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Judith Shaul Norback, Ph.D., is general faculty and Director of Workplace and Academic Communication in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She applies her skills as a social psychologist to gather data from executives about stellar presentations and other oral communication skills and she conducts research on communication, in order to improve instruction. Dr. Norback has developed and provided instruction for students in industrial and biomedical engineering and has advised on oral communication instruction at other universities. Since she founded the Presentation Coaching Program in 2003, the coaching has had over 21,000 student visits. As of winter 2013, she shared her instructional materials with over 250 schools from the U.S., Australia, Germany, and South Korea.
Dr. Norback has studied communication and other basic skills in the workplace and developed curriculum over the past 30 years—first at Educational Testing Service; then as part of the Center for Skills Enhancement, Inc., which she founded, with clients including the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Skill Standards Board, and universities. Since 2000, when she arrived at Georgia Tech, her work has focused on oral communication for engineering students and engineers. Dr. Norback has published over 20 articles in the past decade alone, including articles in the ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, INFORMS Transactions on Education, and the International Journal of Engineering Education. She authored the book Oral Communication Excellence for Engineers and Scientists, published in summer, 2013.
Over the past 12 years Dr. Norback has given over 40 conference presentations and workshops at nation-wide conferences such as ASEE, where she currently serves as chair of the Liberal Education/Engineering & Society (LEES) Division. She has been an officer for the Education Forum of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and has served as Associate Chair for the national Capstone Design Conference. Dr. Norback has a Bachelors’ degree from Cornell University and a Masters and PhD from Princeton University. Her current research interests include increasing the reliability of the Norback-Utschig Presentation Scoring System for Engineers and Scientists and identifying the mental models engineering students use when creating graphical representations.

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Dr. Tristan T. Utschig is a Senior Academic Professional in the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and is Assistant Director for the Scholarship and Assessment of Teaching and Learning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Formerly, he was a tenured Associate Professor of Engineering Physics at Lewis-Clark State College. Dr. Utschig consults with faculty across the university about bringing scholarly teaching and learning innovations into their classroom and assessing their impact. He has regularly published and presented work on a variety of topics including assessment instruments and methodologies, using technology in the classroom, faculty development in instructional design, teaching diversity, and peer coaching. Dr. Utschig completed his PhD in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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Anthony Joseph Bonifonte is currently in his 3rd year of Georgia Tech's PhD program in Operations Research in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department. He attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate, majoring in math and biology. He has served as teaching assistant five times for math and industrial engineering courses. He currently works as a graduate research assistant in Georgia Tech's Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) where he assists with assessment and data analysis for ongoing CETL projects. His thesis research involves mathematical models and decision making in cardiology.

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Gloria Ross is currently a PhD candidate in History and Sociology of Science and Technology at Georgia Tech. Her research focuses on the spatial and demographic factors that shape urban food distribution systems. She currently works as a graduate research assistant in Georgia Tech's Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) where she assists with assessment and data analysis for ongoing CETL projects.

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