She may have only been in her role since Canada Day, but our new Dean of Engineering, Pearl Sullivan, already has big plans for the Faculty over the five years she will be conducting her term. Dean Sullivan agreed to meet with The Iron Warrior during the week before her term and provided some insight on her academic history, goals, and the engineering profession.
Sullivan’s intentions for her term as Dean, which she characterized as educating the “Engineer of the Future”, are to focus on retaining our top tier undergraduate standing, raising the stature of our graduate education and promoting the engineering profession. The primary concern with undergraduate education that Sullivan sees could be improved is whether our current teaching methods are effective in developing future generations of creative and critical thinkers; attributes which are needed for a fast-moving profession. To address undergraduate education, Sullivan has broken down the areas of concern into three further components: students, faculty and content. Addressing how teaching is conducted, Sullivan feels it is ripe for renewal.
“[Professors] are teaching the way they’ve always learned,” Sullivan stated. “Everyone is expected to sit down from 8:30 to 12:30. The passive mode of classroom learning, if you look back into history, started in the medieval period. It was a time when books were rare, so the person standing up, or the teacher, was the only person who owned a book. That one person would read the book, and everyone else would gather to listen. We’ve been applying this model to universities [since then].” She feels that in today’s world, many students don’t even make use of the books, instead opting to bring tablets or laptops. More importantly, they may attend all classes but quite often do not see the relevance of the theory being taught.
Specifically referring to mechanical engineering, Sullivan observed that the curriculum has not significantly changed over 25 years, although content has been getting progressively denser as new topics are added with the discipline expanding. “A lot of teaching has been going on,” she noted, “but the question is, how much learning has been?” The main way around this, she says, is through not content but conceptual learning, which includes understanding the wider context of their engineering knowledge and the effects of their work. The fundamental characteristic of engineering, which is solving technical problems, will not change, but the graduate must now also know how to locate, evaluate, and assimilate information from many sources. The demands on the engineers of the future will require them to solve increasingly complex problems and venture outside their discipline and culture.
Labs are the greatest component that Sullivan sees needing improvement in undergraduate education, which was one of the points addressed in Vision 2015 with the $8.5 million allocated to lab renewal funding. “For mechanical engineering, we’re going to use that [funding] to upgrade antiquated labs and develop engineering clinics.” Sullivan hopes to do away with the “plug and play” aspect of many labs currently in place and replace with experiments that will unite the practical and theoretical pieces. “We want our students to have a broader range [of understanding]. Waterloo engineering students are smarter, so let’s graduate them smarter.” Part of her concern was that some of our first year students were not even aware of how a ratchet works, which was likely due to generational shifts in hobbies and interests.
She hopes that professors across the faculty will explore new teaching approaches inside and outside the classroom. One way this could be achieved is through the integration of knowledge using “engineering clinics”. Professors Sanjeev Bedi (Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering), Carol Hulls (Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering) and Mary Robinson (Chemical Engineering) tested this concept recently with three first-year Mechatronics Engineering program courses: MTE 100 (Introduction to Mechatronics Engineering), CHE 102 (Chemistry), GENE 121 (Computing). “Professor Bedi took the initiative, collaborated with the other professors to develop projects; one was the design of fuel cells, while another was taking apart an entire engine, putting it back together, and seeing how it works. The pilot was a stunning success when student learning was assessed. They could see the connection between computing [and chemistry and mechanics], because the fuel cell had the chemistry part of it, and then you needed to write software for the microprocessor to get it to move. So they saw the connection of three things and they absolutely loved it.”
Sullivan believes that such an activity works towards her goal of “engineering clinics”, which will be developed for the mechanical and mechatronics engineering curricula as the department prepares the programs for the new CEAB outcome-based accreditation assessment expectations. Students will have outside classroom activities focused on small projects that integrate two or three of the courses they are taking. “The wonderful part is, they can take some risks,” Sullivan explained “We tell students, you can get it wrong the first time, but you learn where you went wrong. Just like the engine workshop. Twenty engines were taken apart, but nineteen worked. The one that didn’t work, everyone got together to see what went wrong. You learn more from failures.”
The second area of focus for Sullivan will be graduate studies. A high priority is to recruit top Canadian and international scholars to Waterloo to work with our professors. There are numerous cutting edge research projects underway in state of the art labs. On the education front, there are plans to meet the needs of both graduate students as well as working engineers. For research students in MASc and PhD programs, Sullivan aims to better prepare students for research through a research methods course. “The caliber of our research work hinges on the ingenuity and abilities of our graduate students. We need to find opportunities for them to work in laboratories in prestigious universities and research institutes around the world.” Moreover, she would encourage faculty to “build clusters on campus as part of their longer team research agendas to identify areas of collaboration that would have a global impact, solving larger problems on a scale that would garner international attention”.
“Given the rapid technological changes in the work environment, the challenge in the educational domain is no longer confined to universities.” Sullivan also has a particular interest in upgrading practicing engineers as the faculty launches the Waterloo Engineering iX initiative for next year – iX meaning ‘interactive exchange’. This program will act as internet-based instruction in order to re-train engineers on the job, as in careers today the technologies are always evolving, and working engineers need to continuously develop their skill sets to keep up. Online programs are already established for Electric Power Engineering and Management Science, where professors teach from their offices. The courses and virtual labs will be offered online through the new E5 LiveLink facilities, where classes will be delivered over live, interactive, high definition video conferencing. According to Sullivan, “We have an enviable reputation as an engineering school, the outside world will get to join in the Waterloo Engineering experience.”
Citing the statistic that only 30% of engineering graduates remain engineers, while the rest go on to work in management and CEO roles, this is an obviously important aspect to the continuing functionality of engineering graduates. To be modelled after Harvard/MIT Open Courseware for undergrads, engineering at Waterloo will approach the market of what we know best, practical, working engineers. As Sullivan noted, “our strength is our connection to industry”.
Lastly, Sullivan hopes to promote the existing accelerated master’s program and provide more entrepreneurship support for students. She says that we “need students to see that they can reach their aspirations”, and provide opportunities for students who wish to become practitioners, researchers, and entrepreneurs. The practitioners are already greatly supported through the current co-op program, and have many opportunities for enrichment. For students who wish to pursue research careers, they will be encouraged to enroll in the accelerated master’s program. This will allow to students to finish a master’s only one year after their undergraduate program. This will be achieved by taking a research position for the last co-op term, where the student will begin their thesis, and then a year later will achieve their master’s. Students with very high academic standing will be admitted into PhD programs. For the entrepreneurially inclined students, the Conrad Center for Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology will offer entrepreneurship focused courses such as BET 300 and 400. In addition, the School of Architecture, which Sullivan notes has the distinction of having the top ranked architecture undergraduate program in Canada, will add a PhD program to their existing Masters within the next five years.
Not content on solely improving education, Sullivan hopes to improve the image of the engineering profession as a whole. “I think the engineering profession is under recognized by the public,” she stated. “My highest priority is to promote engineering as a profession that profoundly shapes our technological world through education and research.” Sullivan believes that in order to raise the prominence of engineering at Waterloo on an international level, faculty members, administrative staff, and technical staff must all be involved. Sullivan feels that a shared commitment to help each other succeed is critical to the success of our students in their future roles. She hopes that students will be able to think “I know what it is like to get help, and I would like to help others”.
Sullivan feels that Waterloo is as hard a sell is it seems, since it’s almost designed to be an incubator for vibrant activity and academics. “I like Waterloo because it is a good place to raise your family,” Sullivan stated. “I have three children, and I live close to the university and don’t get into a huge traffic jam as I go to work. If I want to do exotic shopping, I go to Toronto, which is not too far. I think it’s a wonderful city for attracting academics. We have to offer very competitive salaries to bring in top-notch people. The quality of life is definitely excellent and the cost of living here is lower than either Vancouver or Toronto, and that’s really appealing for families to come here.”
When asked how she felt acting as a mentor for all females in engineering, Sullivan stated, “If I can help to inspire young women to enter engineering I would be delighted.” She wants everyone to interpret it as not just a male profession, but also stresses “I’m here for all the students. My interest is to raise opportunities for all the students” .
Sullivan herself long held an interest in math and science, originally attending university to study science at Dalhousie University, but knew she didn’t want to continue be a scientist for a career. “Science was not something I could give up, but it just wasn’t enough,” Sullivan recalled, “and at the same time, I did not want to go to medical school because I would not cope with seeing blood on a regular basis.” Her studies at Dalhousie, while not what she wanted to do, were what first encouraged her to consider transferring to engineering.
“I picked up a brochure in the library,” Sullivan explained. “It talked about civil engineering, and how it improves the lives of people, and that struck a chord with me. I was very inspired by the fact that civil engineers really affected the lives of people. But I did not do civil engineering; I did metallurgy, because I was captivated by materials science.”
Graduating from the Technical University of Nova Scotia (TUNS), which later amalgamated with Dalhousie, in 1985 with a Bachelor of Engineering with Distinction in metallurgical engineering, she then went on to complete a Master of Applied Science in metallurgical engineering at TUNS as well, writing a thesis on wear resistance and microstructure of silicon-modified zinc-aluminum alloys. She attended the University of British Columbia to complete her PhD in metals and materials, where she studied glass-epoxy composite laminates.
Her academic career began in 1991, where she was a lecturer at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, where she was part of the first batch of professors to teach at the new university. Nanyang is now recognized as having one of the fastest-growing and more reputable engineering faculties in the world. “Those four years were a great learning experience for a young teacher,” Sullivan recalled, “because I taught cohorts of 1000 students. The classes were large theatres with 500 students.”
She moved to New Brunswick in mid-1994 to teach at the University of New Brunswick, where she was a professor for 10 years before joining the University of Waterloo in July 2004. Throughout all her teaching positions, she worked in the equivalent mechanical engineering departments, culminating in her position as Chair of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering from 2006 until her role as Dean was announced. She worked in mechanical engineering departments without actually having studied mechanical engineering for a degree, instead having studied engineering mechanics on her own to learn what she needed to know to conduct research. “Every time I tell people this, they laugh,” Sullivan joked. “I always tell my colleagues, ‘I am not sure why you asked me to be department chair because I don’t have a single degree in mechanical engineering.’ My first two degrees were in metallurgical engineering, and my last degree was in materials engineering.”
Most of her research and expertise are related to failure of composite materials used in aircraft structures. Much of her recent work is based in aircraft repair and characterization of polymers, including the effects of aging and moisture diffusion. “I measure and model how polymers age. Actually, polymers are very much alive. They age over time, and that’s why a lot of your polymer materials get brittle. Even if you don’t expose them to the sun, they degrade in ambient conditions and lose their original physical and mechanical properties.”
While she will likely be unable to work as heavily on her research as she begins her work as Dean, her previous experience demonstrates she will be more than up for the task, and the years ahead should bring many promising initiatives and projects under her guidance.
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