MICHELE J. GRIMM – Michigan State University
BEEC Keynote and Panelist
Michele J. Grimm is the Wielenga Creative Engineering Endowed Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Her research has focused on injury biomechanics – from characterizing important tissue properties to developing appropriate models for the assessment of injury mechanisms. Most recently, this has included working with obstetricians to identify the pathomechanics of neonatal brachial plexus injury. Based on this work, she served on the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Task Force on Neonatal Brachial Plexus Palsy.
In addition to her scientific research, Dr. Grimm has spent a large part of her career focused on curriculum development and enhancement of student learning in engineering. She served on the faculty of Wayne State University for 25 years, where she developed and implemented both undergraduate and graduate programs in biomedical engineering and helped to establish a department of biomedical engineering. Her endowed professorship at MSU focuses on research to increase the success of students in engineering through creative pedagogical techniques.
Dr. Grimm completed her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The Johns Hopkins University in 1990 and her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994.
She has just finished a 3-year rotation as a program director for three BME-related programs at the National Science Foundation. During this time, she served as co-chair of the White House’s Office of Science & Technology Policy Task Force on Research and Development for Technology to Support Aging Adults. She was recently named to the National Academy of Medicine’s Commission on a Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity. She is also completing her 5-year appointment as a commissioner with ABET’s Engineering Accreditation Commission.
She is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.
Jennifer Amos – University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Panelist
Dr Amos joined the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois in 2009 and is currently a Teaching Associate Professor in Bioengineering and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Educational Psychology. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with a focus in developmental biology and cell imaging through the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. She was also an NSF GK-12 Fellow during her graduate work, where she taught 7th grade sciences, and earned a teaching certificate in the Preparing Future Faculty Program.
Recently, she completed a Fulbright Program at Ecole Centrale de Lille in France to benchmark and help create a new hybrid masters program combining medicine and engineering. Amos is dedicated to engineering education through design of innovative assessment tools and developing innovative courses and hands-on teaching labs, as well as developing modules and coordinating K-12 summer camps involving bioengineering. She has also led multiple curricular initiative in Bioengineering and the College of Engineering on several NSF funded projects and is applying her expertise in curriculum design for the new Engineering-Based Medical School at Illinois. In addition, she is a program evaluator for BMES and an ABET Senior IDEAL Scholar, where she helps guide programs through designing and implementing assessment plans for program evaluation.