Drs. Joachim Walther and Nicola Sochacka will create The ProQual Institute (PQI) for research Methods in STEM education. The overarching goal of this project is to expand the community of scholars who have the skills to conduct high quality, qualitative and mixed methods research in STEM education. Walther and Sochacka will achieve this goal through the PQI, which will implement a novel, problem-led, research-quality- focused approach to developing educational research methods capacity.

The PQI will also leverage the PI team’s expertise in successfully managing a local institute at the University of Georgia, the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI), where their mission is to “transform engineering education through building social capital and shared capacity around the scholarship of teaching and learning in engineering”