Vanderbilt engineering professors receive national education award

Vanderbilt engineering professor Robert J. Roselli received the American Society for Engineering Education’s 2007 William Elgin Wickenden Award at the ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition held in Honolulu, Hawaii, on June 27.

The award, sponsored by the Journal of Engineering Education, is given to the authors of the paper judged to be the best paper published in the scholarly research journal during the previous January-to-October publication cycle.

Roselli and Purdue University collaborator Sean P. Brophy received the award for their paper, “Effectiveness of Challenge-Based Instruction in Biomechanics,” which was published in the October 2006 issue of the journal.  The paper reports results of a three year study in which challenge-based instruction, based on principles outlined in the National Research Council’s report How People Learn, is compared with traditional taxonomy-based instruction.

Robert J. Roselli is a professor of biomedical engineering and chemical engineering at Vanderbilt. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering and his doctorate in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

He is a founding member of the Vanderbilt Department of Biomedical Engineering, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in biotransport and biomechanics, and serves as the director of graduate studies.  Roselli is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society. He served as Education Director and is currently the Biotransport Domain Leader for the Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard-MIT Engineering Research Center for Bioengineering Technologies (VaNTH ERC).

Sean P. Brophy was a research professor at Vanderbilt when the study was conducted.  He is currently an assistant professor of engineering education at Purdue University. While at Vanderbilt University, he was a member of the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (CTGV) and was Thrust leader of the Learning Sciences group for the VaNTH ERC.

 

American Society for Engineering Education ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Robert J. Roselli