NJIT Tech Forum series: Paving the way to a smarter world: Creativity in engineering education

Imagination and creativity have long energized technological progress. In recent decades, engineers and scientists exceptional for these qualities as well as in-depth knowledge in their disciplines have transformed the world through advances in information technology and many other areas.

As Santosh Kurinec advocates, staying on this path to a smarter, healthier and more prosperous world requires fostering creativity in technical education along with providing essential basic knowledge. It also requires building an educational system that nurtures talent regardless of gender or cultural background.

Kurinec is a professor of electrical and microelectronic engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and a visiting scholar at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. She will speak at NJIT on March 28, 2012, from 3 - 4:30 p.m. in the Campus Center Atrium. The lecture is free and the public is invited.

Kurinec is the featured speaker for NJIT's 2012 Lillian Gilbreth Colloquium, held each year during Women's History Month. The Murray Center for Women in Technology established the colloquium in honor of industrial engineer Dr. Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972). Gilbreth's 1911 book The Psychology of Management was the foundation for modern industrial-management theory and practice.

Prior to joining RIT, Kurinec was assistant professor of electrical engineering at Florida State University/Florida A & M University College of Engineering in Tallahassee. Her research interests include photovoltaics, non-volatile memory, and advanced integrated circuit materials and processes.

In the 1940s, Gilbreth became the first female professor to teach at Newark College of Engineering. The name of the engineering college where Kurinec teaches honors a woman of comparable pioneering spirit. Kate Gleason was one of the first female engineers and engineering entrepreneurs in the nation.

Provided by New Jersey Institute of Technology