Golden Owl awarded to Professor Lucas Bretschger
Professor Lucas Bretschger has won the 2021 Golden Owl at D-MTEC. The prize is awarded annually by the ETH student association for outstanding teaching. Professor Bretschger, one of the founding members of our department, here reveals some of the elements that make his lectures stand out.
Each year, the ETH Zurich student association, VSETH, awards the Golden Owl to one lecturer in every department for particularly dedicated and excellent teaching. Lucas Bretschger, Professor at the Chair of Economics / Resource Economics received the award this year at D-MTEC.
“Receiving the Golden Owl is a great pleasure and honour for me,” Professor Bretschger says. “It recognises a solid and didactically well-developed teaching performance.” Professor Bretschger has been with D-MTEC since its establishment in 2005. In fact, he was one of the co-founders of the department and its first head, and has been teaching courses in resource economics ever since.
In his lectures, Professor Bretschger draws upon his experience in private business and policy advocacy. “I maintain a very personal style and always sprinkle experiences from political consulting and everyday life into my explanations. I think I have a good feel for the difficulties of the material and can appropriately communicate the considerations crucial to understanding it. Also, people notice that I really take sustainability seriously.” It is important to make the relationships between topics tangible to students, Bretschger explains. “By linking otherwise dry material to a sustainable lifestyle, I make it more relevant.”
Yet there is more to it than skilfully imparting complex material. “There are also students who find me funny,” Bretschger says. However, communicating through humour has become more difficult. “Unfortunately, spontaneity has greatly diminished during the pandemic with all the video recordings.”
Congratulations, Lucas! We at the department are proud and happy to count you among our faculty.
