Alice Pawley
ARMSTRONG HALL
701 WEST STADIUM AVENUE
WEST LAFAYETTE, IN 47907-2045
Biography
Dr. Pawley is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Program and the Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University.
She was co-PI of Purdue’s ADVANCE program from 2008-2014, focusing on the underrepresentation of women in STEM faculty positions. She runs the Feminist Research in Engineering Education (FREE, formerly RIFE, group), whose diverse projects and group members are described at feministengineering.org. She received a CAREER award in 2010 and a PECASE award in 2012 for her project researching the stories of undergraduate engineering women and men of color and white women. She has received ASEE-ERM’s best paper award for her CAREER research, and the Denice Denton Emerging Leader award from the Anita Borg Institute, both in 2013. She helped found, fund, and grow the PEER Collaborative, a peer mentoring group of early career and recently tenured faculty and research staff primarily evaluated based on their engineering education research productivity.
Dr. Pawley's goal through her work at Purdue is to help people, including the engineering education profession, develop a vision of engineering education as more inclusive, engaged, and socially just. To do this, she believes in saying what needs to be said - to colleagues, students, and the profession as a whole. She sees community as her religion in how she mentors graduate students, engages with colleagues in her local department, seeks collaborations with colleagues across disciplines and across the country, and engages actively as a citizen in local, state, and national progressive politics. She believes that waste (of anything, including time, energy, effort, or materials) is a form a disrespect to oneself and others, and strives to use organizational systems to better focus both her and her students' attention on doing this important work together. She also believes that noticing daily details about people's lives honours us all as human beings, and shows this through getting curious about students and colleagues' lives to recognize the realities everyone is dealing with as we come to do our work together. It is through these core values that Dr. Pawley tries to embody and advance a more inclusive, engaged, and socially just vision of engineering education.
Hometown
Education
M.S. (Industrial), masters of science in industrial engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ph.D. (Industrial), Doctor of philosophy in industrial engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Research Interests
Selected Publications
Walther, Joachim*, Alice L. Pawley*, Nicola Sochacka* (2016) "Data Sharing in Interpretive Engineering Education Research: Challenges and Opportunities from a Research Quality Perspective." Advances in Engineering Education 5(2), Spring 2016. Link
Walther, Joachim*, Alice L. Pawley*, Nicola Sochacka*. (2018) "Exploring Ethical Validation as a Key Consideration in Interpretive Research Quality." Journal of Engineering Education 107(3) 362-379.
Slaton, Amy E.*, Alice L. Pawley*. (2018) "The Power and Politics of STEM Research Design: Saving the 'Small N'". Engineering Studies 10(2-3) 133-157.
Pawley, Alice L.* (2019) "Learning from small numbers: Studying ruling relations that gender and race the structure of U.S. engineering education." Journal of Engineering Education 108, 13-31
Mejia, Joel Alejandro, Renata Alonso Revelo, Alice L. Pawley, (2020) "Thinking about racism in engineering education in new ways." IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2 December 2020.
Pawley, Alice L., Erin Cech, Stephanie Farrell, Donna Riley (2019) "Targeted harassment of engineering education researchers: How to connect with community and support your colleagues under attack." Presented 2019 American Society for Engineering Education conference, Tampa FL.
Awards & Honors
- Distinguished Service Award, Indiana Conference of the American Association of University Professors, "in recognition of outstanding campaign leadership." Recognizing leadership around the INAAUP Campaign StopSB202, and on revitalizing the Purdue-West Lafayette chapter of AAUP (2024)
- ENE Award for Graduate Teaching, Purdue School of Engineering Education (2023)
- Sterling Olmsted Award, Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division, American Society for Engineering Education. ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition (2020)
- Outstanding Faculty Mentor of Engineering Graduate Students, Purdue College of Engineering (2019)
- ENE Award for Leadership, Purdue School of Engineering Education (2019)
- Best Paper, and PIC Best Paper Nominee. Nominated by the Diversity Committee of the American Society for Engineering Education, ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition (2018)
- ENE Award for Excellence in Mentoring, Purdue School of Engineering Education (2015)
- Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award, Anita Borg Institute (2013)
- Frontiers in Education Conference Benjamin Dasher Award (2013)
- ASEE ERM Best Paper Award (2013)
- Australasian Association for Engineering Education Annual Conference Best Paper Award (2012)
- National Science Foundation Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE) "for outstanding research on root causes of under-representation in engineering degree programs, for educational activities and outreach to students and faculty, and for academic leadership to support equality of access to education" (2012)
- National Science Foundation CAREER Award for "Learning from Small Numbers" project (2010)