Educator of the Year

At Grammarly, we believe that better communication has the power to change lives. That belief lives in our products, our mission, and now, in a new program designed to honor the teachers who bring it into the classroom every day. The Grammarly Educator of the Year Award was built around a simple idea: The students know best. So we let them lead the nominations. Students submit short videos sharing how a professor has shaped their academic journey and changed the way they write, communicate, or think about technology. The voices of learners are at the center of the process from start to finish.

We’re proud to announce our inaugural winner, Dr. Humberto López Castillo, Professor of Public Health at the University of Central Florida.

It Started With a Student

Dr. López Castillo was nominated by Vardhan Avaradi, one of his students at UCF, who highlighted how he pushed him to “redefine his language to be precise yet accessible.” That phrase stayed with our judges because it captures something most educators spend entire careers trying to teach.

His story is as rich as his teaching. Born and raised in Panama, Dr. López Castillo is a practicing pediatrician, a four-language polyglot, and a public health researcher who came to academia through medicine, translation work, and a deep conviction that teamwork and community are at the heart of everything worth doing. His mantra is “we work on the individual, but also on communities.”

Meet Your Audience Where They’re At

Walk into Dr. López Castillo’s classroom, and you will not find students writing only for their academic peers. One of his popular assignments asks students to take a complex public health topic and translate it for a completely different audience. The results speak for themselves: storybooks explaining mosquitoes to kindergarteners, Monopoly-style board games about life with HIV, rap songs about tuberculosis, and podcasts that make epidemiology feel personal.

The assignment is rooted in a truth he learned as a pediatrician: The way you explain something to a child is completely different from how you explain it to a parent, which is different again from how you present it at a conference. Dr. López Castillo brings that same instinct into every classroom, and his students carry it with them long after they graduate.

The Calculator Rule

Dr. López Castillo encourages his students to use AI, but he is clear about how human judgment is essential.

When a student submitted an early draft that included citations for research that did not exist, generated by an AI tool, Dr. López Castillo did not penalize him. He used it as a teaching moment. Get the first draft from a prompt, he said. Then read through it. Check your sources. Think about what you are actually reading. The human element, in his view, is your superpower.

He compares AI to the calculator: a powerful tool, but it’s only as useful as the critical thinker behind it. That philosophy shapes real research. He and Vardhan are currently working on a machine learning project using the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us dataset, a database of nearly 1 million de-identified health records, exploring how AI models can classify populations and predict risk. It is exactly the kind of boundary-pushing, human-guided work that defines what responsible AI in education should look like.

Beyond the Classroom

Dr. López Castillo’s students leave his classroom as better writers, sharper thinkers, and more confident communicators. They write for audiences beyond their academic peers. They think critically as they collaborate with AI. They give a voice to millions.

They are proof that the future of education is not just about adopting new tools. It is about teaching students to use them wisely, communicate with purpose, and never lose sight of the people they are ultimately trying to reach. That is what great educators like Dr. López Castillo make possible, one student at a time.