Kristin Wobbe is the Director of WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning. Most recently she directed the Great Problems Seminar program, WPI’s first-year project’s program. Her teaching awards include the Moruzzi Prize for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, and she is a corecipient of the 2016 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education awarded by the National Academy of Engineering. She received her BA in chemistry from St. Olaf College and her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University. She is the co-editor of Project-Based Learning in the First Year: Beyond all Expectations (Stylus, 2019). Other recent publications appear in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning and Diversity and Democracy.
As a Research & Evaluation Associate with the Center for Project-Based Learning, Kimberly LeChasseur focuses on what we know about the value of project-based learning, both here at WPI and at other colleges and universities where the Center is facilitating professional learning. She helps those at the Center and others invested in project-based learning at the college level to clarify, document, communicate, and use what they know about their work to improve the quality of project-based learning strategies in action. Kimberly facilitates professional learning about how to research and evaluate project-based learning and is available to co-design and draft evaluation plans, inform the selection or creation of assessments, and analyze data about the value and areas in need of improvement for research and evaluation of project-based learning. Kimberly has a joint appointment with the Morgan Center for Teaching and Learning where she focuses on supporting faculty in crafting strong scholarship on teaching and learning. WPI community members who would like to arrange a conversation or consultation with Kimberly should complete this form.
Richard F. Vaz is Senior Fellow for the WPI Center for Project-Based Learning. Rick is Professor of Interdisciplinary and Global Studies and of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and has been a member of the WPI faculty since 1987. Rick was the inaugural director of the Center, serving from 2016-2020. Prior to launching the Center, Rick served for 10 years as WPI’s dean of interdisciplinary and global studies, with responsibility for the Interactive Qualifying Project, WPI’s interdisciplinary degree requirement. He oversaw substantial growth of WPI’s Global Projects Program, a worldwide network of over 40 centers where more than 1000 students and faculty per year address problems for local agencies and organizations. His interests include experiential and global learning, curricular reform, and institutional change. From 2004 to 2010 Rick was a senior science fellow of the AAC&U.
Sara Ringer is our operations manager. She is responsible for keeping us organized and ensuring that our business operations run like clockwork. If the Center is the swan gliding smoothly across the lake, Sara is the furiously paddling feet below the surface. She generally makes the world a more accessible and friendlier place.
