2022-2023 Wimmer Faculty Fellows

Zachary Branson
Assistant Teaching Professor, Statistics

Zach is designing a new mini-course to help students learn to effectively communicate statistical results and research to different audiences. This course is designed for upper-level undergraduates to complement their ongoing research or capstone projects, since communication skills aren’t usually formally taught. Zach plans to use in-class activities, written reflections, peer critiques, and videotaped practice to help students develop their communication skills. Students will also get experience delivering short- and long-form oral presentations on both their own work as well as others’ research. Zach will also focus on inclusive teaching strategies to help students feel comfortable being vulnerable with each other and him, as they practice developing their oral presentation skills. 

Katherine Flanigan
Assistant Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering

Katherine Flanigan is revising 12-200 - CEE Challenges: Design in a Changing World, a sophomore-level design course in Civil & Environmental Engineering in which students are challenged with solving problems related to conventional, cutting-edge, and emerging issues in CEE. Through three projects, students learn about the engineering design process and apply skills in sensing, computing, and data acquisition to real-world scenarios. In order to help students apply and transfer the design process to other engineering problems, Katherine is developing an universal engineering design module. Students will apply the engineering design module in each of their projects to see how the module applies in different contexts, as well as reflect on how the module can apply in future engineering courses and scenarios. 

Daniel Rosenberg Munoz
Assistant Professor, Design

Daniel Rosenberg Munoz teaches a first-year seminar class to MA students in Design in which students learn about the field of innovation design and start thinking about their area of interest for their upcoming thesis work. Daniel will create active learning activities throughout the semester to foster discussion among students, help them master innovative ideas of design, and prepare research proposals, the next big step in their program. Daniel plans to create a set of principles to organize the in-class activities during the semester including prework, the discussion itself, and reflections afterwards.

Zeynep Temel
Assistant Professor, Robotics

Zeynep Temel will be teaching a new course for undergraduate students across all CMU disciplines who have an interest in robotics but who are not robotics majors. Her goal is for students to get more hands-on experience building robots and “leave with a robot in their pocket.” To do this, she is interested in designing active and inquiry-based learning experiences to give students the chance to play and learn from robots in the classroom and will be exploring ways to help them present their work to various audiences through different presentation modes.