For T. Michael Duncan, the Raymond G. Thorpe Teaching Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Emeritus, teaching was more than a job.

Credit: Provided

For 36 years at Cornell, Duncan approached teaching with the same rigor he brought to research: prepare carefully, observe closely, evaluate the results and then figure out how to make it better the next time.

That cycle of constant refinement became a hallmark of Duncan’s career in the Robert F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. As he retires, the numbers alone suggest the scale of his influence: 3,191 lectures, 3,699 undergraduate students, 382 academic advisees and 565 recommendation letters. He also worked with 231 undergraduate teaching assistants and was named a Cornell Merrill Scholar’s “Most Influential Professor” nine times.

But Duncan measures teaching less by numbers than by what students are able to do on their own.

“It was at Cornell that I discovered the scholarship of teaching – of how to get an idea across, and mostly this idea of learning by doing,” Duncan said. He considers creating exercises that teach students how to design among “the most intellectually challenging” work of his career.

Duncan came to Cornell in 1990 after earning his doctorate at the California Institute of Technology and spending a decade as a researcher at Bell Labs. Intro to Chemical Engineering was the first course he taught at Cornell. He developed an approach centered on active problem-solving, incorporating design from the beginning of the curriculum and building teams of undergraduate TAs.

He also treated every lecture as something that could be improved.

Duncan routinely reserved roughly half an hour before class to prepare himself for what he wanted students to learn. More important, he said, was the time afterward, when he would make notes about “what worked and what didn’t work,” whether a question had been misleading and how the lesson could be improved.

Students noticed.

“As both your student and TA, I was impressed by how you would tirelessly iterate and improve upon the classes you taught year after year,” wrote Will Gregg ’16 to Duncan. “Even after multiple decades teaching the same class, you would come up with new ideas/tweaks to make each year an improvement over the last and never settle on ‘good enough.’”

Underlying those refinements was a larger goal. Duncan wanted students to move beyond calculating the correct answer and learn to define problems, work within constraints, question assumptions and design solutions. His calculation sessions emphasized collaborative learning, with students working through problems in changing teams. Duncan believed that good questions could be every bit as important to learning as good explanations.

That philosophy extended to his teaching assistants. Beginning in 1993, Duncan enlisted chemical engineering seniors as undergraduate TAs for Introduction to Chemical Engineering. He met with them weekly not merely to discuss logistics, but to talk about pedagogy: learning and teaching styles, cooperative learning, grading, teamwork, academic integrity, conducting office hours and helping students manage stress. His stated goal was “to get the freshmen to think and to learn how to learn on their own.”

Those meetings became one of Duncan’s favorite parts of teaching and an important part of his legacy. He assembled TA teams deliberately, looking for students with different approaches to problems, and relished hearing ideas he had not considered himself. Fourteen of his former undergraduate TAs have gone on to become professors themselves, carrying forward his commitment to helping others learn.

For many students, however, Duncan’s mentorship mattered just as much outside the classroom. Kathy Vaeth ’94 recalled a seemingly simple conversation that redirected her future.

“I still remember the moment you asked me, ‘Have you ever thought about going to graduate school?’” Vaeth wrote to Duncan. “That question changed the entire course of my life.”

Duncan’s influence also extended beyond individual students to the community around them. He advised students, wrote hundreds of recommendations and, with his wife, Deborah, hosted the school’s annual Vegas Night 27 times, a popular casino-themed tradition that brings the school community together each year.

Credit: Cornell University Photography

Derrick Tang ’08 captured the result best, writing that more than two decades after first taking a class with Duncan, his former professor remained his “gold standard as a teacher, life advisor, and model of someone who is excellent at his job and clear about doing it for the right reasons.”

Tang added, “I may not remember the details of reaction kinetics anymore, but Professor Duncan helped teach me how to think – and that’s something I still use every day!”

For Duncan, that may be the most fitting measure of a teaching career: not whether students remember every equation, but whether they leave Cornell knowing how to confront a problem they have never seen before.

Honor Professor Duncan’s legacy

The R.F. Smith School is encouraging support of the T. Michael Duncan Undergraduate Teaching Fellowship. The fellowship will provide resources to a faculty mentor and a team of undergraduate apprentices as they deepen their understanding of educational best practices, foster experiential learning environments, develop effective teaching skills and inspire the next generation of chemical engineers