Students

Grad Student Kurdekar defends Integrative Studies Ph.D. @ UConn

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Congratulations to our newest Ph.D., Dr. Arpita Kurdekar! She successfully defended the *first* Integrative Studies Ph.D. at UConn this afternoon, titled “Nurturing Creativity Using an Integrated Engineering and Visual Arts Virtual Reality-based Instructional Model”.

This unique work used virtual reality to understand how students from both engineering and arts backgrounds used and interacted with a VR based environment to learn multidisciplinary topics.

As with any multidisciplinary project, it takes a village, and even though I was major advisor, this wouldn’t have been possible without support from colleagues across Engineering, Education, and Fine Arts, including Jorge Paricio Garcia, Michael Young, Ken Thompson, Douglas Degges, and Stephen Slota.

Along the way, Arpita was supported largely through the Krenicki Institute, which fosters interdisciplinary work between engineering and the arts.

We wish Arpita the best as she starts her new post-UConn journey!

 

Ph.D. Student Tori Wagner Wins GE Excellence Fellowship!

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Congratulations to Tori Wagner on being awarded a GE Excellence Fellowship for Fall 2024! Tori is currently working on game-based educational interventions and assessments for teaching complex engineering topics, such as engineering ethics. Her current interests are focused on using text analytics, machine learning, and large language models to assist in evaluating qualitative student responses to ethical dilemmas. Tori recently switched to the new Engineering Education Program in the College of Engineering. She holds holds an M.A.Ed. from the UConn Neag School of Education and her B.S. in Chemistry and Chemistry Teaching from the University of Iowa.