Carnegie Mellon University

Headshot of Katherine Flanigan

October 06, 2022

Flanigan Named Wimmer Faculty Fellow

CEE Assistant Professor Katherine Flanigan was named one of the 2022-23 Wimmer Faculty Fellows at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation. These fellowships are made possible by a grant from the Wimmer Family Foundation and are designed for junior faculty members interested in enhancing their teaching through concentrated work designing or re-designing a course, innovating new materials, or exploring a new pedagogical approach. Fellows work in close collaboration with Eberly Center colleagues and receive a stipend to acknowledge the work it takes to improve one's effectiveness as an educator. 

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 two projects and a series of skill-building assignments, 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 interdisciplinary engineering problems, Flanigan is developing an engineering design module that integrates sensing, computing, and data acquisition in a universal way that can be transferred across domains. 

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.