Dr. Nicola Sochacka was a research scientist and EETI’s Associate Director for Research Initiation and Enablement from 2017 to 2022. Her research program was underpinned by a deep appreciation for diverse perspectives. She worked closely with faculty and students to design qualitative studies that embody a focus on in-process research ethics and bridging the research to practice gap. Her interests included scaling her and her colleagues’ pedagogical developments on fostering empathy in engineering to other instructional settings; increasing the capacity of technical engineering faculty to conduct engineering education research; and piloting a novel methodology called SenseMaker® to investigate and improve the experience of studying engineering at UGA.

Dr. Sochacka is now an adjunct faculty member in UGA’s College of Engineering, and works as the co-founder, owner, and leader of the ProQual Institute for Interpretive Research Methods.