Program Development

For more than two decades, I’ve designed and built educational programs, at Olin College and with universities and organizations around the world. My work focuses on curricula, faculty development, and partnerships that bring people together across disciplines and communities.

With Olin colleagues, I’ve led workshops and coaching conversations at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia on teamwork, assessment, institutional culture, interdisciplinarity, and entrepreneurial thinking. I’ve done the same at Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS in Malaysia, supporting a new integrated engineering program grounded in the liberal arts. At Fulbright University Vietnam, Ela Ben-Ur and I taught an intensive version of our course Engineering for Humanity to blended teams of students and faculty, ran workshops for faculty and staff, and coached faculty on program design. I’ve served as a coach for MIT’s IDEAS program, a year-long cross-sector leadership program built on Otto Scharmer’s Theory U. I serve on the advisory board of the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Innovation & Change.

I design and lead workshops for academic and public audiences, such as:

• community partnerships on aging, for Oxford Brookes University and the British Society of Gerontology, and at the Massachusetts Councils on Aging annual conference

• who gets to design AI, at the MIT Museum and SXSW EDU

• entrepreneurial mindsets and project-based learning, at US and European conferences

I’ve also contributed to national and international conversations about the purposes of engineering education. Examples of this work include participation in a Teagle Foundation initiative integrating STEM and the liberal arts, Engineering4Society at KU Leuven, and the Fetzer Institute’s convening on the social role of engineering. I also gave opening remarks at a National Academies forum on educating health professionals for an aging population, together with an older adult community partner and Olin students.

At Olin

I’ve been building programs since I arrived at Olin, before the college had graduates or accreditation. I co-created lasting parts of the curriculum:

• The Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences program, and its capstone course.

• Products and Markets, a required foundational course in entrepreneurial thinking.

• Engineering for Humanity, a design-for-aging service-learning course that pairs students with older adults. We’ve offered it for more than a decade, and it was the basis of a workshop for the board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Much of this work has focused on faculty. I led two Davis Educational Foundation grants for faculty development. I helped lead a community-oriented redesign of faculty development and assessment, published in the ASEE’s journal Advances in Engineering Education. As Dean of Faculty, I led faculty hiring and development across disciplines. I direct an NEH grant for faculty workshops integrating the humanities and STEM around AI and climate change. I also helped build a community of practice for faculty moving into new research areas, and I served on Olin’s AI working group. I coach in Olin’s Summer Studio, where teams from other institutions spend a week advancing their own teaching and learning initiatives. I’ve also co-convened programs that bring students, staff, and faculty together, such as the long-running Identities and Engineering discussion group.