Sumudu Lewis, director of the university’s UTeach program. (Photo courtesy Edward Brennen for UMass Lowell)
LOWELL – A UMass Lowell professor who prepares students to pursue teaching careers has been recognized for her exemplary work with one of the University of Massachusetts system’s highest honors.
Sumudu Lewis, a clinical professor in the university’s School of Education, is a 2026 recipient of the Manning Prize for Excellence in Teaching, an honor awarded to an outstanding faculty member from each of the UMass system’s campuses in Lowell, Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth and Worcester.
Lewis leads UMass Lowell’s UTeach program. The initiative, part of the national UTeach network, offers an academic minor to prepare students majoring in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields to become middle- and high-school teachers in those disciplines.
Beyond UTeach, Lewis teaches introductory chemistry, trains students who serve as UMass Lowell learning assistants and leads workshops in the university’s Research Academics and Mentoring Pathways (RAMP) program, a summer early enrollment and skill-building initiative for incoming, first-year engineering students.
This year, Lewis helped to organize UMass Lowell’s first Women and Girls in STEM Day, bringing more than 100 students from area high schools to campus to learn from women professors and graduate students. She also conducts workshops for middle school teachers through the National Math and Science Initiative.
Lewis learned she was one of this year’s Manning Prize recipients on her birthday.
“It came as a real surprise – It was a wonderful birthday,” she said.
The award is named in honor of UMass Lowell alumni Robert Manning ’84, ’11(H) a former chairman of the UMass Board of Trustees, and Donna Manning ’85, ’91, ’11(H), who established the prize in 2016.
“Sumudu is a teacher’s teacher. She gives herself to students with full heart and devotion to the UTeach program,” said UMass Lowell Art and Design Associate Professor Karen Roehr, who nominated Lewis for the award along with UMass Lowell Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Kavitha Chandra.
“Alums from UTeach credit her passion for teaching with igniting their own,” Roehr added. “Many K-12 teachers stand on her strong, STEM-ed teaching shoulders. Sumudu is also a generous and collaborative colleague.”
Lewis said she strives to inspire her students with the same kind of inquiry-based teaching and learning that captured her imagination when she was 13 years old. That’s when Lewis, whose family had emigrated from Sri Lanka to England when she was 8, fell in love with chemistry.
“My parents got me a chemistry set, and I started mixing things. I really liked how science explained a lot of things I was curious about. And when you have an explanation, it’s very satisfying,” she said.
Lewis double-majored in biology and chemistry at the University of England, then completed a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Sussex.
When she began teaching as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bangor in North Wales, she realized that being in the classroom allowed her to share her love of science.
After 10 years of teaching chemistry in London high schools, Lewis came to UMass Lowell in 2009 and worked as a teaching assistant while earning a UMass Lowell doctorate in education in 2015. Partway through her degree program, she was hired as a master teacher for the UTeach program and became its director in 2012.
