The R.F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering may occupy Olin Hall, the oldest - and first - building on Cornell's Pew Engineering Quad, but its faculty and staff are embracing the future.
With the support of a Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the school has committed to a five-year project that will update the undergraduate curriculum, completely overhaul how it is delivered and reshape the school's culture. It is the first Ivy League engineering school to receive such a grant, and the proposal that secured the award included letters of commitment signed by every single member of the school's faculty and staff.
"We've always produced excellent engineers, but the world is changing and so are its needs and opportunities," said Susan Daniel, the William C. Hooey Director of the R.F. Smith School and the primary investigator on the grant.
"As a school, we have agreed to evaluate what we're teaching and how we're preparing engineers for this future," Daniel said. "Not only are we thinking about the teaching process, but we're also thinking deeply about the learning process. We've embraced a research-backed, iterative approach where we make changes, test out ideas and hypotheses to enhance learning, and learn some things about ourselves. It's going to take time and effort, but we are all on board, and we are grateful for the support from NSF to give us the resources to do it."
According to the NSF, the RED program funds projects that are "designing revolutionary new approaches to engineering education" and entail "a focus on organizational and cultural change within the departments, involving students, faculty, staff and industry in rethinking what it means to provide an engineering program."
The R.F. Smith School intends to use the grant to embrace what Daniel called a "Living Laboratory Ecosystem," that rewards asking new questions, testing innovative approaches, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, and continuously enhancing and applying new knowledge and methods to tackling local, national and global challenges.
"I want to congratulate Susan and the entire R.F. Smith School community for their leadership in embracing engineering education research and innovation," said Lynden Archer, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering and a former director of the R.F. Smith School. "This grant is confirmation that we are headed in the right direction. I am confident that it will accelerate our progress in ways that will prove transformative for our learning community, as well as others that learn from our example."
The work supported by the RED grant will build on the school's recent investments in faculty whose research focuses on how engineering students best learn and retain technical subjects, form identities as engineers and enter engineering career fields.
Allison Godwin, who specializes in engineering identity development, practices for inclusive education and engineering workforce development, joined the school in 2023, becoming Cornell Engineering's first tenured faculty member focused on engineering education research. She has since been named the Dr. G. Stephen Irwin '67, '68 Professor of Engineering Education Research.
Alexandra Coso Strong, an associate professor whose research focuses on identifying and developing approaches to sustainable and transformative change within educational and other complex systems, joined in the R.F. Smith School and Cornell's Systems Engineering program in 2024.
These additions, along with other subsequent engineering education research hires in Cornell Engineering, are part of a broader initiative to augment the college's existing programs focused on engineering education, such as the James McCormick Family Teaching Excellence Institute.
"What I'm really excited about is the chance to bring together research at different scales all in one department," said Coso Strong, who - like Godwin - is one of the co-investigators on the grant. "Typically, you only have the bandwidth to focus on one aspect, such as the student experience or the faculty and staff experience. We're getting a chance to make change across all these levels and groups."
The other co-investigators on the grant are Jeffrey Varner, associate director of the R.F. Smith School and director of their Master of Engineering programs, and T. Michael Duncan, the Raymond G. Thorpe Teaching Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the school's director of undergraduate studies.
Ultimately, Daniel and her colleagues hope their work has an impact far beyond the walls of Olin Hall.
"At the end of it all, we'll have actually transformed the way that chemical engineers are educated in our program and hopefully inspired others to think about starting their own revolutions and creating their own unique way of educating future engineers," Daniel said. "It's the first step in fostering the national-level changes necessary to create the human capital that will serve our nation well."
