Title of Keynote lecture: Reflections on Change in Engineering Education

Abstract: When, why, and how does engineering education change? Grounding these questions in the context of broader frameworks, I will reflect on some of my personal experiences with change in engineering education: the founding, with Ed Coyle and Hank Dietz, of EPICS – Engineering Projects in Community Service (1995); co-leading, with Jack Lohmann, the ASEE report Innovation with Impact: Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering Education (2012); a long engagement with the public awareness, appreciation, and understanding of engineering, including IEEE’s Envisioned Future and the launch of IEEE’s Public Visibility Committee (2007), and involvement with the NAE report Changing the Conversation: Developing Effective Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering (2008); and championing the growth of engineering education as a discipline in its own right. I will pose (and sometimes answer) questions including “What drove change? What deterred change?  What enabled change?”

Bio: Leah Jamieson is Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, Professor by courtesy in Purdue’s School of Engineering Education, and John Edwardson Dean Emerita of Engineering. She is co-founder and past director of the Engineering Projects in Community Service – EPICS – program, for which she was a co-recipient of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. She was 2007 president of the IEEE, recently served as chair of the NSF Engineering Directorate’s Advisory Committee, as co-chair of the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, and is currently co-organizer of the Women of NAE (National Academy of Engineering) activities. Her service on report committees includes the steering committee for the NAE report Changing the Conversation: Developing Effective Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering (2008) and co-chair, with Jack Lohmann, of the ASEE report Innovation with Impact: Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering Education (2012).

Jamieson is a member of the NAE and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a Fellow of IEEE and ASEE. She holds a BS mathematics from MIT, a PhD in EECS from Princeton, and has been awarded honorary doctorates from Drexel and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.