Dayton Engineer
Associate Professor Receives Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network Rising Star Award
Last week, associate professor Dr. Sidaard Gunasekaran from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering traveled to the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) National Conference in Austin, Texas to accept the organization’s 2023 National Rising Star Award.
The award honors a faculty member with less than 10 years of experience who has gone above and beyond to equip undergraduate engineers with an entrepreneurial mindset to create personal, economic and societal value for others. As the top awardee, Gunasekaran receives a $25,000 grant to advance KEEN’s mission in the University of Dayton’s School of Engineering.
Gunasekaran got involved with the organization his first year at UD when he attended the Integrating Curriculum with Entrepreneurial Mindset workshop, which teaches faculty how to incorporate KEEN’s three C’s — curiosity, connections and value creation — into their courses.
“I knew how I wanted to teach, and I knew I wanted to be a good teacher,” Gunasekaran said. “KEEN gave me the vocabulary to explain what I was thinking and what I wanted to do.”
He started implementing the techniques he learned from the workshop in his courses and joined a KEEN Fellows Program cohort at UD that assessed different learning tools on their ability to increase the three C’s in their classrooms.
“Teaching became like research. I always get excited to try something new to see how the students react to it,” Gunasekaran said. “It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it makes a big impact.”
The goal of the KEEN framework is to instill engineering students with an entrepreneurial mindset. According to Engineering Unleashed, the entrepreneurial mindset is “a set of attitudes, dispositions, habits and behaviors that shape a unique approach to problem-solving, innovation and value creation.”
Gunasekaran fosters the entrepreneurial mindset in his classroom with portfolios, where students use their own words to explain what they learned in class and homework throughout the semester.
“With exams, you study two days before and then forget everything after you finish it,” Gunasekaran said. “But this way, students are constantly swimming in the subject and that builds confidence.”
“In engineering, we want to transition from ‘I just plug numbers into equations and solve to get a solution’ to ‘I actually add value to wherever I end up going,’” Gunasekaran said. “Value can mean different things to different people. Value for business could mean profits, but there is also societal value which benefits the community. At UD, the value is in helping people.”
Gunasekaran plans to use his Rising Star funding to develop more hands-on learning activities in his courses.
