Posted 8 a.m. Thursday, June 19, 2025
Zachariah Tritz receives 2025 Eagle Teaching Excellence Award
UW-La Crosse is home to many outstanding instructors who make a difference in students’ lives inside and outside the classroom.
This year, UWL’s Provost Office received hundreds of nominations from students hoping to recognize their favorite faculty. From these nominations, a university committee selected six faculty to receive 2025 Eagle Teaching Excellence Awards.
They are:
- Brad Dobbs, Management
- Sona Kazemi, Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies
- Heather Linville, Educational Studies
- Ryan McKelley, Psychology
- James Peirce, Mathematics & Statistics
- Zachariah Tritz, Microbiology
This is the sixth and final story highlighting the winners.
Zachariah Tritz, Microbiology
Started at UWL: 2023
Courses: I'm a member of the Microbiology Department. I teach immunology lab and lecture courses, and I sometimes teach First Year Seminar or the Global Impacts of Infectious Disease course.
Background: Prior to teaching at UWL, I was a Ph.D. student at Mayo Clinic in the lab of Dr. Aaron Johnson, studying immunotherapies for brain cancers. I graduated in March 2023 and worked briefly as a post-doc in the same lab. Becoming an educator was always my goal in graduate school, so I spent a lot of time gaining experience teaching along the way.
Favorite part of teaching: When I was working toward this goal of being an educator, the thing I knew I was excited for was the joy of science communication. Watching students get excited about the subject material and invested in the course is amazing to watch — plus, it’s easy to pull off, since immunology is the best and most interesting subject in the world! What I’ve come to appreciate more over time is the connections I’ve made with the students here; UWL has a truly fantastic student population, and I feel enormously lucky to get to both teach and learn from my trainees.