Carnegie Mellon University

Eberly Center

Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation

2023-2024 Wimmer Faculty Fellows

We are pleased to announce the 2023-2024 Wimmer Faculty Fellows. 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. 

Amanda (Mandie) Krause headshotAmanda (Mandie) Krause
Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering

Mandie is expanding the learning objectives of a junior-level core course in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, “Microstructure & Properties I.” Her redesigned course will support students in developing their creative problem-solving skills. Creativity is essential for innovative engineering work and highly valued by employers, but not often taught or rewarded by traditional classroom assessments. Mandie plans to replace some lectures with experimental design critique and brainstorming sessions, develop assessments that reward multiple solutions and out-of-the-box thinking, and use writing assignments to help students engage in metacognitive reflection.


Ryan M. Prendergast headshotRyan M. Prendergast
Assistant Teaching Professor, School of Drama and School of Music


Ryan is redesigning Foundations of Drama I, a required course for first year students in the School of Drama. He is working to streamline various versions of the course from over the years to better connect course topics and assignments with his learning objectives. Ryan is designing the course to be an inclusive and cohesive experience for first year students, no matter which area the students have most experience in. This requires scaffolding and fairly assessing student skills in dramatic analysis, dramaturgical research, and critical response and presentation. Through the use of guided readings through Perusall and active learning strategies at the individual and group level, Ryan is invigorating this course to serve the needs of students and develop important skills.


Jonathan Walton HeadshotJonathan Walton
Assistant Teaching Professor, Entertainment Technology Center

Jonathan will be teaching "Introduction to Game Design,” a course targeted to both ETC master’s students and undergraduates in IDeATe’s Game Design minor. Jonathan aims to revamp the goals of this long standing staple in the ETC program to better meet the curricular and professional needs of current and future students. To achieve this, he will be restructuring major assignments in the course to align with his new learning objectives, and will be incorporating strategies to center students as the primary audience and judges of design work so they are better able to identify themselves and their peers, as well as their professors, as fellow game designers.


Jerry Wang HeadshotJerry Wang
Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chemical Engineering (by courtesy), Mechanical Engineering (by courtesy)

Jerry is focusing on several changes to “Intro to Computation and Data Science for Civil and Environmental Engineering.” To foster more collaborative learning, Jerry is expanding the number of team-based activities by reducing time spent in the classroom lecturing. He’ll be recording short video lectures that will target especially technical aspects of the course and pair them with formative assessments to help students prepare for the collaborative class time. Jerry is also connecting material from multiple courses by redesigning some problem sets to explicitly rely on platforms and principles that students learned about in other required courses, supporting interleaved practice across the CEE curriculum. Finally, Jerry is fostering an affirming environment by developing biographical profiles for historically underrepresented scientists and engineers as an extension of his “Get to Know a Computational Science or Engineer!”