking 3 classes with him. He was an amazing lecturer, with incredibly high standards.”

Voldman performed postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School before joining the MIT faculty in 2002.

When asked what receiving the Bose Award means to him, he said, “Amar Bose was an incredibly gifted educator here at MIT. Being associated with him and his legacy is a real honor.”