IEEE TRYEngineering and IEEE Awards held a special Engineer Spotlight with the recipient of the 2022 IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award, Dr. Christopher Rose on Friday, 8 April 2022. The webinar is now available to listen to on demand.
During the interview with Burt Dicht, Director of IEEE’s Student and Academic Education Programs, Rose shares his story of what inspired him to become an engineer (spoiler alert: it was because, like other engineers, he “liked to take stuff apart … and wanted to know how stuff worked”); whether he felt ready, as a black youth from an inner city, for the engineering program as a student at MIT (he likens it to “stepping into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory”); what led him to transition from an engineering career in industry to one in academia; and how his approach to challenge students can be incorporated at the pre-university level to aid educators and IEEE volunteers engaged in STEM outreach in enhancing their own programs as well as attracting underrepresented groups to STEM.
An IEEE Fellow, Rose inspires his students to dream big in realizing important technologies benefitting society. An early champion of the capstone concept while at Rutgers University, Rose challenged his communications theory students by asking how they would like to see wireless technology change the world—and gave them to tools and support to do so. Results from his students’ capstone projects included wireless parking meters and parking decks, an app that monitors vital statistics of firefighters, and an energy-saving mesh network for reactive lighting.
Now a Professor of Engineering and Associate Provost for STEM Initiatives at Brown University, Rose is the recipient of the 2022 IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award, “for innovations in team-oriented signature design and inspiring women and underrepresented minority students to pursue engineering.” The award is sponsored by the IEEE Education Society.
You can listen to this interesting and fun interview on demand by registering for the webinar at: https://connect.ieee.org/NzU2LUdQSC04OTkAAAGDmJZhjHbep4u4MXyQe7n2Z2hPHvhYiYjiHvK5KOjPS5w1x3Gr3aaEGkNB4yax-Pe_LkSxLEA=
The Engineer Spotlight was started several years ago to introduce practicing engineers to pre-university faculty and students to give them an idea of what engineers do and how they do it. TRYEngineering is part of IEEE Educational Activities. It’s a program to bring engineering and technology into the classroom for educators.