Gabriella Coloyan Fleming

Research Interests

• Servingness in engineering
• Assets-based teaching and learning
• DEI topics in graduate education, faculty hiring and retention, and career pathways
• Natural language processing and generative AI as qualitative research methods
• Engineering study abroad
• Semiconductor and quantum science/ engineering workforce development

Research Statement

I conduct research at the intersection of undergraduate and graduate education, career pathways, and equity, focusing on students themselves and the people, practices, and policies that impact them. I approach this research from two lenses. First, I see research and practice as integrated: a closed feedback loop in which each informs the other. Second, servingness is the overarching goal of my research. I seek to investigate and implement ways that faculty, staff, and institutions can create environments for engineering students to thrive.

Biography

Gabriella Coloyan Fleming is a research scientist in Virginia Tech’s Department of Engineering Education. She holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. After completing her PhD in the experimental characterization of the thermal properties of nanomaterials, she moved into engineering education as a researcher-practitioner. She has worked as a program manager at the University of Michigan’s Center for Engineering Diversity and Outreach, a postdoc in Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin, and the director of and research associate in the Center for Equity in Engineering at UT Austin.

Professional Affiliations

• American Society for Engineering Education

Awards and Honors

• Apprentice Faculty Grant Award, American Society for Engineering Education, Educational Research and Methods Division (2024)
• Honorable Mention, William Elgin Wickenden Award of the American Society for Engineering Education (2024)
• Best Mentor Award, NASCENT ERC Research Experience for Teachers (RET) Program (2016)

Research Grants 

• National Science Foundation Learning to Serve: A Center for Equity in Engineering at an Emerging MSI (EEC-2217741); $1,193,572; 09/2022-08/2024; Co-PI | Abstract
• University of Texas at Austin Evaluation of the Provost’s Faculty Search Committee Workshop; $10,000; 01/2022-12/2022; Co-PI
• University of Texas at Austin NASCENT ERC Postdoctoral Fellowship; $155,000; 05/2021-04/2023; PI

Journal Publications

Katz, A., Fleming, G. C., & Main, J. (2024). Thematic Analysis with Open-Source Generative AI and Machine Learning: A New Method for Inductive Qualitative Codebook Development. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.03721.

Fleming, G. C., Klopfer, M., Katz, A., & Knight, D. (2024). What engineering employers want: An analysis of technical and professional skills in engineering job advertisements. Journal of Engineering Education.

Haines, C., Bortz, W. W., Fleming, G. C., Knight, D. B., Borrego, M., Denton, M., Chasen, A. & Alsharif, A. (2024). STEM program leaders’ strategies to diversify the doctoral student population: Incongruence with student priorities. Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 30.

Fleming, G. C., Hunt, G., Watson, D., Mastronardi, M., You, S., Contreras, L., Borrego, M. & Smith, M. J. (2023). A New Hybrid Model for Faculty Hiring Workshops. Journal of STEM Education: Innovations and Research 24, no. 1 (2023).

Cosgriff-Hernandez, E. M., Aguado, B. A., Akpa, B., Fleming, G. C., Moore, E., Porras, A. M., Boyle, P., Chan, D., Chesler, N., Christman, K., Desai, T., Harley, B., Hudalla, G., Killian, M., Maisel, K., Maitlan, Peyton, S., Pruitt, B., Stabenfeldt, S., Stevens, K., & Bowden, A. K. (2023). Equitable hiring strategies towards a diversified faculty. Nature biomedical engineering, 7(8), 961-968.

Fleming, G. C., Patrick, A. D., Grote, D., Denton, M., Knight, D., Lee, W., Borrego, M., & Murzi, H. (2023). The fallacy of “there are no candidates”: Institutional pathways of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino doctorate earners. Journal of Engineering Education, 112(1), 170-194.

Sokalski, P., Han, Z., Fleming, G. C., Smith, B., Sullivan, S. E., Huang, R., Ruan, X., & Shi, L. (2022). Effects of hot phonons and thermal stress in micro-Raman spectra of molybdenum disulfide. Applied Physics Letters, 121(18).

Smith, B.*, Fleming, G.*, Parrish, K. D., Wen, F., Fleming, E., Jarvis, K., .Tutuc, E., McGaughey, A., & Shi, L. (2020). Mean free path suppression of low-frequency phonons in SiGe nanowires. Nano Letters, 20(11), 8384-8391. *Authors contributed equally to this work

Coloyan, G., Cultrara, N. D., Katre, A., Carrete, J., Heine, M., Ou, E., Kim, J., Jiang, S., Lindsay, L., Mingo, N., Broido, D., Heremans, J., Goldberger, J., & Shi, L. (2016). Basal-plane thermal conductivity of nanocrystalline and amorphized thin germanane. Applied Physics Letters, 109(13).

Conference and Workshop Papers

 Fleming, G. C., Fernandez, K., Julien, C. The Impact of Engineering Summer Camp Counseling on Students' Community Cultural Wealth and Engineering Identities. In 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

Fleming, G. C., Deters, J., Denton, M. Teaching Equity through Assets-Based Journaling: Using Community Cultural Wealth to Guide Student Reflections. In 2024 CoNECD (Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity).

Fleming, G. C., Fernandez, K. E., Julien, C., & Mastronardi, M. (2023, June). Evaluation of Summer Camp Recruitment Methods and Campers’ Perceptions of Engineering (Evaluation, Diversity). In 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

Fleming, G. C. (2023). Lessons Learned: Faculty Search Committees’ Attitudes Towards and Against Rubrics. In 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.

Knight, D. B., Grote, D. M., Alsharif, A. M., Borrego, M. J., Patrick, A., Denton, M., Fleming, G. C., Lee, W., & Murzi, H. (2022, February). Inequities in “Stuckness”: Exploring mobility patterns to higher ranked institutions from undergraduate to graduate school based on students’ race/ethnicity and first generation in college status. In 2022 CoNECD (Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity).

Hu, L., Chen, H., Coloyan, G., & McGaughey, A. J. (2012, March). Phonon Transport in Carbon Nanotube Aerogels. In International Conference on Micro/Nanoscale Heat Transfer (Vol. 54778, pp. 555-558). American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Book Chapter

Fleming, G. C., Borrego, M., & Knight, D. (2023). Engineering graduate education in the United States. In International Handbook of Engineering Education Research (pp. 263-285). Routledge.