Scholarship & Grants
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
My research focuses on my passion for engineering education. Engineering education is a young field which in the past decades has undergone tremendous growth. My research efforts are directed at building and promoting this new engineering sub-discipline by focusing on three levels of the student’s learning: the student, the courses and the institution, and the greater engineering community. Currently, my work focuses on the use of electronic portfolios for student development and program assessment.
The links below for Title and for Venue will take you to the paper and session respectively.
For a full list of my publications and presentations, please read my current CV (viewable by SCU employees and students)
KEEN
KEEN cards are the Kern Family Foundation's way of creating an online community and materials around its Entrepreneurial Mindset + Engineering Skillset. A member of the community can author a card, after some training, and link it to the mindset + skillset attributes found as part of the activity and provide educational materials to implement!
Link to my KEEN Card! (must be a KEEN member to view)
Awarded Grants
While teaching and scholarship is the focus of my position here at SCU, I've also collaborated and been awarded several grants for work related to teaching and learning. These are listed below. The titles are linked to the proposals, and are viewable to anyone with an SCU login.
The most recent is the STEM Convergence Grant awarded to myself, my colleague in Neuroscience, and a colleague in the Office of Assessment. We are hoping to use Portfolium to make our programs more student learning focused by shifting our program advising, student curricular completion, and extra-curricular activities to a more reflective and evidence-based space. Students will save their best work as evidence of their learning and reflect on how this learning affects them now and helps them towards their future career jobs. For more information on the recently funded STEM Convergence Grant, STEM Milestones, follow this link.
Unfunded Grants
No one can be successful all the time. Last year, my colleagues and I wrote a grant proposal and submitted it to the NSF RCN-UBE Incubator program. It was a very challenging proposal to write and we got some good feedback on it, but ultimately did not secure funding. The Title below is linked to a pdf viewable by SCU employees and students and a brief project overview is available below.
Brief Project Overview
This incubator project seeks to build a faculty network composed of instructors who teach Introductory STEM (IntroSTEM) courses supporting BioX students at Santa Clara University. IntroSTEM instructors share common goals and expectations for their students. They often teach analogous concepts in different disciplines, rely on similar foundational skills, and expect students to develop equivalent critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Unfortunately, students often struggle to see how these disciplines connect as concepts are often introduced with discipline-specific vocabulary and methods. BioX students are particularly impacted by a lack of connection across IntroSTEM due to the large number of foundational STEM courses they must take.
The best way for BioX students to build an integrated knowledge base is to identify and engage with faculty who themselves practice integration, connection, and collaboration. The proposed IntroSTEM faculty network will provide an opportunity for faculty members of all ranks who are involved with teaching and developing IntroSTEM courses to develop collaborative and convergent community that will impact BioX students from the moment they set foot on campus. Our network will build mentoring and collaborative relationships enriching classroom instruction for IntroSTEM faculty, aid in integrating between disciplines, and enhance the overall BioX student learning experience. The Incubator project goals include: 1) developing a process to recruit relevant network participants; 2) establishing communications for the network via an online platform to host member connections and discussions, as well as a badging/credentialing system, managing resources and profile pages; and 3) expanding and growing the IntroSTEM network, specifically leveraging adjunct and other contractual faculty. Success of the project will be assessed based on the number of collaborations that emerge from the network, faculty survey results on professional value added, and the resulting impact on student retention in STEM. The Steering Committee consists of Tracy Ruscetti, Christelle Sabatier, and Jes Kuczenski of Santa Clara University.