UT Dallas chemistry instructor who teaches courses on honeybees and Minecraft wins UT System's top teaching award

A UT Dallas instructor known on campus for teaching organic chemistry to rooms of 150 premed students, and for running the university's beehives, has received the University of Texas System's highest teaching honor.

Dr. Christina Thompson, who teaches in the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College with the title professor of instruction, is among 12 faculty members chosen for the 2026 Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award, the university announced Friday. The winners come from the system's 13 academic and health institutions and will be honored when the regents meet this month.

The regents created the award in 2008. Peer faculty and outside reviewers pick recipients after weighing classroom skill, the quality of their curricula, new course development and how much students learn, according to UT Dallas.

From drug design to the lecture hall

Thompson worked in drug design at Abbott Laboratories for four years before joining UT Dallas, the university said. She moved to Richardson after her husband, chemistry and biochemistry professor Dr. Ronald Smaldone, was hired by the university.

She told the university she uses that industry background to hold students' attention. "As a medical chemist, I can tell the students about how the reactions are used to develop a certain drug," she said. "You can feel the shift in the room."

Besides organic chemistry, she has built most of her Honors College courses herself, on subjects ranging from science fiction and Minecraft to honeybees and the science of cooking. She also directs the campus apiary program, which cares for roughly 500,000 bees and supports the school's Bee Campus USA affiliation.

Dr. Donal Skinner, dean of the Honors College, said in the announcement that Thompson is a co-author on 18 peer-reviewed papers, many of them written with undergraduates, even though her job carries no formal research requirement. "She doesn't just teach scientific inquiry; she models it," he said.

Thompson won a UT Dallas President's Teaching Excellence Award in Undergraduate Education in 2024. Her bachelor's degree in chemistry is from Texas A&M, and her chemistry Ph.D. is from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

She said office hours are where much of the work happens. "Every semester, I have two dozen students who are at office hours all the time," she said.

Sources

news.utdallas.edu