Walden Receives WEPAN Inclusive Culture and Equity Award

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Susan Walden was presented the WEPAN Inclusive Culture and Equity Award at the April 2019 WEPAN Annual Conference in Crystal City, VA. This prestigious recognition celebrates exemplary leadership in implementing programs that promote positive change to the climate and culture for women in engineering fields for serving as a model for others.

Walden is the founding director of the Research Institute for STEM Education (RISE) and an associate research professor in the Dean's office of the Gallogly College of Engineering of the University of Oklahoma. She holds a core affiliate appointment in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at OU. Walden is a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education where she serves as chair-designate for the ASEE Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, an ASEE presidential appointment. She assumes the role of chair of that organization-wide committee in June 2019.

As the director of the Research Institute for STEM Education, Walden collaborates with a multi-disciplinary team on nationally recognized scholarship. The team uses primarily qualitative and mixed methods to study how the complex milieu of factors such as faculty cultural competency, institutional policies, and academic cultures intersect with students’ sex, race, ethnicity, socio-economic background, and cultural capital to contribute to students’ academic experiences and eventual success in engineering and computing majors. Walden has partnered in over $10 million of external funding while with RISE and the Gallogly College of Engineering and contributed to 50 peer-reviewed papers and chapters. She has served several NSF projects as a consultant or advisory board member, particularly in relation to evaluation of small-scale projects.

Walden has almost 30-years’ experience in preK-12 science and engineering outreach, leading that mission for the Gallogly College of Engineering from 2006-13. She currently serves on the Consortium Board of the Center for STEM Education for Girls. She has been an executive committee member in several divisions of the American Society for Engineering Education and is a councilor for the Council on Undergraduate Research.

Walden previously was the founding director for the Office of Undergraduate Research at OU, where she led the institutionalization of a strategy to engage every undergraduate student of all disciplines in authentic research, creative inquiry, and creative projects. In this position, she built resources to support faculty and students with regards to developing course-based undergraduate research, improving the mentoring experience and enhancing the benefits of UR for apprentice-type experiences, and identifying assessment and evaluation frameworks and tools to employ at OU. Through that work, Walden personally mentored dozens of students from systemically-marginalized groups through an engineering or science degree and to prestigious fellowships, graduate schools, or careers.


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