Rate My Professor James Salamay

James Salamy is a Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University. He earned a Doctorate by Research in Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering. In his role, he serves as Deputy Director of Education for second-year students in the department and teaches units including ECE2071 - Computer Organisation and Programming and ECE2072 - Digital Systems. Salamy's teaching philosophy centers on shifting from traditional closed-ended tasks to open-ended, real-world scenarios that foster creativity, initiative, collaboration, and resilience. By encouraging exploration, failure, and iteration, he builds students' confidence alongside technical competence, preparing them for complex professional challenges. His programmatic teaching model, which integrates authentic team-based tasks with scalable feedback systems, has been adopted as a blueprint for curriculum redesign across the Faculty of Engineering and has received praise from students, academics, and industry for effectively developing essential skills.

Salamy's research interests encompass photonics, particularly laser stability and wavelength division multiplexing, as well as engineering education and student success factors. Notable publications include 'Enhancing laser temperature stability by passive self-injection locking to a microring resonator' (Optics Express, 2024), 'Self-Locking of Free-Running DFB Lasers to a Single Microring Resonator for Dense WDM' (Journal of Lightwave Technology, 2025; also presented at OFC 2024), 'Network Requirements for Distributed Machine Learning Training in the Cloud' (2022), 'Leveraging machine learning for insights into engineering course design' (2024), and ''P’s Get Degrees': Exploring First-Year Engineering Students’ Perceptions and Experiences of Failure' (2023). He is Primary Chief Investigator on the project 'Tackling the challenges of large-scale education at Monash and Warwick: Validating a novel system for scalable, automated feedback to enhance engagement' (2025-2026) and Chief Investigator on 'Cross Campus Peer Instructions: Unraveling Misconceptions in Information Engineering' (2025-2026). For his contributions to education, Salamy received the Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence Award for Educational Leadership and the Dean’s Excellence Award for Educational Leadership in 2025.