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KEEN COMPASS Team – Other Institutions

PhotoBioRole on this Project
Dr. Heather Dillon, Professor and Chair

University of Washington Tacoma
Dr. Heather Dillon’s research team is currently working on renewable energy systems, solid-state lighting, fundamental heat transfer studies and engineering education. She is the Chair of the Council on Undergraduate Research Engineering Division and recently served as the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in STEM Education at the University of Calgary, Alberta. Before joining academia, Heather Dillon worked for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as a senior research engineer working on both energy efficiency and renewable energy systems, where she received the US Department of Energy Office of Science Outstanding Mentor Award. Heather loves working on projects that support EM with students. She is helping the team manage the engineering faculty development side of the project - How do we help engineering faculty adopt best practices for EM assessment?
Dr. Nicole Ralston

University of Portland
Dr. Nicole Ralston is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon. She received her M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction from University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) and her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in Measurement, Statistics, and Research Design from the University of Washington, and now teaches primarily educational research courses to graduate students, as well as math methods to future elementary teachers. An elementary school teacher at heart, she loves supervising elementary student teachers and supporting local school districts by being the co-director of the Multnomah County Partnership for Education Research (MCPER), a research-practice partnership (RPP) designed to provide district-driven research in service of six local districts. Nicole is newer to KEEN and EM, but has loved supporting engineering faculty on her campus to implement educational pedagogies in their KEEN modules and improve KEEN assessment use over the past three years. On this project, she will work with Heather on managing the faculty development side, including developing online Thinkific modules.
Dr. Deb Grzybowski

Professor of Practice

Department of Engineering Education

Asst. Dean of Teaching & Learning

College of Engineering

The Ohio State University
Dr. Deborah M. Grzybowski is a Professor of Practice in the Department of Engineering Education and Assistant Dean of Teaching and Learning in the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University. She has been involved with developing and accessing curriculum for over 20 years. Her research focuses on making engineering accessible for all, including persons with disabilities and underrepresented students, through innovative curriculum, assessment, and professional development. Infusing and assessing entrepreneurial-minded learning into the first-year curriculum and developing a new undergraduate major in Esports and Game Studies at OSU has been her focus for the past few years.

Previously Deb was the manager of the Large Item Test Facility in the Hazardous Materials Research Facility at Battelle Memorial Institute. She also was the Director of the Ohio Lions Eye Research Facility in the Department of Ophthalmology at OSU for 11 years where her research focused on regulation of intracranial pressure.
Deb began her involvement with developing EM infused curriculum and assessment of EM as co-Principal Investigator for the Ohio State University’s Kern Family Foundation Grant “Exploring the Impacts of Entrepreneurial Minded Learning (EML) on Student Motivation and Identity from Pilot to Scale in a First-Year Engineering Course.” She led the Phase 3 assessment plan of the project. Deb is also going to be a part of the testing team for the Thinkific site along with piloting the modules at OSU.
Mike Rust



Western New England University
Dr. Mike Rust joined the faculty of Western New England University in 2009 where he currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Rust is the Director of the Honors Program and Co-Director of the First Year Program in the College of Engineering. He teaches undergraduate courses in bioinstrumentation, physiology, lab-on-a-chip, and global health. Mike is a member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). Dr. Rust’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), American Society for Quality (ASQ), Kern Family Foundation (KFF), and the Jenzabar Foundation. His research interests involve the development of point-of-care medical technologies, including bioinstrumentation for use in low-resource settings. Mike will be coordinating pilot versions of assessment modules within the Thinkific online learning platform. He will also support networking, team building, and planning activities for the project.
Tim Doughty

University of Portland
Dr. Tim Doughty is Professor and Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Program at the University of Portland’s Shiley School of Engineering. He serves as the KEEN Lead, an advisory board member for the new Innovation Minor, and has served as a University Leadership Coach, a Faculty Scholar for Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and as a Dundon-Berchtold Fellow of Ethics.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Washington State University and his Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University.

His discipline research interests are primarily in nonlinear vibrations with applications in both nondestructive health monitoring and assistive technology. His pedagogical interests center around aspirational ethics and student identity, emphasizing engineering in service to humanity.
Happy to be working with this talented and inspiring team.