Research Foci

The STRIDE research group focuses on four main areas including: 1) fundamental research on how diverse students in engineering navigate their pathways into and through engineering, with a particular focus on engineering identity development; 2) effective pedagogies and practices for an inclusive engineering education; 3) engineering workforce development; and 4) building capacity for engineering education research, particularly in chemical engineering.

Our fundamental research has explored what factors influence diverse students to choose engineering and stay in engineering through their careers, and how different experiences within the practice and culture of engineering foster or hinder belongingness and identity development. In our work, we explore multiple intersections of students’ identities, including gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, first-generation status, disability, and other social identities, to understand how diverse students navigate their engineering pathways. We also examine how students’ “latent diversity” (their underlying affective and cognitive differences) provide potential sources for innovation, but are not visible. The concept of latent diversity focuses on the alternative mindsets and experiences that students bring with them into an engineering degree program rather than on their demographics. In doing so, it takes an asset-based approach rather than focusing on the deficits of students on which some research in diversity has focused (e.g., deficiencies in academic preparation, less understanding of high education systems, lack of support systems, etc.). Students, regardless of background, bring diverse and unique ways of thinking and ideas to the table. If engineering culture privileges particular ways of thinking or being as what it means to be an engineer, it may be alienating for latently diverse students. Recognizing that students’ attitudes, mindsets, and innovation are important provides a way to support all students in engineering.

We are also translating this fundamental research into classroom practices, curricula, and policies that betters support students’ identity, motivation, and belonging. We study what types of changes are effective for positive student outcomes, and how these changes can be sustainably implemented on a large-scale. In engineering workforce development, we leverage our research to understand how to develop the next generation of engineers from K-12 to practicing engineers. And, we work to develop the next generation of engineering educators through faculty professional development, graduate student training, and collaborations.

Our active, funded projects are listed below.

Collaborative Research: Course-based Adaptations of an Ecological Belonging Intervention to Broaden Participation in Engineering at Scale

The UBelong Collaborative brings together researchers from Purdue University (Allison Godwin), University of Pittsburgh (Linda DeAngelo, Kevin Binning, and Chris Schumm), and University of California, Irvine (Natascha Buswell) on this National Science Foundation project (DUE 2111114/2111513). This project uses an ecological-belonging intervention approach that only requires a one-class or one-recitation session to implement and has been shown to erase long-standing achievement gaps by gender and race/ethnicity in several introductory STEM courses. While simple, the intervention cannot involve a fixed script for different university and course contexts. The content of the intervention needs to be customized to the local context in order to address the specific concerns students have in that specific context. This project brings a highly interdisciplinary team across three strategically-selected universities with the goal of developing an approach to identify which 1^st and 2^nd year courses need this intervention, reveal student concerns in that course, adapt the intervention to address those concerns, and address other pragmatic constraints of how that course is taught. This systematic approach also includes processes for on-boarding all the instructors of the given course. In answering a set of seven core research questions, the project intends to expand knowledge about 1) where (on which outcome variables), when (in which contexts, for which students), and why the ecological belonging intervention has positive effects, and 2) the extent to which this intervention on its own has measurable impacts on the overall problem of representation in the larger challenge of representation within the engineering pathways that have struggled with representation. This kind of foundational knowledge is critical to making decisions about when to apply the intervention as well as providing important insights into how to apply the intervention.

Collaborative Research: Assessing Empathetic Formation in Engineering Design

Empathy is essential for identifying, designing for, and meeting user needs and can motivate engineers to meaningfully engage with and respond to diverse viewpoints and values. Thus, educators need tools for developing empathy in engineers. Yet, measuring empathy is challenging because it manifests uniquely in different contexts. This NSF-sponsored project (2104782/2104792/2104979) brings together a team from Purdue, PI Justin Hess, Cornell,  Allison Godwin; Iowa State University, Nick Fila; and University at Buffalo, Corey Schimpf to develop an instrument that is capable of capturing how empathy manifests across different disciplinary and design contexts throughout the design cycle. Our primary objective is to refine this instrument and to ensure its validity, reliability, and fairness for assessing empathic formation in undergraduate engineering design. We will integrate and account for these perspectives in the expansion of the instrument, thus ensuring that the instrument captures a diverse group of instructor perspectives and needs. Thus, this study will support a critical need for a valid tool for assessing empathy in engineering design.

FMRG: Cyber: Scalable Precision Manufacturing of Programmable Polymer Nanoparticles Using Low-temperature Initiated Chemical Vapor Deposition Guided by Artificial Intelligence

Polymer nanoparticles have a broad range of significant applications, including drug delivery, soft robotics and nanomedicine, etc. However, existing manufacturing of such materials are limited by batch production, quality variability and a narrow range of particle functionality, resulting in a slow development cycle, often decade long, for new materials, recipes, and use at scale. The overall goal of this NSF-funded future manufacturing research (2229092) is to develop and investigate a novel paradigm to revolutionize manufacturing of polymer nanomaterials by integrating continuous processing, in-line characterization and AI-enabled accelerated data analysis to guide the production of programmed polymer nanoparticles. This interdisciplinary group brings together experts in polymers, liquid crystals, AI, and engineering education research—Rong Yang (PI, Cornell University), Nicholas Abbott (Co-PI, Cornell University), Fengqi You (Co-PI, Cornell University), Allison Godwin (Co-PI, Cornell University), and Jan Genzer (Co-PI, NC State). Allison Godwin leads the engineering workforce development efforts to create a technically excellent and inclusive community of cyber manufacturing researchers, learners, and professionals to bridge the gap between data science and engineering and support implementation of our new paradigm in polymer nanomaterials manufacturing.

Revolution of the CBE Undergraduate Program

Allison Godwin is the Chair of the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee in the R. F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She is leading efforts to develop a revolutionary vision for the undergraduate engineering program.

Motivating Context for ENGRI 1120: Feast! Chemical and Biomolecular Processes and Products through Food

This Course Redesign Initiative to Support Teaching for Engaged Learning (CRISTEL) grant from the McCormick Teaching Excellence Institute is re-envisioning ENGRI 1120: Introduction to Chemical Engineering at Cornell University. The current course offering has a focus on traditional chemical engineering knowledge situated in decontextualized problem-solving. This approach provides a discipline-specific set of knowledge that is often abstract and unconnected to students’ motivations for engineering and lived experiences. This proposal engages active, problem-based learning (PBL) in a partially flipped classroom. The course is focused on chemical and biomolecular engineering (CBE) processes and products in the context of food. Food as a context is relatable and connected to students’ everyday lives. It provides tangible examples and spans cultural and historical boundaries. For these reasons, food is a more motivating context than a traditionally taught course and still provides opportunities to connect to core concepts in CBE; environmental, social, and economic considerations; quality and safety; and ethics. This redesigned course invites students to consider the role of CBE in the past and present through immersive and experiential learning that engages all five senses and their minds in active learning.

CAREER: Actualizing Latent Diversity: Building Innovation through Engineering Students’ Identity Development (Completed)

The U.S. needs new and innovative engineering solutions to meet the global demands of our growing economy. However, most engineers graduating from engineering degree programs are more alike in their problem solving approaches, ways of thinking, and engineering identities than different in their skills as innovative thinkers. Students who do not conform to this mold of “being an engineer” are often alienated from engineering, do not develop engineering identities, and leave engineering, which reduces the much-needed human potential for innovation. The overarching goal of this project funded by NSF EEC (1554057) is to characterize how latently diverse students experience the culture of engineering and negotiate their identities as engineers. To answer these questions, a national survey data from first-year engineering students will be collected and latent diversity will be characterized by using topological data analysis. From these results, longitudinal narrative interviews with latently diverse students will be used to understand students’ identity development how this identity development as is supported or hindered by their classroom experiences and institutional structure. The integrated education plan will implement pedagogies to support the development of latently diverse students in first-year engineering programs (a critical time point at which many talented students are lost from engineering programs). By directly providing engineering educators and leadership with a new understanding of ways to support these latently diverse students, and by revealing unexpected problems and functional solutions in the way these students navigate engineering degree programs, the integrated research and educational plan will directly impact the educational experiences of thousands of engineering students to develop innovative, rather than homogeneous, engineers.

Learn more about the concept of latent diversity:

Check out our final story collection as well: https://engineering.purdue.edu/STORIES/.