About Us
The TEA project is funded by the California Education Learning Lab program. The goal of the project is to support STEM faculty in re-designing all or part of a course, using adaptive mastery learning coupled with specifications grading and supported by available technology platforms in an effort to help STEM students develop a growth mindset. Fostering a growth mindset is key to successful teaching in STEM (Canning et al., 2019; Miller, 2015).
A collaborative team from the University of California Irvine (UCI), San Jose State University (SJSU) and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (CPP) is working together to create a learning community-based faculty development program on each of the three campuses, to provide ongoing support for STEM faculty interested in implementing mastery learning and specifications grading in their courses.
Our SJSU TEA Team
Dr. Nikos J. Mourtos (PI) - Professor and Chair, Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Mourtos earned his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece (1980) and subsequently his M.S. (1982), Engineer (1983), and Ph.D. (1987) degrees in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering from Stanford University. He has developed and taught more than 20 courses in aerospace, mechanical, and general engineering subjects, and he has also been teaching a course on leadership, complexity, and systems thinking in the doctoral program for educational leadership at SJSU. He has served as the Faculty Instructional Development Coordinator for the College of Engineering (1996-2002), a Faculty-in-Residence for Innovative Pedagogy (1998-2002), and the Assistant Director for the SJSU Center for Faculty Development and Support (2006-2008). He has published extensively on engineering education topics such as active, cooperative, and problem-based learning, teaching, and learning styles, as well as on teaching and assessing problem solving design, and lifelong learning skills. He has conducted more than 100 faculty workshops on research-based course design and in particular, on how to teach and assess complex 21st-century process skills. His research interests encompass aircraft design, any aspect of teaching and learning in STEAM education, as well as complexity and systems thinking in education and engineering settings. His current focus is on (a) analyzing educational challenges (e.g., achievement gap, inclusion) and engineering failures (e.g., recent Boeing 737-Max accidents) using systems thinking, and (b) examining the intersection of art and engineering to increase student creativity in engineering design.
Dr. Laura Sullivan-Green (co-PI) - Associate Professor and Chair, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Sullivan-Green earned her B.S. degree from the University of Dayton and her M.S. and a Ph.D. (2008) degrees in Civil Engineering from Northwestern University. Her area of expertise is Geotechnical Engineering and her research interest is in a forensics issue - determination of crack age. Her current research is as follows: Accelerated Testing of Carbonation Penetration through Crack Surfaces Biomass Quantification on Construction Materials. She teaches in the areas of Geotechnical Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, and History of Technology. She also has broad interests and experience in the field of flipped STEM teaching and faculty development. For the last four years, Dr. Sullivan-Green has been the Principal Investigator and Manager of SJSU’s $3 Million First in the World grant (U.S. Department of Education) that focuses on faculty development in the use of flipped classroom pedagogy and active learning in the classroom. Cal Poly Pomona and Cal State Los Angeles are collaborating institutions for this effort.
Eileen Chen - Instructional Designer, College of Engineering
Eileen Chen earned a BA with Design Studies and Art Education minor at SJSU and a MsEd in Education Technology Leadership at CSU East Bay. She has been the Instructional Designer for the College of Engineering at San Jose State University since 2013. She provides recommendations to the College of Engineering on course redesign and apply the best practices with technology tools. She received the Dean’s Service Award in the College of Engineering (2020).
Dr. Maria Chierichetti (Peer Coach) - Assistant Professor, Aerospace Engineering
Maria Chierichetti joined the department of Aerospace Engineering as a full-time assistant professor in Fall 2019. Her interests lie in the field of transportation safety, with particular emphasis on aeronautical systems, and focuses on the developing methodologies using machine/deep learning for structural health monitoring and unmanned structural inspections in the context of urban air mobility. Dr. Chierichetti is also interested in innovative pedagogies for higher education and in investigating how students’ learning is affected by external factors, such as COVID-19 pandemic and community service. Before joining SJSU, she worked as a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and at the University of Cincinnati. She earned her PhD and MS in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech in 2012 and 2011 respectively.. She earned a BS and MS from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2004 and 2007 respectively, with majors in Aeronautical Engineering. She is an Amelia Earhart Fellow – Zonta International Foundation.
Dr. Magdalini Eirinaki (Peer Coach) - Professor and Associate Chair, Computer Engineering
Dr. Eirinaki earned her B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Pireaus in Greece (1998), her M.S. degree in Advanced Computing from Imperial College London in UK (2000), and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece (2006). Her research interests span a broad range of machine learning, data mining, social graph mining, recommender systems, and deep learning applications. Since 2007, when she joined San Jose State University, she has introduced several courses in the areas of data mining, machine learning, and AI to the Computer Engineering department curriculum. She has served as the Faculty-in-Residence for Online Learning (2010-2011), as Assessment Coordinator (2015-2020), and is currently serving as the Director of the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence program. She is the recipient of the 2017 Applied Materials award for excellence in teaching, the 2019 Newnan brothers award for faculty excellence and the SJSU distinguished faculty mentor award (2015, 2019, and 2020).
