Even though it’s quite a few years since 2005, when Jakob Arendt Rasmussen was a second-year PhD scholar of Physics at iNANO, he still clearly remembers being taught an autumn semester of quantum mechanics by Brian Bech Nielsen.

“He was really lively, and teachers like Brian who sometimes break out into song are never boring. He was always in good spirits, knowing that the subject he taught was highly abstract.”

After the breaks Bech Nielsen sometimes started a new session by shouting the words: “I feel good!”

“This was a great way to grab our attention and call us to order,” explains Jakob Arendt Rasmussen. He also describes Bech Nielsen as “a great communicator” and a very pleasant person.

“You have to actually BE Brian to lecture in his own particular style,” he concludes.

A teacher who cared

The fact that Bech Nielsen wasn’t afraid to break out into song in the middle of a lecture is confirmed by Jens Holbech, who is now a senior consultant at the dean’s office of Science & Technology.

“He sometimes sang a whole song a cappella. We loved it – and he actually has a really good voice!”

Jens Holbech was taught solid state physics by Brian Bech Nielsen back in the 1990s, and he also describes him as a teacher who cared.

“If anyone was absent from his lectures a couple of times in a row, he sometimes asked them in the break whether they were doing alright, or whether they needed any help.”

“I also remember him as a hugely enthusiastic and ambitious teacher who was always well prepared and very anxious that we should get something out of his lectures. He was a good communicator, you could sense that he’d thought a lot about the best way of presenting his material, and he’d clearly used the experiences and feedback gained from previous lectures. He dared to show us who he was, so we got an impression of the man behind the teacher’s mask.”