Virginia Tech Engineering Education

A major event on our departmental calendar is our social event at the ASEE conference where we connect with our alumni and collaborators - this year the gorgeous Portland weather played along swimmingly!!

We're 20! Celebrating 20 years of impact through Virginia Tech's Department of Engineering Education with faculty, graduate students and alumni at the ASEE conference!

Well done, Dr. Katz - this is indeed a great achievement to get this support for your grounding-breaking with generative AI!

We are thrilled to be able to share the news that Dr. Nicole Pitterson has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure! Very very well deserved for all the excellent research, teaching and service contributions Nicole makes to our department, our college, our university and to our field!!

Introducing our Ph.D. Fall 24 Intake! Benjamin Chaback holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and a M.S. in Systems Engineering, both from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He served as the Program Coordinator for Undergraduate Research at Embry-Riddle from July 2022 to July 2024. He is interested in studying how we can use undergraduate research experiences to further student learning outcomes, and desires to work with big data and to integrate systems thinking into the design of these programs. He grew up in Bergen, New York (near Rochester).

Introducing Our Ph.D. Fall 24 Intake! Kylee Shiekh has a B.S. in Computational Applied Mathematics, and a M.S. in Quantum Software Engineering, both from the Colorado School of Mines. Her experience at Mines as an engineering student led her to think more critically about the classroom. She's interested in working on broadening participation in engineering, and studying how values are communicated to engineers. Home for Kylee is where her family is, which is currently Colorado, Italy and England.

Great to see Engineering Education faculty Drs. Qin Zhu and Dayoung Kim as co-PIs with VT Computer Science faculty Dr. Hoda Eldardiry as PI on this $349k grant just awarded by the NSF to research how engineering education can better nurture socially responsible AI engineers. Important work and we look forward to seeing the findings that will emerge from this project!

Opportunity to join an amazing team of Academic and Career Advisors in a leading Engineering Education department! Our Advisors play a key role in supporting first year students in our General Engineering program - and are a lively fun bunch! All details here; review date is end of this month.

We have another doctor in the house! Congratulations to Dr. Malle Schilling for the successful defense of her dissertation, entitled "Understanding Place and Rurality in Engineering Education through Pathways and Engagement". So important to have this study that focuses on the region in which we are located, South West Virginia. Dr. Schilling's mixed method study both used quantitative data from the Virginia Longitudinal Data System to analyze high school students' post-secondary pathways, and coupled this with a qualitative study with engineering professionals working in this area. A superb study bringing forward important details on rurality and spatial justice in relation to engineering careers, and with important implications outlined. Well done, Malle! Malle was advised by Dr. Jake Grohs, and also serving on her committee were Drs. Marie Paretti, Amy Azano and David Knight. She was supported to do this work with the award of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

It's a wonderful season of Ph.D. defenses in our Department! Last week we were also delighted to see Dr. Crystal M. Pee defend her Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Countering the John Henryism Narrative: A Case Study to Explore how Black Engineers Respond to Working Conditions". Well done Dr. Pee on adding to the limited literature we have so far on early-career engineers, and especially on Black engineers in the USA - with a most thought-provoking and creative study. Crystal has been advised by Dr. Walter Lee, and is supported further by a committee comprising Drs. Jake Grohs, Susan Sajadi and Donna Ratcliffe. Nice work!!