Professional Societies, Career Paths, and Diversity in Engineering
April 22, 2019
The National Academy of Engineering has long played an important role in examining engineering practice and leveraging its findings and resources to help guide the direction of engineering education accordingly. In this talk, Beth will give an overview of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as well as more specific programs of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). She will (1) present information from recent NAE projects that examined how engineering professional societies can better engage with undergraduate engineering education, the educational and career pathways of engineers, and furthering diversity and inclusion in the engineering workforce; and (2) how this information can be incorporated in engineering education.
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Dr. Elizabeth T. Cady is a Senior Program Officer at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). She has worked on a variety of projects that examine and enhance systems for the formal, informal, and lifelong education of engineers. She is leading a project that will recognize and share innovative practices that improve diversity in undergraduate engineering education and also staffs a consensus study examining the capacity of K-12 teachers to teach engineering as well as LinkEngineering, an online toolkit to support PreK-12 engineering education. From 2009-2016 she ran the Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium, which brought together innovative engineering faculty members to recognize their accomplishments in incorporating innovative practices into their teaching and promote dissemination of pioneering practice in engineering education. She also co-edited a resource collection translating research on women in science and engineering into practical tips for faculty members and worked on the Online Ethics Center, a website that supports ethics education and science and engineering. She earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Cognitive and Human Factors Psychology from Kansas State University and a B.A. in psychobiology and political science from Wheaton College in Massachusetts.