ECEDHA Educator Summit: December 2020

Join us for a brief introduction to the ECEDHA Summit Series.

 

Featuring:

Sid Deliwala
Director of ESE Labs
University of Pennsylvania
Sid has been the Director of Lab Programs in the Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) Department for over two decades. His experience includes managing lab programs, developing unique courses that encourage student engagement in their academic career and teaching undergraduates. He also manages state of the art undergraduate teaching classroom+lab facilities [C-Labs], Detkin, Ketterer and Simmons Labs. Sid enjoys working with students and continues to teach summer high school programs (Pre-freshmen Program and M&T Summer Institute), ESE 111 (ESE Freshmen Course), ESE 190 (Silicon Garage), Coursera Robotics Specialization (capstone) and ESE Capstone (ESE 450/451 Senior Design) in Fall and Spring semester. He is also an active participant in ECEDHA conference and co-leads the Technology Program at ECEDHA. Sid graduated with bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Walchand Institute of Technology in 1991 and a master’s degree from Drexel University in 1995.

 

This session brings together a group of ECE department heads to reflect on their experiences in addressing the challenges of the past several months, beginning with reactions to the sudden emergence of COVID-19 in Spring 2020 and continuing through plans for Spring 2021. Topics considered include the impacts on education, research and department administration.

 

Moderator:

Zhihua Qu
Professor and Chair of ECE
University of Central Florida

Zhihua Qu received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and joined the University of Central Florida (UCF) in 1990. From 1995 to 1997, he served as the assistant chair of the department. From 1999 to 2004, he was the Director/Interim Chair of Electrical Engineering at UCF. He has been a Professor (since 2000), SAIC Endowed Professor (since 2010), and Pegasus Professor and Chair at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (2010-2021). He has led the RISES Cluster, one of the first class of university clusters, since its inception in 2015. Dr. Qu conducts interdisciplinary research in broad fields of energy and power, networked systems & control. In energy systems, his research interests include power system stability, wide-area controls and their modular data-driven designs, self-organizing microgrids, distributed energy resources, distributed optimization, and cooperative control. He is the PI and Director of FEEDER Center which, originally funded from 2013 to 2019 by US Department of Energy (DOE) and afterwards by industrial/utility partners, consists of 12 universities, 18 utility companies, 10 industry companies and 2 national labs. This intercollegiate and partnership team provides a full spectrum of collaborative research, development and educational activities, including its innovative multi-institutional course sharing, to better train the current and future workforce and to accelerate the deployment of distributed power systems technologies.

Panelists: Randall Berry
Professor & Chair, ECE
Northwestern University
Randall Berry is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2014 for contributions to resource allocation and interference management in wireless networks. Berry obtained B.S. in electrical engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology and later got his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.



Magnus Egerstedt
Steve W. Chaddick School Chair & Professor, ECE
Georgia Tech
Dr. Magnus Egerstedt is the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds secondary appointments in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Interactive Computing, and the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, and has previously served as the Executive Director for the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech. He received the M.S. degree in Engineering Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, the B.A. degree in Philosophy from Stockholm University, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Egerstedt conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of multi-robot systems. Magnus Egerstedt is a Fellow of both IEEE and IFAC, and is a Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science. He has received a number of teaching and research awards, including the Ragazzini Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Control Conference, the Outstanding Doctoral Advisor Award and the HKN Outstanding Teacher Award from Georgia Tech, the Alumni of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology, and the CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Ashfaq Khokhar
Professor & Palmer Department Chair, ECE
Iowa State University
Dr. Khokhar earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, Pakistan; his master’s degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University; and his Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California. Dr. Khokhar has received various types of scholarly recognition and awards, including the NSF CAREER Award in 1998 for his work on multi-threaded algorithms for multimedia applications. In 1996, he won an Outstanding Paper Award for his presentation at the International Conference on Parallel Processing. He has served as associate editor on the editorial board of numerous journals. Khokhar was elected an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow in 2009 for his work on multimedia computing and databases, and he is a member of the Honor’s Society Phi Kappa Phi.

Luke Lester
Department Head and Professor, ECE
Virginia Tech
Luke F. Lester,IEEE and SPIE Fellow, received the B.S. in Engineering Physics in 1984 and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1992, both from Cornell University. He is a Professor and Head of the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech. Prior to joining VT, he was a professor of ECE at the University of New Mexico (UNM) from 1994 to 2013, and most recently the Interim Department Chair and the Endowed Chair Professor in Microelectronics there. Before 1994, Dr. Lester worked as an engineer for the General Electric (Martin Marietta) Electronics Laboratory in Syracuse, New York for 6 years where he worked on transistors for mm-wave applications. There in 1986 he co-invented the first Pseudomorphic HEMT, a device that was later highlighted in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest transistor. By 1991 as a PhD student in Prof. Lester Eastman's group at Cornell, he researched and developed the first strained quantum well lasers with mm-wave bandwidths. These lasers are now the industry standard for optical transmitters in data and telecommunications. In all, Dr. Lester has 28 years experience in III-V semiconductor devices and advanced fabrication techniques. In 2001, he was a co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Zia Laser, Inc., a startup company using quantum dot laser technology to develop products for communications and computer/microprocessor applications. The company was later acquired by Innolume, GmbH. He is an active organizer and participant in the IEEE Photonics Society's conferences, workshops and journals. He was a US Air Force Summer Faculty Fellow in 2006 and 2007. Dr. Lester's other awards and honors include: a 1986 IEE Electronics Letters Premium Award for the first transistor amplifier at 94 GHz; the 1994 Martin Marietta Manager's Award; the Best Paper Award at SPIE's Photonics West 2000 for reporting a quantum dot laser with the lowest semiconductor laser threshold; and the 2012 Harold E. Edgerton Award of the SPIE for his pioneering work on ultrafast quantum dot mode-locked lasers. He has published at least 125 journal articles and over 240 conference papers.

Larry Overzet
Department Head, ECE
University of Texas at Dallas
Professor Overzet is a fellow of the AVS, senior member of the IEEE, and a Registered Professional Engineer in Texas. He was chosen to be UTD’s Polykarp Kusch Lecturer in 2005 and was given the UT System’s “Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Award” in 2011. His research interests are varied but have primarily revolved around the study of plasmas used in semiconductor processing.






Daniel Stancil
Alcoa Distinguished Professor and Department Head, ECE
North Carolina State University
Daniel D. Stancil is the Alcoa Distinguished Professor and Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. His early interest in radios and electronics launched an engineering career that has been--and continues to be--fun and rewarding. Along the way he picked up engineering degrees from Tennessee Tech (B.S.E.E.) and MIT (S.M., E.E. and Ph.D.). He has spent many years as a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at both Carnegie Mellon University and NC State. While at CMU he served as Associate Head of the ECE Department, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering. He has been Department Head at NC State since 2009.



Timothy Wilson
Professor and Chair, EECS
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Dr. Wilson joined Embry-Riddle in 2000, following a stint at the University of Memphis. He received his degrees from MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where his research focused on modeling the hydrodynamics and signal processing of the mammalian auditory system. At ERAU, his research has concerned the technologies and legalities of Unmanned Aircraft Systems. He, colleagues, and students have conducted a number of surveys of unmanned aircraft technologies in collaboration with researchers at the FAA’s William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Those surveys have led to a number of regulatory gap analyses that identify likely regulatory issues raised by the introduction of unmanned aircraft into the National Airspace System. More recently he has worked with colleagues from the Engineering Fundamentals department on issues regarding adoption of evidence-based instructional practices in engineering education.
 

 

Partnerships with industry have taken on an added dimension as we all learn to operate in virtual spaces. This panel of industry leaders considers their role in preparing students for the challenges of a virtual work environment while maintaining effective teams and sustaining innovation.

 

Moderators:

Sid Deliwala
Director of ESE Labs
University of Pennsylvania
Sid has been the Director of Lab Programs in the Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) Department for over two decades. His experience includes managing lab programs, developing unique courses that encourage student engagement in their academic career and teaching undergraduates. He also manages state of the art undergraduate teaching classroom+lab facilities [C-Labs], Detkin, Ketterer and Simmons Labs. Sid enjoys working with students and continues to teach summer high school programs (Pre-freshmen Program and M&T Summer Institute), ESE 111 (ESE Freshmen Course), ESE 190 (Silicon Garage), Coursera Robotics Specialization (capstone) and ESE Capstone (ESE 450/451 Senior Design) in Fall and Spring semester. He is also an active participant in ECEDHA conference and co-leads the Technology Program at ECEDHA. Sid graduated with bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Walchand Institute of Technology in 1991 and a master’s degree from Drexel University in 1995.

 

Students completing their senior design requirement have faced the additional challenge of conducting much of the work remotely this year. This panel discusses adaptations made to accommodate these conditions at different institutions, along with their expectations when projects conclude in the spring.

 

Moderator:

Stephen E. Johnson
President
Digilent Inc.
Steve is currently the Director of Marketing for R&D Applications, Portfolio Business Unit, National Instruments and the President of Digilent Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of National Instruments. Steve is a 20-year veteran of National Instruments, holding senior management positions in R&D, sales, and marketing departments before becoming the leader of the Digilent subsidiary in 2014. Prior to joining NI, he held various positions in engineering, product development, and management with technology companies including Hewlett-Packard, General Scanning, and AstroNova. Steve is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..

 

 

 

 

Panelists:

Ramsin Khoshabeh
Director, ECE Makerspace
University of California, San Diego
Bio to come.











John Peeples
Professor, ECE
The Citadel
Dr. John Peeples' scholarly interests span a broad range of physical electronics, from novel techniques of cooling high performance electronics, to emerging methods of energy conversion. John earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from The Citadel. Upon completing a tour of duty in the USAF, he entered graduate study at the University of South Carolina where he earned a MSEE and PhD in Electrical Engineering. After 25 years in the computer industry, Dr. Peeples returned to his alma mater to teach electrical and computer engineering.
Dr. Peeples served as The Citadel ECE Department Head for 12 years and as the President of ECEDHA, the North American Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Head Association in 2015. He has written numerous technical papers, journal articles and two book chapters, and holds two US patents. Effective January 1, 2015, he was appointed by Governor Nikki Haley to serve on the South Carolina Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors. In this capacity Dr. Peeples helps develop and promote legislation governing the engineering profession, and with his fellow board members adjudicates disciplinary cases concerning the profession of engineering. Dr. Peeples teaches at all levels including graduate courses. His emphasis areas including the two-semester senior capstone experience, solid state electronic devices and energy systems engineering.

David Vallancourt
Senior Lecturer, Electrical Engineering
Columbia University
David Vallancourt is Senior Lecturer in Circuits and Systems in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. He received the BS (1981), MS (1983), and PhD (1987) degrees from Columbia, and was an Assistant Professor in SEAS until joining Bell Labs in 1992. Dr. Vallancourt's focus at Bell Labs and subsequent positions at Texas Instruments, Vitesse Semiconductor, and PMC-Sierra was analog and mixed-signal integrated circuit design for communications applications, for which he was awarded a dozen patents. In 2005 Dr. Vallancourt returned to Columbia where he teaches introductory courses in electrical engineering for engineers and for non-engineers, electronics, and laboratory courses including the senior “capstone” project lab. He created and teaches The Art of Engineering (AoE) course, the SEAS-wide introduction to engineering for all first year students. Dr. Vallancourt has received the Engineering School Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award and Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award.

Joseph Zambreno
Professor and Associate Chair, ECE
Iowa State University
Joseph A. Zambreno has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University since 2006, where he is currently a Professor, Associate Chair, and director of the Reconfigurable Computing Lab (RCL). Prior to joining ISU he was at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, where he graduated with his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2006, his M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2002, and his B.S. degree summa cum laude in Computer Engineering in 2001. While at Northwestern University, Dr. Zambreno was a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, a Northwestern University Graduate School Fellowship, a Walter P. Murphy Fellowship, and the EECS department Best Dissertation Award for his Ph.D. dissertation titled "Compiler and Architectural Approaches to Software Protection and Security." He is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2012), as well as the ISU award for Early Achievement in Teaching (2012), the College of Engineering Outstanding Achievement in Teaching Award (2019), and the ECpE department's Warren B. Boast undergraduate teaching award (2009, 2011, 2016).

 

The great distance learning experiment is sweeping the nation’s colleges and universities. The Minority Serving Institutions that make up the Inclusive Engineering Consortium (IEC) are uniquely positioned to rapidly capture the experiences of minority engineering students and their instructors. This session reviews results from a study of how they have adapted to online learning environments in electrical and computer engineering courses during the current crisis.

 

Moderator:

Kenneth Connor
Professor, Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and engineering education onsultant. Research involves the application of particle beam based diagnostics to plasmas of interest to the thermonuclear fusion community, high frequency wave phenomena, photonics, instrumentation, engineering education, diversity in the engineering workforce, and technology enhanced learning.


 

Panelists:

Kathy Gullie
Owner Evaluator
Gullie Consultant Services

Dr. Kathy Gullie and her associates at Gullie Consultant Services LLC have been in education, assessment, program development and evaluation for over 30 years. A former New York State teacher for 36 years, Dr. Gullie is committed to the improvement of education for students in all areas., Along with members of the team, Gullie Consultant Services LLC. has served as external evaluators for school districts, federal and state agencies, not-for-profit organizations, and institutions of higher education in New York State, as well as from around the country. Some of our past clients include: The National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, The New York State Department of Education, New York State VESID, State University of New York at Albany/SUNY, the State University of New York at Binghamton/SUNY, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), Howard University, Morgan University and New York City Board of Education. Based in the Capital Region, Gullie Consultants Services LLC., is a small consultancy, working directly with school districts and colleges/universities in multiple states and regions. A registered Woman Owned Business (WOB), Gullie Consultant Services LLC., prides itself on delivering high-quality program evaluations, data collection and analysis to its clients.

Kofi Nyarko
Associate Professor, ECE
Morgan State University

Dr. Nyarko is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Morgan State University (MSU). He also serves as Director of the Engineering Visualization Research Laboratory (EVRL). He has conducted research for MSU since 2005, consecutively under the titles of Research Engineer, Director, and finally Associate Professor. As a Research Engineer, Dr. Nyarko worked under the Chesapeake Information Based Aeronautics consortium (CIBAC) with engineers at NASA Langley on various projects involving aviation safety. Under his direction, the Engineering Visualization Research Laboratory has acquired and conducted research funded from the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Army Research Laboratory, NASA and Department of Homeland Security along with other funding from Purdue University's Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments (VACCINE), a DHS Center of Excellence. After receiving his doctorate from Morgan State University, Dr. Nyarko worked as an independent Software Engineer with contracts involving computational engineering, scientific/engineering simulation & visualization, visual analytics, complex computer algorithm development, computer network theory, machine learning, mobile software development, and avionic system software development. He also served as Adjunct Faculty for University of Baltimore's Department of Science, Information Arts and Technologies.

Dean Spaulding
Evaluator
Gullie Consultant Services

Bio to come.


Rebecca Zarch
SageFox Consulting Group

Rebecca Zarch has spent the last 15 years evaluating projects supporting young adults moving through STEM pathways and workforce development projects. She particularly loves projects that involve complex organizational change, the infusion of innovation and entrepreneurship into the educational environment, and those that promote underrepresented groups in the STEM fields. Much of Rebecca's work focuses on computer science education projects. Her work is typically based at community colleges and graduate school programs. Rebecca received her MBA in nonprofit management at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management and her M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

 

This session shares an update on Project RECET, an online repository for Remote ECE Teaching. Online and online compatible techniques for teaching ECE courses at the undergraduate and continuing education levels have been developed and researched for years, but they are still not widely deployed. The COVID-19 pandemic forced virtually every ECE program in the US online within a short period of time during the Spring 2020 semester. With an initial focus on introductory analog and digital circuits, Project RECET provides a resource for faculty in need of materials for online instruction.

 

Moderator:

Daniel Stancil
Alcoa Distinguished Professor and Department Head, ECE
North Carolina State University
Daniel D. Stancil is the Alcoa Distinguished Professor and Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. His early interest in radios and electronics launched an engineering career that has been--and continues to be--fun and rewarding. Along the way he picked up engineering degrees from Tennessee Tech (B.S.E.E.) and MIT (S.M., E.E. and Ph.D.). He has spent many years as a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at both Carnegie Mellon University and NC State. While at CMU he served as Associate Head of the ECE Department, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering. He has been Department Head at NC State since 2009.

 

Panelists:

Kenneth Connor
Professor, Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and engineering education onsultant. Research involves the application of particle beam based diagnostics to plasmas of interest to the thermonuclear fusion community, high frequency wave phenomena, photonics, instrumentation, engineering education, diversity in the engineering workforce, and technology enhanced learning.






Michael Devetsikiotis
Professor, Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering
University of New Mexico

Michael Devetsikiotis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. He received the Dipl. Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1988, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. In 1993, he joined the Broadband Networks Laboratory at Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. He later became an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University in 1995, an Assistant Professor in 1996 and an Associate Professor in 1999. Michael joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State as an Associate Professor, in 2000, and became a Professor in 2006. He served as the coordinator of the Masters of Science in Computer Networking until 2011 when he became the ECE Director of Graduate Programs. His research work has resulted in 37 published refereed journal articles, 119 refereed conference papers, and 58 invited presentations, in the area of design and performance evaluation of communication networks, telecommunications, and complex socio-technical systems. Devetsikiotis has a special interest in efficient simulation and rare event modeling techniques, and in analyzing complex systems, ranging from high-speed networks to wireless resource allocation, to collaboration technologies, to smart grid infrastructure, and to intelligent buildings and electric vehicles.

 

The panel will consist of a small but representative group of ECE students from member institutions across the country. The students will tell of their experiences with remote instruction, in both the Spring and Fall of 2020. The students will share the different styles of lectures, discussions and group work, office hours, labs, and assessments/evaluations that they found to be the most and least successful.

 

Moderator:

Elizabeth Zidar
Junior, ECE
Northwestern University
Elizabeth Zidar is in her third year at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, studying Electrical Engineering. This summer, she worked remotely as an intern for ECEDHA and helped build the ECE Lab Pros Network. Elizabeth has been happy to share her experience with the jump to online learning, and she is very excited to co-chair this panel of other ECE students to discuss the variety of impacts this change has had on education as a whole.

 

Panelists:

Sadiyah Bhuria
Senior
University of Central Florida
Sadiyah Bhuria is a Computer Engineering student, graduating Fall 2020. She currently works as an Undergraduate Learning Assistant and Undergraduate Research Assistant at the University of Central Florida. Upon graduating, Sadiyah looks forward to pursuing her Masters in Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, beginning Spring 2020. Sadiyah has loved working with computers since she was a child. She is an International student and loves the education in the United States; her specific focus is mostly on Machine Learning. In the future, Sadiyah looks forward to working with software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft.



Katie (Katelyn) Brinker
Second Year PhD Student
Iowa State University
Katelyn Brinker is a PhD student in electrical engineering at Iowa State University (ISU) supported by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship (NSTRF). In 2017 she earned dual B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) and in 2019 she earned her M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Missouri S&T. Her research at the ISU Center for Nondestructive Evaluation (CNDE) involves developing wireless passive microwave sensors for materials characterization and structural health monitoring applications. In conjunction to being a Graduate Research Assistant, she works as a Pathways Intern at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. In terms of volunteer work, she currently serves as a Student Governor to the IEEE-HKN Board of Governors and as the Graduate Student Representative to the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society AdCom. She is also the winner of the 2017 IEEE-HKN Alton B. Zerby and Carl T. Koerner Outstanding Student Award and the 2017 DiscoverE New Faces of Engineering – IEEE-USA award.


Cailyn Crowley
Super Senior (9th Semester)
Missouri University S&T
Cailyn Crowley is dual major at Missouri University of Science and Technology studying Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. She is currently the President of the Gamma Theta Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu and will be graduating December 2020.








Jan Iglesias Morales
Senior
University of Central Florida
Jan Iglesias Morales is a senior Computer Engineering student at the University of Central Florida with a passion for embedded systems and software development. He is the current president of the IEEE HKN chapter at UCF, Zeta Chi. Jan will be graduating December 2020 and will begin his professional career at Texas Instruments as an Applications Engineer.







Hannah Schroeder
Senior
University of Houston
Hannah Schroeder is a senior Electrical Engineering major at the
University of Houston, with a concentration in computers and embedded systems. Hannah is the President of the IEEE-HKN Epsilon Epsilon chapter, which was recently reinstated in Fall 2019, and has guided the chapter through its first two semesters of inducting students and hosting events. Outside of her studies, Hannah is also active in the Honors Club Theater group, having written two short plays and acted in three, and has a strong appreciation for the creative and liberal arts.


 

 

Lab courses present a special challenge under COVID-19 restrictions. While some schools have been able to manage capacity constraints and allow limited student access to labs, most students are dealing with virtual labs to some degree. This session addresses managing virtual labs during the COVID era.

 

Moderator:

Sid Deliwala
Director of ESE Labs
University of Pennsylvania
Sid has been the Director of Lab Programs in the Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) Department for over two decades. His experience includes managing lab programs, developing unique courses that encourage student engagement in their academic career and teaching undergraduates. He also manages state of the art undergraduate teaching classroom+lab facilities [C-Labs], Detkin, Ketterer and Simmons Labs. Sid enjoys working with students and continues to teach summer high school programs (Pre-freshmen Program and M&T Summer Institute), ESE 111 (ESE Freshmen Course), ESE 190 (Silicon Garage), Coursera Robotics Specialization (capstone) and ESE Capstone (ESE 450/451 Senior Design) in Fall and Spring semester. He is also an active participant in ECEDHA conference and co-leads the Technology Program at ECEDHA. Sid graduated with bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Walchand Institute of Technology in 1991 and a master’s degree from Drexel University in 1995.
 

Panelists:

Fred Beyette
Professor and School Chair, ECE
University of Georgia
Fred Beyette is the founding chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the University of Georgia College of Engineering. Over the past decade, Beyette’s research has focused on developing point-of-care devices for medical and health monitoring applications - including devices that guide the diagnosis and treatment of acute neurologic emergencies such and stroke and traumatic brain injury. His work has resulted in 12 patent applications. Prior to joining the UGA faculty in 2017, Beyette served as a professor of electrical engineering and computing systems at the University of Cincinnati.
Beyette earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at Colorado State University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, he joined the faculty at the University of Cincinnati in 1996. In addition to his duties as a professor, Beyette has served as associate department head for electrical engineering and as graduate program coordinator. He has trained 55 students at the master’s, doctoral and fellow levels and has mentored more than 125 undergraduate research/senior design students.

Bruce Kothmann
Senior Lecturer
University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Kothmann is a Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. He has received numerous teaching prizes, including the 2012 Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence. He is an avid user of laboratory and interactive teaching spaces. Before coming to Penn, Dr. Kothmann worked in the Flying Qualities group at Boeing Rotorcraft in Philadelphia. He designed fly-by-wire control laws for the RAH-66 Comanche, V-22 Osprey, and CH-47 Chinook. He has been a regular invited lecturer at the US Navy Test Pilot School for more than a decade and earned his PhD from Princeton University.





Rick Kuhlman
Head of Product - Initial State
Tektronix
Rick served as Head of Product and CTO of multiple IoT companies - most recently at Initial State, an IoT web dashboard system, acquired by Tektronix in 2018. Before that, Rick served as the Director of Product at Invodo, an ecommerce video company. He started his career at National Instruments where he served on the LabVIEW product team for FPGA and embedded software.




Wilson Lee
Education Market Segment Lead
Tektronix
Wilson Lee is Education Market Segment Lead at Tektronix. Wilson has over 25 years of technical marketing, technical sales leadership roles with manufacturers such as CTS Electronic Components, as well technical/value-add distributors such as Richardson RFPD and Premier Farnell. Wilson has focused on on-line learning communities such as Element 14 that nurture crowd learning, and design engineer engagement. Wilson’s other areas of focused experience is technology advancement and adaption within the RF/Wireless, Industrial Power, and Industrial Automation market segments. Wilson earned his Bachelors of Science Degree at Cornell University. He has lived in New York, Chicago and Asia through his career and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.


Mario Leone
Technologist
Rowan University
Mr. Leone provides support and guidance in the ECE labs, designing, building, and setting up lab experiments for classes, research projects, and clinic projects, as well as assisting students with their project needs. He maintains the lab equipment, acquires materials to support student and faculty projects, designs and delivers courses on lab safety, instrument operation, and other lab and technical procedures and processes, including how to take designs from paper to reality. Mr. Leone is an engineering consultant bringing 35+ years of industry experience to our department, both technical and business. His main areas of expertise are data communications, process control and automation. As atechnologist, entrepreneur, and business owner he helps guide Rowan students on the myriad of aspects of the technical world beyond the classroom. In addition, Mr. Leone has served and continues to serve on numerous industry standards committees (EIA, IEEE, CEA) as a subject matter expert, and his current committee work involves standardizing communications for the IoT (Internet of Things) and devices in the consumer space.

Dominik May
Assistant Professor
University of Georgia
Dr. May is an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute. He researches online and intercultural engineering education. His primary research focus lies on the development, introduction, practical use, and educational value of online laboratories (remote, virtual, and cross-reality) and online experimentation in engineering instruction. In his work, he focuses on developing broader educational strategies for the design and use of online engineering equipment, putting these into practice and provide the evidence base for further development efforts. Moreover, Dr. May is developing instructional concepts to bring students into international study contexts so that they can experience intercultural collaboration and develop respective competences.
Dr. May is Vice President of the International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE), which is an international non-profit organization to encourage the wider development, distribution, and application of Online Engineering (OE) technologies and its influence on society. Furthermore, he serves as Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET) intending to promote the interdisciplinary discussion of engineers, educators, and engineering education researchers around technology, instruction, and research. Dr. May has organized several international conferences in the Engineering Education Research field. He is currently program co-chair and international program committee member for the annual International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation (REV) and served as a special session committee member for the Experiment@ International Conference Series (exp.at).