Jacqueline Dewar

Professor Jacqueline Dewar joined LMU in 1973 during its inaugural year as Loyola University and Marymount College completed their merger. Over her 40-year career and as a professor emerita of mathematics, Professor Dewar has had far-ranging impact through her scholarship, teaching, and service. Her scholarly activity includes a nationally prominent role in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her teaching accomplishments at LMU have been recognized with the President's Fritz B. Burns Distinguished Teaching Award and by national organizations, notably including the MAA’s Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. 

Professor Dewar’s impact on LMU’s mathematics curricula has been transformative. In the 1970's, she authored the proposal that initiated LMU's biomathematics program, and after more than 40 years, the foundation she laid continues to draw students with interdisciplinary interests.  In 1977, she wheeled a teletype terminal connected by a phone line to her classroom. Her leadership brought the first “microcomputer” to the Math Department for in-class use. And in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she incorporated activities and workshops in the mathematics curriculum to help counteract math anxiety and math avoidance. Also in the 1980s, Professor Dewar developed a computer literacy component that incorporated problem solving and computer language in a course for future elementary teachers. Professor Dewar’s service displays significant commitment at all levels: to the department, as chair and director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Mathematics program; to the university, as director of the Center for Teaching Excellence; nationally to the profession, through leadership as a member of the Mathematical Association of America’s Board of Governors and via numerous roles within the Association for Women of Mathematics; and to the broader community, through outreach activities such as the Expanding Your Horizon Career Day conference, aimed at girls in junior high school. As evidence of how highly her valued her contributions have been, in 2018 she was recognized with the Association for Women in Mathematics Service Award.