Dayton Engineer

By Alexandria Ford '26

It is crucial for undergraduate engineering programs to equip students with efficient technical skills and to nurture curiosity, encourage meaningful connections and inspire the creation of value.                       

The University of Dayton is a member of the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), where 70 engineering schools are dedicated to advancing the entrepreneurial spirit among both faculty and students. The University of Dayton was one of the original network partners and has been involved with KEEN for the past 20 years. School of Engineering faculty have won numerous awards and accolades for curricular innovations.

Through KEEN, the School of Engineering offered grant funding for various projects to expand entrepreneurial learning in courses and to connect them to KEEN’s 3 C’s — curiosity, connections and creative value. Five faculty members spent the summer revamping their courses to enhance entrepreneurial and experiential learning opportunities within their courses.

From redesigning courses to creating new ones, each faculty member devoted time to providing content and examples that make already tough engineering topics easier to understand.

Associate professor Khalid Zhouri began utilizing JetCat engines to show thermodynamics, allowing students to break down the engines into components and assemble them back together.

Kirk Pirlo, a professor in chemical engineering, redesigned his introduction to bioengineering class including a new module that asks students to design and execute a biomanufacturing process, run a continuous bioreactor and analyze the data to optimize a set of independent variables to maximize product/biomass output.

Associate professor Amy Doll created a module to help students identify rapidly emerging areas in electronics technology and how their non-conventional engineering design problems (impact on health, ethical concerns, sustainability, etc.) and the design’s importance to the end-user.

Raul Ordonez, a professor in electrical and computer engineering, grew his in-class homelessness project, in which students use real Dayton homelessness data to devise a mathematical model and use the model to provide insight into the situation.

Assistant professor Rydge Mulford created a new course that combines topics of fluid mechanics and heat transfer into one, and developed a final course project that is a hands-on exploration of pumped fluid loops, heat exchangers and thermal fluids design.

“I wanted to help students be more excited about fluids and heat transfer,” Mulford said. “We moved the complicated mathematical details to higher level classes and focused this class on applied topics and hands-on lessons. This new class will be taught for the first time this fall.”

Through the partnership with KEEN, UD has experienced an increased level of student and faculty development around entrepreneurially minded learning and other advanced pedagogies.