Surprisingly little research has been conducted in engineering education that emerges from a complex systems perspective--a perspective that offers promise on how to better educate engineers to contribute to increasingly complex issues, such as environmental degradation, global warming, and disease prevention and control. As the discipline of engineering education matures and the engineering education research community delves deeper into this endeavor, understandable and necessary tensions develop at the interface of tradition and change; tensions that can be reconciled with a complex systems perspective. By using complex systems principles, we can look at local interactions and characteristics of individuals to determine emergent patterns and properties of the larger system. Additionally, a complex systems perspective encourages people to change the system not by imposing external structures and control, but instead by nudging the system from within. This seminar will begin with the fundamentals of complex systems and then conclude with a discussion of illustrative examples of complex systems at the student, course, curricular, programmatic, and university levels.

Nadia Kellam is an engineering education researcher with a PhD in mechanical engineering. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia with the Faculty of Engineering, an interdisciplinary institution whose vision encompasses engineering and liberal arts. Her research and teaching are aligned with the Faculty of Engineering and include the design, development, and implementation of innovative Synthesis and Design Studios within the Environmental Engineering program. The current sophomore-level Studio integrates engineering and art students with specific instruction in observation, modeling, problem framing, and creative thinking strategies within the ill-structured issue of sustainability and food. Within this Studio Sequence her research is focused on how the cognitive capacity of artistic, creative thinking informs the development of creative problem solving within environmental engineering students. Dr. Kellam’s other research and teaching interests include sustainability, complex systems, and modeling. She also teaches at the undergraduate level within the Biological and Agricultural Engineering department, is a Lilly Teaching Fellow, and is a key faculty member appointed to design the Environmental Engineering program of study. Dr. Kellam is currently teaching the inaugural Environmental Engineering Studio to be offered at the University of Georgia.