We are pleased to present Olga Pierrakos with the 2024 Sterling Olmsted Award, the LEES division’s highest honor, “recognizing those who have made distinguished contributions to the development and teaching of liberal arts in engineering education.”
Dr. Olga Pierrakos has been an ASEE member and LEES Division member since 2005. She has taught engineering at three different universities – Virginia Tech, James Madison University, and now Wake Forest University.
She is an engineering educator, an engineering education researcher, and a national engineering education thought leader. She has contributed to the founding of two brand new engineering programs – first as a founding faculty member at James Madison University and then at Wake Forest University as the Founding Chair of their engineering program. She has also twice served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation.
Olga is a first-generation college student and a first-generation engineer, who in 11 years at Virginia Tech earned a BS (Engineering Science and Mechanics), a MS (Engineering Mechanics), a PhD (Biomedical Engineering), and completed a National Academy of Engineering postdoc in engineering education. She has collaborated across disciplinary lines, for example working with psychology colleagues to study (1) diversity and persistence in engineering education from the lens of engineering student identity development, (2) student motivation, and (3) complex problem solving and pedagogy.
As the Founding Chair of WFU Engineering, Olga embraced a bold vision for a liberal arts engineering education with a holistic approach to Educating the Whole Engineer. She intentionally emphasized diversity and inclusion, and centered student voices, in building this program. She has sought and deployed resources from NSF and KEEN thoughtfully. For example, Olga used grant funding to hire educational researchers, a social scientist, and a philosopher to be part of the WFU engineering team in order to incorporate ethics education, social psychology, and humanities perspectives in the curriculum. Olga also recruited liberal arts faculty (e.g. historians, social scientists, artists, environmental justice, policy, lawyers, and entrepreneurs) across campus to enrich the project-based engineering curriculum.
She is an effective mentor to students and colleagues, and now in her second tour as an NSF program director she is leading the drive for engineering education as liberal arts education on the national scale.