College Names Inaugural Dean's KEEN Faculty Fellows
Content
The Riccio College of Engineering (CoE) has selected six faculty members to serve as its inaugural Dean's KEEN Faculty Fellows over the next year.
KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network) is a system of diverse universities across the United States that work as KEEN partner schools. UMass Amherst was invited to join the KEEN network last fall.
As part of our KEEN membership, the Riccio CoE received a small grant from the Kern Family Foundation which, paired with matching funds from Dean Sanjay Raman, will provide each fellow with $5,000 to support his or her work while exploring, and ultimately contributing to, the KEEN network’s professional- and teaching-development resources.
The Dean's KEEN Faculty Fellows will have access to additional funding to support colleague working groups and collaborations with colleagues at partner institutions. In addition to the base grant, the Kern Family Foundation has already supported the travel of eight Riccio CoE faculty to KEEN annual and leadership conferences and is funding the participation of six Riccio CoE faculty in KEEN’s Engineering Unleashed Faculty Development workshops, which will take place over the summer with continued support through the academic years 2026 and 2027.
The overall goal of the KEEN network is to foster an “E-Mindset” in engineering-education practices, providing students opportunities within the curriculum to be curious, create value, and make connections between the classroom and real world.
According to Riccio CoE Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Paula Rees, “Nominations for fellowship support were submitted by the departments to college leadership, which reviewed nominees’ KEEN network exploration and integration plans for potential local and national impact.”
Rees explains that “While this internal-fellowship award is distinct from the national-level Engineering Unleashed Fellows program (See Fellows | Engineering Unleashed), our goal is to support faculty on their journey to being recognized at the national level for their contributions to trailblazing resources and educational practices supporting student learning and engineering education in general.”
In that context, six faculty members are developing five innovative projects to carry out as Dean's KEEN Faculty Fellows:
Assistant Professor Jessica Boakye of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department is focusing on CEE 331: Structural Analysis, a core junior-level course. She will replace traditional textbook problems with real-world, structural-analysis challenges using structures that students encounter daily. For instance, students will photograph structures, idealize them for calculations, and analyze them with software to spark curiosity and create practical value. Additionally, she will design problems to connect concepts across multiple civil-engineering courses, including (but not limited to) those concerned with statics, strength of materials, programming, statistics, and systems analysis.
CEE Assistant Professor Christian Guzman plans to incorporate “E-Mindset” principles in two classes, CEE 357: Fluid Mechanics and CEE 473: Groundwater. He will challenge students to connect open-channel flow and groundwater concepts to applications. By leveraging KEEN’s emphasis on “curiosity, connections, and creating value,” Guzman aims to incubate, accelerate, and scale topic-relevant ideas to support students’ learning and advance their ability to design more resilient, sustainable, and socially aware solutions to drought, pollution, and flooding challenges.
Associate Professor Shannon Roberts of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department aims to redesign Engin 113 to focus on curiosity and creativity. The goal is to get first-year students excited and passionate about their major, which will ultimately improve retention. She will retool the class, which is taught using the team-based learning framework, to include more reflexive-learning practices, real-world case studies related to design challenges, and mixed-methods problems that require students to integrate qualitative and quantitative data.
MIE Lecturer Mary Sheehan and MIE Senior Lecturer and Professor of Practice in Manufacturing Jim Lagrant are launching a major redesign of MIE 375: Manufacturing Processes. They will transform this core junior-level course with a focus on new-product introduction and Design for Manufacturability and Assembly. A key component of the redesign is aligning lecture topics and in-class activities with the semester-long project so that students can immediately apply core concepts to realistic engineering challenges. The new course will center on KEEN’s emphasis on “curiosity, connections, and creating value” through hands-on, industry-inspired experiences, thus enabling students to develop skillsets in opportunity recognition, design refinement, and impact evaluation.
Senior Lecturer Sam Wojda of the Biomedical Engineering Department will focus on implementation of ideas from the Engineering Unleashed website in various courses while encouraging vertical/horizontal integration of lessons with other courses in the curriculum. Wojda will begin by focusing on exploring how to utilize “E-Mindset” principles in two sophomore-level classes, BME 201: Materials Science and BME 230: Statics and Dynamics. Wojda will leverage her experience to work with and encourage other faculty to implement ideas from Engineering Unleashed in their courses (like BME 241: Strength of Materials and BME 300: Biomaterials) while emphasizing vertical/horizontal integration of lessons among various courses in the curriculum.