Champion for engineering education efforts in Southeast Asia Khairiyah Mohd Yusof, a Purdue University Professor of Engineering Education (ENE), was honored this fall with the International Society of Engineering Pedagogy’s (IGIP) highest award.

The IGIP Nikola Tesla Chain, awarded for international outstanding achievements in the field of engineering pedagogy, was presented to Mohd Yusof during the 2023 IGIP Annual Conference held Sept. 28 in Madrid, Spain.

Professor Mohd Yusof joined the faculty of Purdue ENE in 2023 after retiring from a 30-year career at the University Teknologi Malaysia’s (UTM) Department of Chemical Engineering. At UTM, she founded its Centre for Engineering Education (CEE) in 2011 and was its director until 2021. She was responsible for researching and developing innovative teaching and learning methods, mentoring faculty on new approaches to educating engineers, and promoting scholarly engineering education.

“Good scholarly teaching should be shared beyond the four walls of the classroom, and the Nicola Tesla Chain does this by calling attention—at an international level—to the contribution of engineering educators, even those working in parts of the world where engineering education is not recognized as an area of significance,” said Mohd Yusof.

Through her leadership roles with the Society of Engineering Education Malaysia, the Research in Engineering Education Network, and the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies, she helped to develop and support communities of practice in Asia, especially Malaysia. For almost 20 years, she led CEE-designed modules and mentored faculty champions and change agents there and at institutions in Indonesia, Afghanistan, and several other countries. Utilizing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) model as a framework, she mentored faculty to take a scholarly approach to engineering education and inspired them to publish scholarly articles on their teaching impact as well as create engineering education centers in their institutions and societies in their countries.

“I hope this award inspires engineering educators everywhere to further develop and sustain their practice and share their knowledge. Never underestimate sincere efforts in micro-level SoTL implementation!” said Mohd Yusof.

Mohd Yusof’s own research and teaching efforts have focused on improved student learning while supporting faculty to innovate and create impactful, student-centered learning environments in their courses and engineering programs. On her journey to continuously improve her own practice as an engineering educator, she developed the Cooperative Problem-based Learning (CPBL) model to support students while they undergo problem- and project-based learning for small student-groups in a typical classroom setting.