Educating empathic engineers: Challenges and opportunities

This talk is sponsored by the Kern Program on Purposefully Duke and the Kenan Institute for Ethics. The seminar will be recorded. Zoom meeting information will be provided after registration. Dr. Nicola W. Sochacka is a research scientist and the Associate Director for Research Initiation and Enablement in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) at UGA. Her multi-pronged research program is underpinned by a deep appreciation for diverse perspectives. She works closely with faculty and students within and outside of engineering to design cutting edge qualitative studies that embody a focus on in-process research ethics and bridging the research to practice gap. Her current interests include scaling her and her colleagues' pedagogical developments on fostering empathy in engineering to other instructional settings; increasing the capacity of technical faculty in her college to engage with and conduct engineering education research; and piloting a novel methodological approach called SenseMaker® to investigate and improve faculty, staff, and student experiences in engineering at UGA. Her work has been recognized through multiple best paper awards and keynote presentations at international and national conferences and workshops.