Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: Women in Space
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (387) · October 11th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Today in History – October 11, 1984 – Astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, becomes the first American woman to perform a space walk. Sullivan became an astronaut in 1979 and has been on three space flights: STS-41G (October 5-13, 1984), STS-31 (April 24-29, 1990) and STS-45 (March 24-April 2, 1992). She has also held a number of Space Shuttle support assignments, including software development, launch and landing photography, orbiter and cargo testing, checkout and launch support at the Kennedy Space Center, extravehicular and spacesuit support crew, and capsule communicator for Mission Control. Sullivan’s doctorate is in geology and earth sciences. Her research was in geological engineering, including research in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Newfoundland Basin and fault zones off the Southern California Coast.
Another historic moment for women in space arrived on October 19, 2007 when NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson arrived at the International Space Station to begin her tenure as the first woman to command a station mission. On October 30, 2007 another female astronaut commanding the space shuttle Discovery, Pam Melroy, reached the space station, making it the first time two women have led space missions at the same time.
For more news and educational resources in space exploration, women in space, and aerospace and aeronautical engineering, see the Engineering Pathway’s Aerospace Engineering Education Community site.
Tags: Aerospace Engineering · Broadening Participation · Gender Equity · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Geological Engineering
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1 | Zhang's Blog // Oct 24, 2008 at 9:49 pm
[...] woman to perform a space walk. Sullivan became an astronaut in 1979 and has been on three space Read More|||In 1992 she embarked on a mission aboard the space shuttle Endeavour to study the effects of zero [...]
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