"I teach a subject that's notoriously hard to learn"

Romain Fleury, a tenure-track assistant professor who heads the Laboratory of Wave Engineering, has been named best teacher in electrical and electronic engineering. When he was a student, Romain Fleury feared the subject he now teaches at EPFL. "I teach something that's notoriously hard to learn. When someone first tried to explain electromagnetics to me, I didn't understand a thing. It was way too complicated," he says. And it's true that the subject is a perfect storm of highly abstract concepts and convoluted equations. So when he started teaching, Fleury spent a lot of time figuring out how he could clearly explain the inner workings of electrical signals and the propagation of electromagnetic waves.