News

Students Chose Christian Ochsner for Švejnar-Terrell Teaching Prize

3 October, 2019

We are pleased to announce that Christian Ochsner was awarded this year's Jan Švejnar and Katherine Terrell Teaching Prize. The award is based on the students' course instruction in CERGE-EI's core and field graduate courses.

Christian has joined CERGE-EI Faculty as an Assistant Professor last year. He focuses on economic history and applied economics. Christian also holds a part-time research fellow/post-doc position at the University of Zurich.

"I am lucky at CERGE-EI that most of the students are very interested and motivated. And of course, it helps that I can teach in a field where I do my own research," said Christian.

"In the end, teaching is also an opportunity to leverage my own ideas and knowledge in a field that I want to push forward. At the end of the day, I guess, an average researcher has more long-term influence on the profession via teaching than via publishing even though I am hoping that I will also gain influence via publishing," he added.

The Acting Director of CERGE-EI Sergey Slobodyan noted that the prize was set up to recognize the best teachers of economics at CERGE-EI, and to emphasize that graduate teaching quality is a vital part of CERGE-EI's mission.

"There are many success stories that began with great teachers - they inspire us, provide support and guidance, and of course it is their job to be critical," said Slobodyan.

"We believe that teachers like Christian and many others at CERGE-EI have played and are still playing a significant role in the success of our students and alumni and we are grateful for their work," he added.

Recently, Christian and his colleague Felix Roesel from the Ifo Institute in Dresden were awarded a prize by the Leibniz Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim (ZEW) for their study of populism. Read our blog interview to find out more about their work.