KEEN Rising Stars

The 2020 KEEN Rising Stars

by Edmond J. Dougherty, April 2021. 

On my first day as an undergrad, the Dean addressed all the first-year engineers and said, “Look to your left; look to your right. One of you won’t be here by sophomore year.” 

It was no idle threat. Both of my high school friends were gone by winter break. In senior year, my required Electromagnetic Field Theory course was taught by a stern, gaunt character right out of a Dickens novel. He delighted in the fact that he was the only one who understood the hundreds of equations he scratched on the chalkboard. The class average was 17 out of 100. During his final exam, the very last of my undergraduate career, I stared at the sheet of exam questions without a clue where to begin. I looked over at the brightest student in our class. He was red-faced, tears streaming down his face. I relaxed for the first time in four years and just did my best. 

Fortunately, the pedagogical mindset of “only the strong survive” is long gone from most campuses. Today, engineering classrooms are more nurturing, experiential, and team-oriented. These techniques encourage students to better understand engineering technology and its practical uses in society.

Education starts with the educators. KEEN focuses its efforts on enhancing the capabilities of engineering faculty. As part of its effort to showcase excellence in education, the KEEN awards task force recently announced the 2020 KEEN “Rising Stars”: Dr. Blake Hylton of Ohio Northern University, Dr. Cheryl Bodnar of Rowan University, and the KEEN National Rising Star, Dr. Cristi Bell-Huff of Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Rising Stars are three junior faculty who “have gone above and beyond to equip undergraduate engineers to create personal, economic, and societal value through the entrepreneurial mindset.” They are dedicated to making entrepreneurially minded learning commonplace in engineering education so that one day, entrepreneurial engineering is simply engineering. 

Just like last year, I had the privilege to interview these Rising Stars. In addition to seeing their commitment to entrepreneurially minded learning, and KEEN’s 3C’s (Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value), I was delighted to hear their individual approaches to making the engineering classroom more welcoming, thought-provoking, and relevant - all while ensuring the technical content is more understandable to students. 

KEEN’s Rising Stars show us a variety of ways to make great engineering education happen. This is a vastly different experience than what I had with the professors of my youth - and students are better off because of it. 

Let me introduce you to this year’s Rising Stars: The Performer, the Gamer, and the Storyteller.

Dr. Blake Hylton, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Ohio Northern University (ONU), constantly searches for opportunities to improve his classes, draw connections between courses and content, and develop new and better ways to unlock the value in that content for students. The entrepreneurial mindset really encapsulates his spirit of continuous improvement and persistence through failure.

The entrepreneurial mindset is an essential core element of Cheryl Bodnar’s personality and drives her daily. Despite not having any formal training in engineering education, she employed her curiosity about the field to identify gaps and opportunities, and build a successful research program

The top KEEN Rising Star award winner is Dr. Cristi Bell-Huff, a Lecturer and Director of Faculty and Student Training at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Dr. Cristi Bell-Huff has consistently demonstrated an entrepreneurial mindset, such as connecting design practices to engineering for her students to benefit local community members, and implementing vertically-integrated, story-driven entrepreneurially-minded learning curriculum.

By listening to real-life stories, students learn how people deal with stressful situations. In Bell-Huff’s 2018 KEEN Talk, "Empathy and the entrepreneurial mindset," we meet “Robert,” a person with mental and physical disabilities who works assembling spray bottles. He is paid by the bottle, but he earns much less than his co-workers because he is only able to use his left hand. 

Bell-Huff’s students from her sophomore design class visited Robert’s workplace to interview him and observe the assembly process. The students learned that in addition to his slower pace, the repetition was painful. After testing prototypes, the students soon delivered a simple, low cost but effective system that they knew would work for Robert: A gravity fed bottle dispenser and a motorized bottle grip that helped twist on the spray mechanism. 

Robert was happy. His productivity and pay increased dramatically, and his work-related pain was eliminated. The students learned many lessons they will employ throughout their careers.