Speaker Wants to Re-energize Engineering

Details

Published on Thursday, 22 December 2011 22:37

By Joe Velarde

When Ioannis Miaoulis, Ph.D., began his tenure at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., he was faced with a great dilemma. There was a lingering uncertainty regarding the direction of the School of Engineering, which had lost students to the School of Arts and Sciences. When Miaoulis investigated the situation, it was just as he suspected – freshman students had begun to think engineering was boring.

“I would approach them and ask them why they thought it was boring,” he said during a Dec. 8 lecture in The University of Texas at El Paso’s Tomás Rivera Conference Center. “It occurred to me that these students hadn’t ever taken an engineering course. In fact, they’d not really been introduced to engineering at all.”

Originally from Greece, Miaoulis became director and president at the Boston Museum of Science after serving in several roles at Tufts University, including dean of the School of Engineering, associate provost, interim dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and professor of mechanical engineering. 

Miaoulis made a plea for a new curriculum in engineering that broadened the scope of the discipline and reinvigorated the degree for a newer generation of students.

He noted that as a discipline, engineering is seldom taught at the middle and high school levels.

“You hear about occupations in engineering, and you think of mechanics or even the person driving the train,” he said. “The fact is that nothing in this world would exist had it not been for the existence of engineering.”

Mechanical and electrical engineering are essentially composites of multiple STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines ranging from simple science to arithmetic that, when combined, form derivatives credited with the creation of all technology. Miaoulis argues that everything from the clothes we wear to the cars we drive comes from engineering.

Miaoulis’ curriculum involves multiple fields within the degree, including liberal arts disciplines. One of the first classes he taught at Tufts was a culinary class where he used engineering formulas and theories in the kitchen.

“It was simple, really,” he said. “After we broke for Thanksgiving, many of my students impressed their families with their cooking skills, calculating the heat and cooking time with complex mathematics and engineering theory.”

There are three vital components to Miaoulis’ new curriculum. The first is to pull resources from outside disciplines. For example, he argues that a building must be physically and scientifically practical, but must also serve as an aesthetically pleasing object.

The second is to reinvent the degree to make math and science far more relevant to students, as they are two very necessary tools within the practice of engineering.

The third component is to create career opportunities in engineering.

“Ioannis is a visionary who is leading the U.S. in education reforms,” said Peter Golding, Ph.D., associate dean of UTEP’s College of Engineering. “We will be well advised to listen to his message, and those students who learn engineering in K-12 schools in the future will become the leaders of the rising engineered world.”

Richard Schoephoerster, Ph.D., dean of UTEP’s College of Engineering, said the lecture was a refreshing new take on the degree and its future.

“His dream of an engineering education for all is very much aligned with our goals of attracting students into engineering who would otherwise not consider it as a career option,” Schoephoerster said. “We hope to develop a partnership with the Boston Museum of Science, the Insights El Paso Science Museum, and our school districts to increase the quality and quantity of engineering education in El Paso for K-12 grades.”

Miaoulis earned bachelor's and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in economics at Tufts, and received a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published more than 100 research papers and holds two patents.

He spoke as part of UTEP’s Engineering Lecture Series, which brings speakers to campus to address topics at the intersection of society and technology. This year’s theme is “Leadership for the Conceptual Age.”