Sara Merino-Aceituno

Sara Merino-Aceituno was nominated for this prize for being a student favourite in terms of devotion to teaching and genuinely caring about her students understanding and having fun with mathematics. She believes in the impact maths can have and we believe she is a driving force at our faculty making said impact the best it could possibly be. Several nominations have reached us and what they all have in common is the impression of her going the extra mile for her students. This especially shows through the extracurricular course “Mastering Math & Mind”, which she introduced in 2024. In it, she teaches the fundamentals of mathematical proofs as well as self management. In our interview Sara told us that she gets a lot of positive energy out of her interactions with students and she enjoys how they keep coming up with questions which are tricky to answer and require her to get creative with her explanations. For her teaching it is important to her to always keep adapting – to students, to new tools or to other developments. Five years from now, she would want her masters students to remember the bigger picture of the lecture she held. We learned that during her own time studying she faced times in which she thought she wouldn’t make it as a mathematician, but she saw other people struggling too and still making it so she kept going. Now she in turn does her best to help students keep going too.