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External Leadership

I have taken on a variety of national and international organizational and thought leadership roles in biomedical engineering, engineering education, faculty development and interdisciplinary collaborations. Below are some select roles and activities. 

Engineering Education

  • Elected in 2020 as an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Fellow 

  • Co-founder of the ASEE Interdivisional Committee, created in 2012-2013 to explore ways to encourage more mixing between divisions. The committee organizes the annual Interdivisional Townhall meeting at ASEE, New Chairs Meeting and ASEE Active. The audience for the townhall meeting typically is >200 people. I wrote the committee charge and initial bylaws. 

  • Chair/Co-Chair of the Interdivisional Committee (2018-2020). Each year planning for the townhall involves engaging approximately 40 ASEE members (from a wide range of divisions) to develop the meeting theme. There is a virtual conference that is held in April to prime the discussion at the in-person meeting in June. The Chair then leads volunteers (identified at the in-person meeting) to create a deliverable. Examples of deliverables are:

    • “ASEE Conference Playbook: Co-created Sessions from the ASEE 2019 Town Hall (Stop Lecturing about Active Learning.” Lead author and editor. The playbook was disseminated to all program and division chairs as well as AAEE in Australia where a parallel session was run at their annual conference

    • “The Culture of Teaching, Report from the ASEE Interdivisional Committee”, 2017. Co-lead Author

    •  “Recommendations of the Connecting Us Team”, Strategic Doing Initiative. 2017. One of eight contributors

    • “Summary of ASEE Member Views on Proposed Changes to ABET: Engineering Accreditation Standards”, 2016. Co-lead author. Disseminated to ABET.

  •  Co-founder and member of the ASEE Committee on Alternative Publications in 2017. 

  • Member of the ad-hoc Session Redesign Committee for ASEE. The task of the group (started in 2019 and ongoing) is to stimulate the incorporation of active learning into ASEE sessions.

  •  Invited to be one of eight members of the ASEE Connecting Us Strategic Working Group, 2015-2017. Wrote the mission and charge for the group and was one of the three lead authors on the deliverable to ASEE headquarters.

  • Co-founder (in a minor capacity) in the formation of the Faculty Development Division of ASEE

  • ASEE Campus Representative for Bucknell since 2017.  In 2019 Bucknell won both the Highest Member Percentage for the Mid-Atlantic region and the ASEE Recruitment Award for the Mid-Atlantic.

Biomedical Engineering

  • Founder and inaugural chair of the Undergraduate Research Track at the National Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) conference. Work began in 2007 and was completed in 2009. Developed the original charter, standard operating procedures, secured industry-sponsored awards and presented to the BME board. To date, this track has enabled over 4200 undergraduate students to show their work at BMES since 2009. For most students this is their first published work.

  • Interviewed and quoted in US News and World Report in 2014 on growth of Biomedical Engineering as a discipline.

  • Co-Organizer for Biomedical Engineering Body of Knowledge (BOK) Workshop in 2009. First formal group meeting to determine a body of knowledge for biomedical engineering.

  • Co-organizer of the BME-IDEA conferences (2014-present) that has met the day before the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) meeting. Meeting of faculty, industry and government to discuss, share and create objectives, challenges and opportunities in BME Innovation and Design. Most involved in fundraising, onboarding of new organizers, program planning, inviting speakers and panel moderation. 

  • Four-year term in senior leadership in the Biomedical Engineering Division (BED) from 2012-2016, including program chair and division chair.  Led program layout, abstract and paper reviews, continued to systematize processes to make it easier for future chairs, kick-started a redrafting of the BED Bylaws and operationalized the Work-In-Progress poster session.

  • Co-editor of the Biomedical Engineering Series, Morgan and Claypool Publishing from 2013 – 2016. Helped grow the number of books to 55 by recruiting new authors.

  • Served a 3 year-term as a member-at-large in the BED prior to being elected chair from 2007-2010.

  • Only person in BED to win both the teaching award (for new faculty) in 2010 and the Pilkington Award in 2017 for “Outstanding Education, Leadership and Research in Biomedical Engineering”.

Faculty Development

  • Delivered over 90 multi-day workshops on engineering education nationally and internationally (e.g. Finland, England, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Columbia). Most of these workshops were over multiple days 

  • Facilitator and content developer for 10 multi-day KEEN Innovating Curriculum with Entrepreneurial Mindset (ICE) workshops. These workshops have reached hundreds of new engineering educators, helping them build problem-based modules that they integrate into their existing courses.

  • Organizing and Review Committee for VentureWell OPEN Conference (attendance ~600, with ~300 submissions.) 2016-2019.

  •  Organizer for 2017 KEEN National Conference 2016 and 2017 (with attendance ~400). In 2016 delivered the Conference Opening talk.

  • NSF Epicenter Pathways Faculty Mentors in 2015. The Pathways program provided institutions with frameworks and guidance on transforming their entrepreneurial ecosystem on their campus.

Interdisciplinary Collaborations

  • Featured on CNN health for interdisciplinary work on the trans-human in 2012

  • Google DancePlex Instructor in 2013. One-week class to Google employees on improv dance combined with technology. Many members of the Google Glass team participated.

  • Interviewed at length for the film Let Me Do (debut at the Toronto Film Festival, 2015, http://letmedoitmovie.com/) that explores changes in engineering education. Bucknell was the only undergraduate-focused engineering school featured, alongside Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, University College London, and Duke.

  • TEDx speaker, “The Grammar of Collaboration” (Bucknell TEDx) and “The Technical Human” (Santiago Chile TEDx). Both focused on how technology and society are intertwined.

  • Offered one of the original 10 Stanford d.school Pop-up classes with Aleta Hayes called “How to Be A Cyborg”. Led to webinars, articles and talks on best practices in offering pop-up classes. 

  • Contributions to several works Integrating dance and music with engineering, including work with the National Park Service, Capacitor Dance Company, ChocolateHeads Movement Band, Eastman Conservatory, Julliard School of Music and the Bucknell Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. These have ranged from giving formal talks about the intersections of engineering and the arts, to participating in performances (as a dancer and musician), to creating new digital musical instruments.  

  • Founder of Ideas At Play, an interdisciplinary group that creates classroom games. Led an experimental three-part session at ASEE called “Integrated Games,” that took place in the main lobby at the 2016 conference. These sessions were featured as a Conference Highlight.

  • Featured in ASEE Prism (September 2018, pp 40-43) “Signals and Systems Without Control,” that details a radical pedagogy (similar to a democratized classroom) in a required junior-level Biomedical Signals and Systems course at Bucknell. 

  • ABET National Symposium Keynote speaker in 2014. “Educating T-shaped Engineers: Connecting the Technical and Non-Technical ABET Criteria”.

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