The California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) is awarded travel support for a multidisciplinary team of 12 U.S. participants (8 senior faculty, 2 junior faculty and 2 graduate students) to visit to two institutions in China: Tongji University in Shanghai and Nanjing University of Technology in Nanjing. The objective of the January 2008 planning visit is to assess the expertise, capabilities and facilities at the foreign sites in order to develop a protocol to conduct follow-on research aimed at engineering learning mechanisms: that is, how to educate engineers to innovate and design sustainable solutions in the global marketplace.
The U.S. PI is Dr. Linda Vanasupa, director of the Educating Global Engineers Initiative and Professor of Materials Engineering at Cal Poly. The primary Chinese counterparts are Dr. ZHAO, Jianfu, Vice President and Professor in the College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at Tongji University, and Dr. LIU, Weiqing, International Cooperation Office, Nanjing University of Technology.
The planning visit activities are thoughtfully structured and theoretically focused. The planning visit will catalyze research that explicitly examines the influence of diversity (gender, ethnic, economic and cultural) on engineering education.
