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Cristián (Cris) Vargas-Ordóñez (he/his/él) is a Colombian third-year PhD student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. Raised around the life of photography and as an amateur contact improv dancer and yoga teacher, he is interested in integrating the arts and engineering in educational settings to promote and protect universally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms. His research with his advisor, Dr. Morgan Hynes, includes literature reviews, calls for action, and qualitative studies understanding how to make this kind of integration from a perspective of critical theories. As a result, he has developed and taught curricular initiatives such as Purdue’s honors course Compassionate Engineering and K-12 theater and engineering activities related to bullying prevention. As an international student in the US, Cristián is convinced that it is needed to bring a voice to this frequently overlooked population. He was director and producer of the podcast “We, the Aliens” and is currently one of the receivers of the CILMAR seed grant. His goal is to advocate for international students while developing and improving his research.

As a chemical engineer, he has worked in various sectors and private and public companies. He also has belonged to Colombian educational formal and informal settings as a pedagogy consultant at the Planetarium of Bogotá: Innovation, Science, and Technology instructor and consultant at the science and technology museum Maloka, and secondary school teacher in Chemistry. As part of his research in Spanish, he has explored Colombian chemical engineers’ social representations about science and technology, their conceptions and attitudes about chemical engineering, and their identity as chemical engineers. Cristián is a Master in Education from the University of Los Andes in Colombia, a Master in Science, Technology, and Society from the National University of Quilmes in Argentina, and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of America in Colombia.

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Siqing Wei received B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Engineering Education program at Purdue University. After years of experience serving as a peer teacher and a graduate teaching assistant in first-year engineering courses, he has been a research assistant at CATME research group studying multicultural team dynamics and outcomes. The research interests span how cultural diversity impacts teamwork and how to help students improve intercultural competency and teamwork competency by interventions, counseling, pedagogy, and tool selection (such as how to use CATME Team-Maker to form inclusive and diversified teams) to promote DEI. In addition, he also works on many research-to-practice projects to enhance educational technology usage in engineering classrooms and educational research by various methods, such as natural language processing. In addition, he is also interested in the learning experiences of international students. Siqing also works as the technical development and support manager at the CATME research group.

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Tiantian Li (Olivia) is a PhD student in Engineering Education at Purdue University. She is a Purdue graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Engineering, with a concentration in Pharmaceutical Processing Engineering. She has completed Purdue’s Certificate of Systems Engineering and Quantitative Research, Assessment, and Evaluation in Education Certificate. Her research interest is in the assessment of systems thinking skills and systems awareness. She is also interested in studying international scholars' experience within engineering.

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