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Research

Our Active Research Grants

Whether developing a center for equity in graduate education; discovering natural language processing; or even developing a compassionate community of scholar practictioners, our faculty have received funding for a wide variety of research areas. View our portfolio!

Our Research Areas

Our department research is organized into four overaching areas: teaching and learning; organization and systems; ethics and social responsibility; and equity and culture. Each of our 17 tenured/tenure-track faculty specializes in various issues, from socio-technical decisions and pedagogical issues to educational inequities and cultural responsiveness.

We explore pedagogical issues (e.g., topics related to teaching, learning, and assessment) and associated psychological processes in both curricular and co-curricular settings. This work often focuses on topics such as conceptual understanding, design thinking, creativity, psychological safety, motivation, individual career pathways, and professional identity formation.

We examine interpersonal interactions and organizational issues that occur within and across systems in both academia and industry. This work often focuses on the alignment within and across educational and workplace systems; workforce development & professional skills; integrative and interdisciplinary collaborative processes; community engagement; and educational networks and outreach.

We investigate the decision-making of engineers, factors influencing those decisions, and the consequences of those decisions throughout engineering and engineering education. This work often focuses on topics such as ethics and moral reasoning; sociotechnical thinking and problem-solving; design and innovation; and regulation and policies.

We analyze policies, practices, and the experiences of specific subpopulations within and across educational and workplace environments. This work often focuses on addressing educational inequities, promoting cultural responsiveness, and critiquing engineering culture.