Board Profile
Reform Driver
P. K. Imbrie got his first taste of engineering education research while a grad student in aerospace engineering in the late 1990s. He was part of a team that revamped the first-year curriculum at Texas A&M University with projects aimed, first, at getting students to think like engineers and, second, to apply all they’d learned in the preceding months. “This stuff is hard to do—much harder than technical research,” he recalls thinking. Aerospace had tools and measurements that could tell him when, for instance, a metal had reached 100 degrees. But “you don’t have the same level of control with people.”
That hooked him. While Imbrie went on to teach and conduct research in aeronautics, his career has given equal or greater billing to the field of engineering education. He searches for instruments to assess how students learn that are just as valid and reliable as those he might use to gauge stress in ceramics—and then applies that knowledge. At Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education, he developed a learning laboratory with design, innovation, prototyping, and demonstration studios where first-year students tackle authentic societal problems. Returning to his alma mater, he helped design Texas A&M’s new 550,000-square-foot undergraduate engineering complex—the biggest academic building in the state—all configured to foster collaboration among faculty and students.
Finding that transfer students graduate at higher rates than first-time, full-time undergraduates, he helped develop seamless pathways into four-year Texas A&M engineering programs for community college students. Now, as a professor and department head of engineering education at the University of Cincinnati, he’s working on similar relationships with three nearby community colleges that have significant minority enrollment. He is also building a graduate program.
Along the way, Imbrie has broken research ground, challenging conventional assessments of student ability and exposing flaws in university policies. One study, conducted at Purdue with Beth Holloway, Teri Reed (a fellow ASEE board member who is married to Imbrie), and Kenneth Reid of Virginia Tech, documented bias against women in admission to engineering and prompted a policy change at the university. Published in the Journal of Engineering Education, it won the 2015 Wickenden Prize. Another study, which won the 2014 Best Paper Award from ASEE’s Educational Research and Methods Division, refined the Student Attitudinal Success Inventory to keep only the most effective questions in predicting students’ performance and persistence in engineering.
Imbrie sees a need for researchers to adopt a common vocabulary—there are various names for project-based learning, for example—and he worries that “we’re now not pushing ourselves down a systematic pathway. We keep reinventing the wheel.” Researchers should also learn “how to write so it’s accessible to all engineering educators,” he says. The overriding point is to narrow the gap between how engineering is commonly taught and what students need. Imbrie has a ready platform for reform ideas in ASEE, where he represents Professional Interest Council III on the Board of Directors. An archive search shows Imbrie’s name on no fewer than 114 Annual Conference proceedings.
Obituary
Lester Gerhardt; Lamme Award Medalist
Lester A. Gerhardt, an ASEE life member and a professor emeritus of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, died September 20, 2018.
Gerhardt received ASEE’s Benjamin Garver Lamme Award and Medal in 2012 for his “combined contributions to the art of teaching, contributions to research and technical literature, and achievements that contribute to the advancement of the profession and of engineering college administration.” He was also the first recipient of the ASEE Research Administration Award.
A specialist in digital signal processing, emphasizing image and speech processing and brain-computer interfacing, he held joint appointments in the ECSE and computer science departments at RPI, where his 45-year career combined teaching, research, and administration. He was also a strong proponent of international education. In 1995, he co-founded the Global Engineering Education Exchange program, run by the Institute of International Education, and was one of the 19 original framers of the Newport Declaration, which called for integrating global education into the U.S. engineering curriculum.
Call for Board Candidates
The ASEE Nominating Committee, chaired by Most Immediate Past President Bevlee Watford, requests member participation in nominating candidates for the 2020 ASEE Board election. Board positions to be nominated are: President-Elect; Vice President, Member Affairs; Chairs of Professional Interest Councils II and III; and Chairs of the Council of Sections for Zones I and III.
- All nominees must be individual members or institutional member representatives of ASEE at the time of nomination and must maintain ASEE membership during their term of office. Nominating Committee members are not eligible for nomination.
- Candidates for President-Elect must be active members who have served or are serving on the Board of Directors. Because ASEE is a Department of Defense contractor, candidates for President-Elect must currently be U.S. citizens and undergo a security clearance. The nominees for Vice President, Member Affairs shall be chosen from those who have served as Zone Chairs.
- Candidates for Chair-Elect for Zone I and Zone III will be selected by their members of their respective Sections, as the ASEE Constitution stipulates.
- Each proposed candidate for a Society-wide office should submit a first-person biographical sketch of fewer than 400 words that documents career contributions, ASEE offices held, awards and recognitions received, and educational background. Include comments on leadership qualities, ability to collaborate with others to achieve objectives, and willingness to serve if elected. Self-nominations are accepted. For nominations for the office of President-Elect, please include a statement summarizing why you think your nominee is a good candidate for the position. A listing of members who meet constitutional eligibility requirements for the offices of President-Elect and Vice President, Member Affairs is available from the executive director’s office at ASEE headquarters.
Nominations will be accepted electronically at s.nguyen-fawley@asee.org. Please include a subject line that begins with the words “2020 Nomination” so that it can be forwarded to the Nominating Committee. Please be assured that your nominations are confidential and will be seen only by the assistant secretary of the Board and members of the Nominating Committee. The deadline to submit nominations is June 1, 2019.
Nominations postmarked by June 1, 2019, will also be accepted by mail. Please mark the envelope CONFIDENTIAL and address it to Bevlee Watford, Chair, ASEE Nominating Committee, ASEE, 1818 N Street, N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036.