Colloquium Schedule
Coming soon!
Colloquium Speakers
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Dr. Jacob Grohs
Associate Professor of Engineering Education Virginia Tech |
Jake is an educational researcher whose interests focus on systems thinking, multi-stakeholder partnerships, and collaborative change efforts in education. His project portfolio includes a wide range of interdisciplinary and multi-party applied educational research projects which have focused on issues such as novel assessment of systems thinking competencies in engineering, healthcare, and community contexts; access to engineering education in rural communities; and research-practice collaborations to improve undergraduate engineering education quality, affordability, and student success. Jake is an NSF CAREER awardee, and his external funding portfolio includes research grants in excess of $7.5M ($2.6M personal share). Jake also directs the Center for Educational Networks and Impacts at Virginia Tech which advances applied research and community engagement to address the complexities and persistent issues of educational ecosystems. CENI builds long-term relationships with regional schools, museums, and programs for reciprocal learning and positive collaborative change. CENI is a research center housed within the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. In his personal life, Jake is committed to his family including his partner Courtney, their sons Jude, Crosby, Béla, and a giant Newfoundland dog Rhody.
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Dr. Per Urlaub
Director of Global Languages Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Professor Per Urlaub (PhD, Stanford) is Director of Global Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he investigates the impact of technology on language, literacy, culture, and education. He teaches German Studies, European Studies and Translation Studies and serves as Associate Head of House of the Sidney Pacific Graduate Community, a residence for nearly 700 students adjacent to the MIT campus. Before joining MIT in 2022, he was a professor at Middlebury College, where he taught in the Linguistics and Educational Studies programs and served as Associate Dean of the Language Schools. Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor of German at the University of Texas at Austin. His earlier scholarship focused on the development of literary reading competencies in the second language. An advocate for thoughtful approaches to technology in education, his more recent work investigates affordances and limitations of geoinformatics, machine translation, and generative AI in language and humanities education. His output includes two books, one guest-edited journal volume, 30+ peer-reviewed articles and chapters, 120+ academic presentations, as well as journalistic commentary in venues such as The Washington Post, The New Republic, and Die Welt.
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Dr. Kristin Boudreau
Professor of Humanities and Arts Worcester Polytechnic Institute |
Kris Boudreau is a scholar of U.S. literature and culture, engineering education, and critical university studies. She has published books and articles on US literature and culture and on engineering education. She was a member of the National Academies committee that published the 2018 consensus report, The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education. Her publications based on integrative curricular developments have won awards from the American Society for Engineering Education and from the National Academies Press. Boudreau teaches at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she helped to implement a new tenure track for teaching faculty that was awarded a 2021 Delphi Award from USC’s Pullias Center for Higher Education. She has given many workshops on project-based learning and the pedagogy of integrative education. She will discuss collaborations with students at WPI that are both integrative in themselves and produce integrative pedagogy for other teachers and students.
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Dr. Olga Pierrakos
Professor of Engineering Wake Forest University |
Dr. Olga Pierrakos (PhD) is a higher education leader, an interdisciplinary engineer, an innovative educator, national STEM education thought leader. She is currently a STEM Education Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) working on programs across the STEM education, engineering, and technology innovation directorates. Prior to joining NSF for a second stint, Olga served as the Founding Chair of Wake Forest Engineering (2017-2024) from launch to accreditation and led transformational change with a vision to Educate the Whole Engineer for Human Flourishing. Olga led Wake Forest Engineering with Inclusive and Interdisciplinary Innovation to transform the culture, curriculum, pedagogy, student experience, and the research enterprise of Wake Forest Engineering, serving as a catalyst for institutional change. Under her leadership, Wake Forest Engineering achieved unprecedented outcomes and accreditation: (1) curricular innovation enabling diverse academic pathways for students to enter diverse workforce paths, (2) pedagogical innovation enabling experiential and holistic learning, (3) faculty diversity (50% women, 25% racial/ethnic) leveraging research-informed practices, (4) student diversity (42% women, 25% racial/ethnic) leveraging student-centered and evidence-informed advising and curricular practices, (5) becoming the second highest performing academic unit with external research funding, and (6) becoming the highest ranked academic program on campus (2023 US News Report, 14th Best Undergraduate Engineering Program among 275 universities). Olga has been the PI on a multi-year Kern Family Foundation KEEN award targeted at “Educating the Whole Engineer” through innovation (entrepreneurial mindset) and cultivation of character, an effort that has enabled integrative learning across the engineering curriculum. Wake Forest Engineering represents a modern exemplar of higher education ingenuity with intentionality around student-centeredness, interdisciplinarity, inclusion, holistic education, and strategic partnerships within and beyond academia. As a first-generation graduate and engineer, Olga has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and a MS and BS in Engineering Mechanics from Virginia Tech. She has been founding faculty of two brand new U.S. engineering undergraduate programs – Wake Forest University and James Madison University – demonstrating institutional and national transformation of engineering education.
