Universities, colleges and academic departments acknowledge the need for more collaborative, multidisciplinary, entrepreneurial, and global education. Unfortunately, this is no trivial task. Centuries of tradition have produced institutional silos, reinforced by layers of policy and cultural differences between academic departments, between colleges, and between academic and non-academic units. Successful multidisciplinary programs require programmatic and administrative innovation that meet faculty, student and institutional needs and leverage available resources. The Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) model, in place at thirty-seven institutions, has achieved notable success in these areas. This paper profiles innovations from ten VIP Programs in three areas: institutional organization, program organization, and faculty approaches. With these innovations, the programs have broken down silos and cultivated meaningful partnerships to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders. The featured institutions vary in size and mission and represent four countries. Each innovation is presented with a brief background to provide context on how the VIP Program is situated within the larger institution. Together, these backgrounds, innovations, and lessons learned can benefit others seeking to develop and/or maintain cross-campus multidisciplinary programs.
Dr. Michaela E. Amoo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Howard University. Dr. Amoo designs and develops application-specific Field Programable Gate Array (FPGA) -based processors to tackle the problem of computational complexity. She has particular interest in High Performance Computing (HPC), remote sensing, autonomous navigation, and extraterrestrial applications wherein size, weight, power, speed, and computational accuracy are criteria. She has expertise in integer, fixed, and floating-point hardware system design, signal processing, controls, and atmospheric radiative transfer modelling.
Jack Bringardner is the Assistant Dean for Academic and Curricular Affairs at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. He is also an Assistant Professor in the General Engineering Department and Civil Engineering Department where he teaches the First-Year Engineering Program course Introduction to Engineering and Design. He is the Director of Vertically Integrated Projects at NYU. His Vertically Integrated Projects course is on Smart Cities Technology with a focus on transportation. His primary focus is developing curriculum, mentoring students, and engineering education research, particularly for project-based curriculum, first-year engineering, and transportation. He is active in the American Society for Engineering Education and is the Webmaster for the ASEE First-Year Programs Division and the First-Year Engineering Experience Conference. He is affiliated with the Transportation Engineering program in the NYU Civil and Urban Engineering Department. He is the advisor for NYU student chapter of the Institute for Transportation Engineers.
Dr. Jen-Yeu Chen’s research interests span over the areas of networking, control and communications. In particular, in recent years, he focuses on machine learning, optimization, decision and control problems for effective and energy-efficient designs in next generation wireless communication systems. He has developed energy-efficient and computing-effective protocols/algorithms for next generation IoT applications such as wireless resource allocation and data transmission as well as forwarding mechanisms in 3GPP C-V2X and FeNB-IoT/eFeMTC. For latency-sensitive AIoT systems requiring Mobile Edge Computing, distributed algorithms for optimal resource allocation were proposed. He is also developing practical AIoT systems to solve real-life problems in the fields of smart agriculture and smart healthcare and smart education. Some other problems he tackled were data aggregation/fusion, distributed consensus, power control, scheduling and synchronization in wireless ad hoc networks, intrusion detection in a large scale wireless sensor network with Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), and coordinated probabilistic map construction by the mobile robotic sensor network (a multi-agent system) such as a group of UAVs.
Dr. Chen obtained his PhD from School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, USA. Prior to his PhD study, he was with Chunghwa Telecom Laboratories, CHTL, Taiwan. He is a 3GPP regular meeting delegate by the collaboration with ITRI, Taiwan.
Edward J. Coyle is the John B. Peatman Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He is the Director of both the VIP Program at GT and the VIP Consortium. Dr. Coyle was a co-recipient of the National Academy of Engineering’s 2005 Bernard M. Gordon Award for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education; ASEE's 1997 Chester F. Carlson Award; and, the 2019 ABET Innovation Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and his research interests include reform of higher education, wireless and sensor networks, and signal and image processing.
Jillana Finnegan works in the College of Innovation and Design as a Director of Programs. She supports the Vertically Integrated Projects program as well as other initiatives in the college to shape the future of higher education.
Charles Kim is a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Howard University. He received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University in College Station ,TX in 1989, and worked as a researcher at Texas A&M University before he took an assistant professor at the University of Suwon in 1994. Since 1999, he is with Howard University. Dr. Kim's research interests include energy systems, fault detection and anticipation, embedded computing, safety-critical computer systems, and statistical and machine reasoning. Dr. Kim is active in faculty-student team project through the Vertically Integrated Projects program. Also for years he's been in practicing experiential learning through the Inclusive Engineering Consortium in engineering education with personal instrumentation such as mobile studio.
http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-8445-6333
University of Michigan
[biography]
Trish Koman is the faculty research program manager at the University of Michigan College of Engineering Multidisciplinary Design Program. She supports over a dozen research teams engaging an average of 200 students and conducts educational research. She is also a research investigator at the University of Michigan School of Public Health Environmental Health Sciences department, where she leads community-engaged multidisciplinary research to create healthier communities.
Trish draws on over 20 years of public service as a senior environmental scientist at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) working mainly to improve air quality. She was part of the leadership team for the US EPA's National Clean Diesel Campaign, where she initiated a partnership to reduce diesel emissions at U.S. marine ports and helped create the Clean School Bus USA partnership program to protect children's health. Trish managed multi-disciplinary benefit-cost analyses, regulatory programs, and technological innovation initiatives. Her air quality and policy analyses formed the rationale for setting landmark national ambient air quality standards for fine particulate matter, which withstood a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court. She has been recognized with four Gold Medals for exceptional service to the country and an EPA Administrator award for excellence. In partnership with community groups, Trish led an environmental education effort in Flint, Michigan. Trish received a University of Michigan Provost award for innovation in teaching. She earned a B.A. with distinction in philosophy and chemistry from the University of Virginia, a masters degree in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Michigan.
Magda Lagoudas, Executive Director for Industry & Nonprofit Partnerships, has been at Texas A&M University since 1992 and served on several capacities across the College of Engineering, including Director for the Space Engineering Institute and Associate Director for the Space Engineering Research Center. Current responsibilities include pursuing strategic partnerships with industry to provide engineering students with opportunities to collaborate on multidisciplinary teams addressing real world challenges and with industry engagement. College signature programs include the Texas A&M I-Corps Site, AggiE_Challenge, INSPIRES, and two annual Project Showcases. Magda is the Principal Investigator of the Texas A&M University I-Corps Site grant and has been active in promoting entrepreneurship both at the local and national level.
Donna Crystal Llewellyn received her BA (major in Mathematics and minor in Economics) with High Honors from Swarthmore College in 1980. She went on to earn an MS in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University in 1984. After 30 years at Georgia Tech in a variety of roles, Donna became the Executive Director of the new Institute for STEM and Diversity Initiatives at Boise State University in January 2015. Donna's current interests center around education issues in general, and in particular on increasing access and success of those traditionally under-represented and/or under-served in STEM higher education.
Dr Louise Logan is a Learning Enhancement Officer at the University of Strathclyde and Program Coordinator for the University's Vertically Integrated Projects for Sustainable Development program. She completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded PhD in English in 2019.
Assistant Director, Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program, Georgia Institute of Technology; Doctoral student in Education Policy Studies at Georgia State University, with a concentration in Research, Measurement and Statistics; Master of Education in Education Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Nadia M. Trent is a senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Pretoria (UP). In 2018 she piloted the first Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Programme in Africa with the help of the VIP consortium. The programme has immense potential to improve teaching and learning at UP and other South African institutions. It alleviates many challenges and harnesses opportunities created by extreme diversity (race, religion, economic status, language etc) on campus. Nadia's own VIP team develops multi-agent transportation simulation models to address policy issues in South Africa as a part of ongoing research streams within the Centre for Transport Development.
Scott M. Strachan received his B.Eng. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees in 1995 and 2005 from the University of Strathclyde, where he now works as a Senior Teaching Fellow. Since his research appointment within the Institute of Energy and Environment (Inst EE) in 1997, he has conducted and supported numerous research projects with leading UK energy companies, mainly focusing on the areas of plant condition monitoring, asset management, data mining, knowledge management and engineering, and intelligent systems applications for power systems. He has been active in the energy access area of research since 2006. He was a founder of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering (EEE) Department’s outreach Gambia Solar Project and Tamil Nadu Solar Project; both staff-student initiatives delivering off-grid solar PV systems to rural schools and health clinics. He is also the co-director of the university’s flagship Vertically Integrated Project for Sustainable Development program, which coordinates undergraduate and post-graduate research tackling the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the Low Carbon Energy Development Network.
Ben Ward is Associate Professor, Chemical and Life Science Engineering, and Director Project Outreach in the College of Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University. In his role as Director Project Outreach he is director of the College’s Capstone Senior Design program. A key part of this responsibility is identifying Health Science, non-profit and industrially sponsored projects for engineering student teams to work on. Dr Ward is also Principal Investigator for the Engineering Critical Patient Care VIP team, which develops medical devices for various constituencies in the VCU Health System. One of the developed devices has been taken private by a company founded by former students.
Prior to joining Virginia Commonwealth University, Ben had an industrial R&D, Engineering and Product Development career spanning 33 years. This includes Hoechst Celanese from 1981 to 2000, and Filtrona (Essentra) Porous Technologies as VP of R&D from 2001 to 2013. He led successful product development activities in very diverse areas, such as ultra-high temperature resistant thermoplastics, gas barrier coatings for tires, moisture indicating wicks for pregnancy test kits, porous storage and ink release media for ink jet printer cartridges, absorptive components for endoscopic surgical instruments, and specialty filter media. He is inventor or co-inventor of over 30 US patents and foreign equivalents.
Dr Ward is a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors, Sigma XI and the American Chemical Society.
Ben has a Ph.D. in Organic and Inorganic Chemistry from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was an Eastman Kodak Fellow, and a B.S. in Chemistry from Duke University.
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