News

This year I completed my first teaching certificate through the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the University of Illinois.  Throughout the year, I attended seminars, collected feedback from my students, and had someone observe my teaching.  I wrote reflective essays on the entire process as well.  I learned a lot while completing the requirements of this certificate.  Many of the lessons I was able to apply right away as a teaching assistant, however other lessons I have made note of for future classes that I teach.

List of all recipients

Each year the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education (AE3) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers Grants for the Advancement of Teaching Engineering (GATE).  Professor Sreenivas (my advisor) and I were awarded funding use the GE320 laboratory kit in the fall semester of 2014.

This will give us the opportunity to conduct a quasi-experiment in GE320 laboratory sections this fall.  The control group will be four of the scheduled lab sections of GE320 in the fall semester of 2014.  These sections will use the lab equipment that is currently being used in the course.  The subject group will be the remaining three of the laboratory sections.  These sections will use a laboratory kit instead of the existing equipment.  Even though the kit is designed to be portable, in this study the kit will be used during schedule laboratory sessions in the same room as the other sections.  The laboratory experiments in this course are designed to reinforce topics learned in lecture and give students the opportunity to practice what they have learned.  I will measure how well each group achieves the course objectives to ensure the kit helps the students at least as well as the existing equipment before proceeding with further development of the kit.

All GATE recipients for the 2014-15 school year

This year I applied to the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.  I received an honorable mention in the field of engineering education.  The reviewers provided some very positive and supportive comments on my research proposal. 

News story on Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering website

All 2014 awardees

My first peer-reviewed publication will be a poster at this summer’s American Society of Engineering Education Annual conference in Indianapolis, Indiana.  The poster covers the content and development of the GE320 kit.

I am pleased to be named as one of this year’s Society of Women Engineer’s New Faces of Engineering. An amazing group of women, including Rachel Morford, Brianne Wilburne, Allison Tuff Mjoen, and Jennifer Vallero, are also recognized with this honor.