Philip Dames, PhD was named as a 2025 recipient of the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award. Dames is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering with secondary appointments in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer & Information Sciences.
Established in 1961, the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award honors faculty members who demonstrate teaching excellence in a classroom, laboratory or clinical setting.
Dames first joined the College of Engineering in 2016 and established the Temple Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (TRAIL).
His first experience with teaching dates back to his time in high school. He registered to be a teaching assistant/grader for a math teacher and a drafting/technical drawing teacher. Additionally, his peers would often come to him with questions about their classwork.
“One of the things that I realized is that you have to know something a lot better to teach it to someone rather than just be able to do it yourself,” he shares.
Dames found that he enjoyed helping students work through a problem they were struggling with. To continue this passion, he served as a teaching assistant through his undergraduate and graduate studies and co-taught a course during his post-doctoral fellowship. Prior to starting a full-time position, he obtained a Teaching Certificate from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Teaching & Learning.
As a full-time faculty member at the College of Engineering, Dames has taught nine different courses and even worked to create his own courses and curriculum, including the course Introduction to Mobile Robotics.
“It made me think about teaching in a different way,” he explains. “With making a course from scratch, you really have to start from the big picture and then get down to the specifics.”
In the classroom, Dames utilizes project-based learning and incorporates real-world data for students to use, allowing students to consider the implications of their engineering design for the world around them.
In the TRAIL lab, Dames leads a team of undergraduate and graduate students in their research to improve robots’ ability to operate in complex, real-world environments. He sees his main role as providing technical guidance and shaping the direction of the research.
For undergraduate students, he mostly looks for curiosity as a requirement to join his lab, giving them hands-on structure and support as they learn how to navigate the research process.
For his graduate students, Dames works to help them with their career goals within the focus of his lab. If a student is interested in academia, he’ll encourage them to become a TA and find mentorship opportunities.
While Dames is grateful to receive the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award, the fact that it's an award in which he is recognized by his students and his peers makes it all the more meaningful, as what he finds most rewarding about teaching is seeing student success.
Dames shares, “Seeing that ‘aha moment’, when a student has been struggling with a particular topic, and it just clicks for them. Getting to see that is fun.”
Above all, Dames tries to guide the next generation of engineers to success. He’s created a classroom environment that encourages students to ask questions and utilizes a “Pause Button” policy allowing students to extend a deadline if facing some outside-the-classroom struggles.
He hopes students leave the College of Engineering as thoughtful engineers, emulating his favorite quote from National Medal of Science Winner Theodore Von Karman: “Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.”
Dames will be presented with the award at the University Faculty Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, April 15.