Engineering Education Transformations Institute

This week’s seminar speaker is Dr. Ai-Chu Elisha Ding!

Dr. Ding teaches graduate courses for the Learning Design and Technology program. Her research examines the innovative and equitable technology integration and professional development in K-12 education. Specifically, she has focused on supporting multilingual learners (MLs) and struggling learners in STEM education through innovative technologies and pedagogies such as virtual reality (VR), game-based learning (GBL), and artificial intelligence (AI). She is specifically interested in looking into the multimodal and translanguaging affordances of emerging technologies for supporting MLs. She has also worked closely with both pre-service and in-service teachers on their professional development and technology integration. Her past grant project sponsored by the Indiana Department of Education provide support to middle school STEAM teachers on designing and incorporating GBL along with using VR and block programming to enhance student collaboration and multimodal meaning making. She is currently the chair of the Technology as Agent of Change for Teaching and Learning (TACTL) SIG for the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

This week’s seminar speaker is our very own Dr. Julie P. Martin!

Julie P. Martin, PhD, FASEE, is the director of the University of Georgia’s Engineering Education Transformations Institute and a professor of engineering education. Dr. Martin is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, where her vision is to create a culture of constructive review for academic publishing. From 2017-2019, Dr. Martin served as a National Science Foundation program director in the Engineering Education and Centers Division. In 2018, she represented the NSF on an interagency working group headed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to write the federal government’s 5-Year STEM Education Strategic Plan. She is well known for her scholarship on diversity, equity, and inclusion, which expands the engineering education community’s capacity to solve persistent challenges in broadening participation by elevating the experiences, assets, and voices of traditionally marginalized groups. Dr. Martin has held a variety of national leadership positions in the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) and Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN), including national president of WEPAN. She is a Fellow of ASEE and a member of ASEE’s Hall of Fame. She holds a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s in the same field from North Carolina State. For more about Dr. Martin’s work, please visit her website at juliepmartin.com.

Interested in a Ph.D. in Engineering Education? Want to learn more about what that looks like at the University of Georgia? Then join us on October 20th @ 3:30PM for our virtual open house!

Scan/press and hold the QR code for the link or click here: https://linktr.ee/eetiuga

Join us on September 22nd at 3PM in Driftmier 1240 as we learn more about the interview quality reflection tool (IQRT)!

Dillon Seward, a new student working with Dr. James Huff, received the Presidential Graduate Fellow award! It is the University’s most prestigious fellowship award for incoming doctoral students.

This week we’re welcoming Dr. Krishna Pakala!

Krishna Pakala, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering (MBE) at Boise State University. He currently serves as the inaugural Graduate Mentoring & Advising Faculty Fellow for Faculty Development in the Graduate College and as the Dean’s Fellow for ABET Accreditation in the College of Engineering.

An award-winning educator, Dr. Pakala has taught more than 60 courses and 2,500 students and has received honors including the 2023 ASEE National Outstanding Teaching Award, ASEE Mechanical Engineering Division Outstanding New Educator Award, Boise State Foundation Excellence Award, David S. Taylor Service to Students Award, and multiple Golden Apple Awards. He is a past Chair and current Campus Representative for the ASEE Pacific Northwest Section.

Dr. Pakala’s scholarly interests center on innovative teaching and learning, emerging technologies, storytelling, STEM identity, student belonging, and graduate education. He has secured more than $16 million in external funding, including leading an NSF Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program project focused on developing K–12 STEM teacher leaders in microelectronics and semiconductor education. He has mentored graduate and undergraduate researchers, peer educators, and student leaders and serves on the Board of Directors for The Story Collider, a national nonprofit dedicated to elevating true, personal stories about science.

Congratulations to Dr. Martin for her NSF grant - Collaborative Research: Toward Curricular Integration Leveraging Students Community Cultural Wealth in an Engineering Design Context (NSF Award: 2603158)

Congratulations to Drs. Figard and Huff for their NSF grant - Investigating Memorable Messaging Across Undergraduate Engineering Pathways (NSF Award: 2556091)

Happy Fall Semester Bulldogs!

Welcome back to our returning students and welcome to Athens for our new students!

Congratulations to Dr. SJ Bork for her NSF grant - Collaborative Research: Mental Health Care Pathways: Examining Help Seeking Behaviors in Engineering Graduate Students (NSF Award: 2556258)