Award
2020 NSF Career Award Winner
Department
Department of Engineering Education
Awarded Project
Grohs will conduct applied research related to the imperative for increased focus on education access and quality, as well as workforce development, among Applachian communities, whose students are shown to be underrepresented in higher education generally and in engineering careers specifically. Through this research, he aims to contribute to knowledge on how students develop, maintain, or shift engineering interest pathways as they engage in sustained engineering activities, facilitated through collaborations between their schools and industries in their communities, in the classroom and beyond. His project has two interrelated goals: building longitudinal understanding of engineering interest from middle school engagements with the school-wide population, through high school and into post-graduation decisions; and designing educational opportunities to support sustained development of engineering interest.
What impact do you hope your research will have?
I consider myself an applied researcher. Most of my projects involve collaboration with stakeholders — e.g., K-12, industry, full-time instructors of middle-years UG engineering courses, Virginia Department of Education via longitudinal data system — to work together on improvement/change focused initiatives.
What do you find most interesting about your field of engineering?
The challenges and opportunities to learn, collaborate, and improve. In my research overview, I wrote: I am troubled by the many seemingly intractable systemic issues that face us. As an educator, researcher, and hopeful human lucky enough to work in a university, especially a public land-grant university, I recognize I too am complicit in systems being what they are and therefore have agency and responsibility to make sure my work aims toward better, and the many ways we collectively can define and achieve that.
If you had one piece of advice to give students that aspire to pursue research and are just starting their journey, what would you share with them?
Embrace your childlike curiosity about everything and everyone. Reading, questioning, listening, learning. “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the relentless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” - Paulo Freire, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” 1970