Workshop

Innovation and Sustainability in STEM Education

Event Date: May 28, 2026 2:00pm-3:30pm

Speaker(s):
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Luke Landherr, Ph.D.
COE Distinguished Teaching Professor, Chemical Engineering
Northeastern University
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Lisa Yan, Ph.D.
Assistant Teaching Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California, Berkeley
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Shaul Hanany
Professor, School of Physics and Astronomy
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
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Engage with three leading educators as they introduce innovations into STEM curricula that resonate with a wide range of learners. The presenters will share their experiences with developing new instruction modalities and reflect on the sustainability of their efforts.

Dr. Luke Landherr will introduce the use of comics as a tool for teaching STEM concepts, drawing on decades of work on comics in education and recent applications in undergraduate engineering courses. This presentation will provide participants with guidance to begin developing a comic for a concept from their own courses, along with a practical model for producing and implementing educational comics in STEM instruction.

Dr. Lisa Yan will follow by discussing the development of a portable introductory undergraduate data science course created through cross-institution collaboration. The course integrates computational and quantitative social science perspectives to create an entry point to data science for students with various academic and career goals. Participants will also learn about the pedagogical and organizational challenges of building interdisciplinary curricula and how to navigate them.

Dr. Shaul Hanany will close by discussing the ongoing efforts at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities to integrate computation throughout the undergraduate physics curriculum, addressing gaps between the way physics is used by physicists and prevailing classroom practice. Dr. Hanany will outline the project’s change process, describe current progress, and reflect on lessons learned about sustaining curricular innovation.

Speaker(s)

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Luke Landherr, Ph.D.
COE Distinguished Teaching Professor, Chemical Engineering
Northeastern University
Dr. Luke Landherr is a COE Distinguished Faculty, teaching professor and the associate chair for undergraduate studies of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University. They conduct engineering education research into novel visual teaching techniques for undergraduate and K-12 STEM education. Their comics to teach complex science and engineering concepts have been adopted by colleges and high schools throughout the U.S., U.K., Belgium, and Denmark, and they helped to write and create the Crash Course: Engineering video series. They are currently a regular contributor to the Chemical Engineering Education journal producing the Drawn To Engineering comic, and have received multiple AIChE and ASEE awards for their work.
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Lisa Yan, Ph.D.
Assistant Teaching Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Lisa Yan is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the use of automated techniques for teaching and learning with programming assignments in large courses and the design of culturally relevant curricula and training for undergraduate computing educators. In collaboration with colleagues from the social sciences, Dr. Yan has redesigned several foundational courses that impact student preparedness, success, and sense of belonging within computer science and data science majors. She is a recipient of the UC Berkeley Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Student Instructors for her creation of a professional development course that prepares teaching assistants to teach undergraduate Data Science courses. Dr. Yan’s work is supported by the NSF, the California Learning Lab, and the Mozilla Foundation; she holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
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Shaul Hanany
Professor, School of Physics and Astronomy
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Professor Shaul Hanany graduated from Tel Aviv University in Israel. He has worked on computer simulations of alignment of dust grains for his MS, which is from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and on measuring the polarization of x-rays for his Ph.D., which is from Columbia University. He transitioned to working on properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation when he became a research fellow at the Center for Particle Astrophysics at Berkeley. Hanany continued with this work after moving to the University of Minnesota. Hanany received a Land McKnight professorship, has twice been named by students as 'Best Professor of Physics', is a recipient of the George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Teaching, and is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished University Teacher. Results from measurements of the CMB that Hanany and his colleagues published several years ago have been named by Science magazine 'one of the ten most important breakthroughs in science' for that year.