Presenter Bios
Dr. H. Parker is the Director of the Global Competence Initiative and the Asst. Director of Student Mobility & Assessment and Latin America/Spain Programs for Global Engineering Programs and Partnerships (GEPP) at Purdue University. She is charged with managing and implementing a competitive grant from the US Department of State to foster more inclusion and significantly increase the number of transformative experiences in the Americas including study abroad, internships abroad, and international research collaborations. Dr. Parker has over nine years of experience supporting campus initiatives and programs which strive to promote and advance innovative pedagogies by advocating for continuous improvement in teaching, learning, and service at Purdue and beyond. For several years, she supported Purdue’s Global Learning Faculty and Student Development program, whose initiatives strive to optimize and transform classroom teaching and learning by integrating global competency into the curricula. She co-developed numerous resources, including intercultural and global learning assessment scales and digital badges, and has made various presentations at professional conferences to share open source applications and teaching tools designed to develop cross-cultural dexterity. Dr. Parker is a qualified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) and collaborates closely with Purdue’s International Programs to promote and assess curricular and co-curricular intercultural learning options for the Purdue community while facilitating cutting edge research on intercultural competency topics of interest to the University and to the intercultural learning and assessment field.
Dr. Silvia Caro obtained her Civil Engineering and Masters in Civil Engineering degrees from Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes-Colombia) and her PhD degree from Texas A&M University. She is a full professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Uniandes, and she currently holds the position of Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the School of Engineering. Her research interests are related to road infrastructure, including the advanced experimental characterization and computational modeling of asphalt materials. She is the past-president of the Academy of Pavement Science and Engineering (APSE), and an active member of several international technical and editorial committees in the area of pavement engineering. Her responsibilities as an Associate Dean include the implementation of a curriculum management system for the academic programs of the School of Engineering, the development of the ‘excellence in teaching’ program, the implementation of new master virtual programs, and the planning and execution of initiatives related to academic internationalization.