visit author page

Janet Y. Tsai is a researcher and instructor in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on ways to encourage more students, especially women and those from nontraditional demographic groups, to pursue interests in the field of engineering. Janet assists in recruitment and retention efforts locally, nationally, and internationally, hoping to broaden the image of engineering, science, and technology to include new forms of communication and problem solving for emerging grand challenges. A second vein of Janet's research seeks to identify the social and cultural impacts of technological choices made by engineers in the process of designing and creating new devices and systems. Her work considers the intentional and unintentional consequences of durable structures, products, architectures, and standards in engineering education, to pinpoint areas for transformative change.

visit author page

visit author page

Kevin O’Connor is assistant professor of Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. His scholarship focuses on human action, communication, and learning as socioculturally organized phenomena. A major strand of his research explores the varied trajectories taken by students as they attempt to enter professional disciplines such as engineering, and focuses on the dilemmas encountered by students as they move through these institutionalized trajectories. He is co-editor of a 2010 National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook, Learning Research as a Human Science. Other work has appeared in Linguistics and Education; Mind, Culture, and Activity; Anthropology & Education Quarterly, the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science; the Journal of Engineering Education; and the Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research. His teaching interests include developmental psychology; sociocultural theories of communication, learning, and identity; qualitative methods; and discourse analysis.

visit author page

visit author page

Beth A. Myers is the Director of Analytics, Assessment and Accreditation at the University of Colorado Boulder. She holds a BA in biochemistry, ME in engineering management and PhD in civil engineering. Her interests are in quantitative and qualitative research and data analysis as related to equity in education. She has been involved in the new pilot Engineering Math course at CU-Boulder since the start.

visit author page

visit author page

Jacquelyn Sullivan is founding co-director of the Engineering Plus degree program in the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. She spearheaded design and launch of the Engineering GoldShirt Program to provide a unique access pathway to engineering for high potential, next tier students not admitted through the standard admissions process; this program is now being adapted at several engineering colleges. Sullivan led the founding of the Precollege division of ASEE in 2004; was awarded NAE’s 2008 Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, and was conferred as an ASEE Fellow in 2011. She has served on multiple NAE committees, and on the NSF ENG division's Advisory Committee.

visit author page

visit author page

Derek Reamon is the Co-director of the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program (ITLP) and theEngineering Plus (e+) degree program, and a Teaching Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. As ITLP co-director, he coordinates 19-22 sections of First-year Engineering Projects, a course that has a proven benefit on retention within engineering and is also a nationally recognized model for freshman design courses. The e+ program has created a flexible engineering degree and a pathway to secondary math and science teaching licensure, to increase the numbers of STEM teachers that have strong engineering design backgrounds. Derek is also an award-winning teacher and was most recently awarded the John and Mercedes Peebles Innovation in Education from CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. Dr. Reamon received his PhD in engineering education from Stanford University in 1999. His dissertation was one the first in the nascent field of engineering education research.

visit author page

visit author page

Ken Anderson is a Professor of Computer Science and the Associate Dean for Education for the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He co-directs Project EPIC, an NSF-funded project since 2009 that investigates how members of the public make use of social media during times of mass emergency. Professor Anderson leads the design and implementation of a large-scale data collection and analysis system for that project.

Prof. Anderson was a participant in the first cohort of the NCWIT Pacesetters program, a program designed to recruit more women to the field of computer science and encourage them to pursue their careers in technology.

As part of his Pacesetters efforts, Prof. Anderson led the charge to create a new BA in CS degree at CU that allows students in Arts and Sciences to earn a degree in computer science. This new degree program was first offered in Fall 2013 and had 240 students enroll during its first semester and now has more than 900 majors four years later.

He also organizes and hosts the annual NCWIT Colorado Aspirations in Computing Award for the past eight years. This award recognizes the computing achievements of female high school students in Colorado and encourages them to enroll in computer science at the college level. Since 2010, over 400 young women in computing have been recognized by these events.

Prof. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1997 at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include hypermedia, the design of reliable large-scale software infrastructure, the design and implementation of data-intensive systems, and the design of web application frameworks.

visit author page