Two faculty selected to participate in symposium

 
Abu-Lail, center, with some of her students.
 
 
PULLMAN, Wash. – Nehal Abu-Lail, assistant professor in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, and Christopher Hundhausen, associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, have been selected to participate in the prestigious National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium.
 
They are two of 65 faculty members from throughout the U.S. who were chosen to participate. The symposium, which will take place Nov. 13-16 in Irvine, Calif., brings together innovative engineering educators to share ideas and learn from research and best practice in education, according to a National Academy of Engineering press release.
 
The College of Engineering and Architecture is a national leader in engineering education research. In 2010, for instance, three faculty members in the Voiland School received approximately 10 percent of the $18 million awarded nationally by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (TUES) program – more than any academic department in the United States. The program provides research support for improving curricula and teaching methods in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.
 
Through a National Science Foundation grant, Abu-Lail, a WSU faculty member since 2006, has provided support for several students from underrepresented groups to help with the research she is doing to better understand Listeria monocytogenes infections. L. monocytogenes was the bug involved in a recent outbreak linked to contaminated cantaloupe. Although L. monocytogenes infections are fairly rare (about 2,500 cases per year in the U.S.), the pathogen has a fatality rate of 20 percent, the highest rate of any food-borne pathogen.
 
Abu-Lail is working to better understand the mechanisms of the bug’s adhesion to surfaces and how that correlates to virulence. The results will be important in efforts to design new effective preventive and treatment strategies and in designing criteria to distinguish virulent from avirulent strains.
 
Abu-Lail has participated in visits to high schools around the state to tell students about WSU’s engineering programs. She also has worked with high school teachers to develop experiments for the high school classroom about bacterial adhesion. The simple experiments help students answer interesting and relevant questions while improving their science and math abilities.
 
Abu-Lail recently received a 3M Nontenured Faculty Grant. The award recognizes outstanding new faculty for the quality and pertinence of their research. She holds a PhD. from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.
 
A WSU faculty member since 2007, Hundhausen has worked for several years in computer science to introduce a studio approach into that challenging curriculum. Traditionally, computer science courses have been based on teaching traditions in the mathematical sciences and have maintained a strong focus on teaching programming and programming languages. The studio-based teaching approach is based instead on methods used in design fields, such as architecture.
 
In particular, students use “design crits’’ as a means of learning.  In the computer science courses, students construct their own solutions to computing problems and present those solutions to their peers for feedback and discussion.  The students develop a collaborative relationship, as they are required to review each other’s solutions, which are used as a means of talking with peers and faculty about computing concepts.
 
Hoping to improve students’ performance and retention in engineering, Hundhausen also received National Science Foundation support to develop a new software tool and studio-based approach to learning for chemical engineering classes.
Hundhausen directs the Human-centered Environments for Learning and Programming (HELP) lab. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER award and holds a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Oregon.