Nick Totaro, Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award recipients
April 20, 2026
– Credit: College of Engineering
For Nick Totaro, Senior Instructor in LSU's Department of Biological & Agricultural Engineering (BAE), teaching engineering means teaching students that their work has to reach someone. Over the past decade, he has made that conviction the backbone of three Communication-Intensive courses and, in the process, helped reshape how an entire department thinks about what engineers need to know before they graduate.
Nick has taught more than 2,100 students across BE 1251 (Introduction to Engineering Methods), BE 1252 (Biology in Engineering), and BE 2350 (Experimental Methods for Engineers)—all certified in written, spoken, visual, and technological communication. For that sustained commitment, he has received the 2026 Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teaching Award from LSU's Communication across the Curriculum program.
The clearest picture of Nick's teaching is BE 1251, a course he has redesigned from the ground up. Students spend the first ten weeks learning engineering design, 3D CAD modeling, and additive manufacturing. Then, in week eleven, Nick takes them to a local East Baton Rouge Parish public school, where they sit with first- through fourth-graders and observe what math tools exist, what's missing, and what kids actually respond to. They write reflections, return to their groups, and design. The final project—a 3D-printed math educational tool inspired by a children's book and aligned to a Louisiana math standard—is the final exam. Students present their designs in a formal slide deck, demonstrate the tool with elementary students during a return school visit, and submit a written engineering report documenting the full design process. All four communication modes are woven into a single deliverable that gets donated to the school and used by real children. Since 2018, BE 1251 has produced and donated more than 150 educational tools to five EBR public schools, with a sixth partner school currently being finalized.
As the BAE undergraduate curriculum coordinator, Nick has also worked with colleagues across the department to ensure that all biological engineering students can complete the coursework required to earn the LSU Distinguished Communicator distinction within their major. He has served as Faculty Advisor to 38 Distinguished Communicators, with 12 more expected to graduate this spring—among the highest totals in LSU history for a program of 330 students.
Department Chair Marybeth Lima nominated Nick with her highest recommendation. "His lagniappe, long-term, strategic effort," she wrote, "makes Nick Totaro a fabulous candidate for the Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teaching Award."
Students feel the impact well after the semester ends. Raedan Stephens, a Biological Engineering and Computer Science major, wrote that Nick's teaching set the foundation for everything that followed. "He establishes the foundation of communication skills that students need to succeed throughout the remainder of their undergraduate education," Stephens observed, adding that Nick's CxC advising consistently raised the quality of student writing, presentations, and portfolio materials in ways that translated directly into professional settings.
Nick also serves CxC beyond his department as a faculty reviewer of Distinguished Communicator portfolios and is a regular participant in CxC programming, generously sharing his experience and ideas with fellow teachers. He notices something telling in his work as the College of Engineering's Pre-Healthcare Coach: students regularly include their BE 1251 and BE 2350 final projects in medical and dental school personal statements—not because they were told to, but because the work meant something to them.
That may be the truest measure of what Nick has built in the College of Engineering: courses where students leave with proof that their work can matter to a community, communicated in their own voice.
About the Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award
The Lillian Bridwell-Bowles Innovative C-I Teacher Award recognizes, inspires, and continues to support innovation in C-I course/assignment design, teaching, assessment/feedback practices, classroom management, and teaching productivity/efficiency/effectiveness. Any LSU faculty member—tenured, tenure-track, or non-tenure track, full or part-time—who has taught a certified C-I course within the past three semesters and has not previously received this award is eligible. Recipients receive a $500 award. This award is named in honor of Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, an internationally recognized scholar of communication-intensive pedagogy and the founder of LSU’s Communication across the Curriculum program.