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!

 

Burkey inducted as AIChE Fellow at 2024 AIChE Meeting

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Prof. Daniel D. Burkey, Castleman Term Professor of Engineering Innovation and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Diversity, was recently inducted as an AIChE Fellow at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in San Diego.

Fellow is the highest grade of membership available in AICHE, and granted only through election by the AIChE Board of Directors. Fellows typically have at least 25 years of professional service and the honor is granted to members “in recognition of significant professional accomplishments and contributions in engineering.”

Burkey is a recognized leader in engineering education, both in research and in service. Burkey’s research focuses on work in game-based education, specifically in the areas of process safety and engineering ethics. His collaborative work in these areas have been recognized with the 2020 AIChE Education Division Innovation Award, the 2022 William H. Corcoran Award from the Chemical Engineering Division of ASEE, and the 2023 David Himmelblau Award for Computer-Aided Chemical Engineering Education.

In terms of service, Burkey has been elected three times as a Director of the AIChE Education Division, where he has run the Education Division’s Future Faculty Mentoring Program since 2017. This program pairs established faculty with senior graduate students and postdocs with to support them during the faculty search process. The program has now supported more than 200 mentees and engaged more than 100 mentors, and has program alumni in more than 100 faculty positions in more than 50 academic institutions world-wide. Burkey was also one of the programming leads for the 2022 AIChE/ASEE Chemical Engineering Summer School, one of the signature NSF-co-sponsored professional development opportunities for new chemical engineering faculty.

(Photo: Burkey alongside fellow inductee and President of Lehigh University Joe Helble)

Burkey awarded 2024 Provost’s Engaged Scholarship Award

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Prof. Daniel Burkey was recognized as a Distinguished Educator at the 2024 Provost’s Awards for Community Engaged Scholarship on October 14. This was in recognition for Burkey’s previous work with service-learning projects that involved hundreds of students in first-year engineering and the engineering learning community working on projects that benefited students with severe autism with community partners in the Hartford area.

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.

Burkey awarded $2.5M S-STEM Grant

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Prof. Dan Burkey was recently awarded a $2.5M S-STEM Grant from the National Science Foundation. S-STEM is a program that supports low-income and first-generation students. This particular program will develop a cohort model and curricular and co-curricular supports for students majoring in computing and data sciences at UConn. Working with co-investigators in CLAS and the Provost’s Office, the S-STEM will provide up to $15,000 per year to eligible students in support of their education. The S-STEM will run from 2024 through 2030.

Burkey named Assistant Editor at CEE

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Daniel Burkey on Oct. 20, 2021. (Peter Morenus/UConn Photo)

Prof. Dan Burkey has been recently appointed as an Assistant Editor at the Chemical Engineering Education journal, responsible for external engagement. For the past year, he has served as a Guest Editor at the journal, working on the special issues associated with the 2022 Chemical Engineering Summer School, which was held at the Colorado School of Mines in July 2022 and for which he served as part of the Programming Committee.

Contents Under Pressure Team wins 2023 Himmelblau Award!

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Prof. Dan Burkey, together with colleagues Cheryl Bodnar, Dan Anastasio, and Matt Cooper have been selected as recipients of the 2023 Himmelblau Award from the CAST Division of AIChE. The Himmelblau award recognizes the outstanding contributions to computing in chemical engineering education. The team, who developed Contents Under Pressure with game designer Filament Games, will accept the award at the CAST Division Dinner to be held at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Orlando this November