Dr. Georgios Boumis
Title: Assistant Professor of Coastal Engineering and Infrastructure Resilience.
Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering / Maine Sea Grant
How long have you been teaching? Since 2025
How long have you been at UMaine? A little bit more than a year!
SEATLE Award for: “The Future Ready Redesign”
Meet Georgios
Courses you Teach
CIE 115: “Computers in Civil Engineering” & CIE 598: “Data Analytics for Coastal Systems”.
Tell us a bit about you
If your teaching (or research) had a theme song, what would it be?
Gymnopédie No. 1 by Erik Satie, meaning methodical… not boring! 🙂
What’s a surprising fact most people don’t know about you?
I’m a certified sailing yacht skipper!
What’s something you have always wanted to learn, but haven’t yet?
I’ve always wanted to learn to play the piano!
What’s something you would secretly love to teach, even if it has nothing to do with your field?
Most likely a class on “Elements of Harmony” and the connection between music and math.
What historical figure would you most like to co-teach a course with?
Euclid, the father of geometry!
What’s something you’d walk across campus in a snowstorm for?
A Diet Coke. (unfortunately)
Tell us a bit about your approach to teaching
How would you describe what you feel to be meaningful changes to your course design or approaches to teaching that have emerged as you have grown as an instructor?
Through my work with CITL, I’ve tried to shape the course I was co-teaching (CIE 115) to embrace the use of AI in a meaningful way, rather than treat it as something to avoid or condemn. With this redesign in mind, I’ve tried to shift students’ focus more toward analytical thinking, rather than simply identifying and using the right computational tool.
How would you describe the impact of these changes on the students in your classes?
While it may have seemed at first that students were finding the material more difficult, I believe this new course approach actually created space for deeper, more meaningful engagement. I think this showed up in the thoughtful and substantive questions students were asking.
What would be a piece of advice you might give a new instructor at UMaine?
Something I learned as a new instructor myself: you’re not going to nail the perfect class design right away, and I guess that’s completely normal. Go easy on yourself when things don’t go as planned.