From left: Capps, Casale, Marques
Three Drexel Engineering faculty have recently received honors from Engineering Unleashed and KEEN, recognizing their leadership in embedding an entrepreneurial mindset in undergraduate engineering.
Shannon Capps, PhD, associate professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering; and Johanna Casale, PhD, assistant teaching professor in engineering, leadership and society have been named 2025 Engineering Unleashed Fellows, and Amanda Carneiro Marques, PhD, assistant professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering, has been selected as a KEEN Campus Rising Star.
Engineering Unleashed Fellows are chosen following participation in a faculty development workshop, a year of coached project work, and an independent review of an online contribution to the EngineeringUnleashed.com community. This national cohort also receives recognition on the Engineering Unleashed website, opportunities to advance their teaching projects, a $10,000 dollar institutional grant, and an invitation to an in-person Fellows meeting scheduled for October 2025.
Capps’s contribution, “Air Pollution Control Strategy Development,” is a four-to-eight-week rotating small group project in which students first specialize in a topic, then brief their classmates, as they design a defensible clean air plan for a real city. Student teams begin with a photo essay that documents local air quality challenges, then mine publicly available datasets to connect emissions to health and economic outcomes. Each team models candidate control options, compares cost and benefit, and prepares a gallery-walk poster for feedback from classmates and invited stakeholders. Along the way, students practice the KEEN 3Cs by asking curiosity-driven questions, making technical and societal connections, and proposing solutions that create value for residents and industry alike.
Casale’s classroom card, “Integrating EM into the Structures Sequence for Construction Management Students,” embeds a two-week, data-driven lab inside her Mechanics of Solids class. In week one, student groups generate their own material properties by testing rigid foam cubes in compression and evaluating the strength of a welded joint. In week two, they use those results to design and build a simple composite beam that must meet a specified load and deflection. Teams predict mid-span behavior, choose adhesives and geometries under tight material limits, test, and iterate until the beam meets criteria. The sequence emphasizes learning from failure, making evidence-based decisions, and carrying insights forward to the next course in the program.
KEEN Campus Rising Stars are faculty members with less than ten years of experience who have gone above and beyond to equip undergraduate engineers with an entrepreneurial mindset to create personal, economic, and societal value for others.
Marques’s Rising Star recognition highlights a semester-length “Mindful Resilience” mini-adventure in hydrology focused on extreme water events. Students rotate through case-study stations where they explore what-if scenario planning, stakeholder role-play, and risk-communication workshops. The design builds technical skill while cultivating habits that KEEN identifies as core to entrepreneurial mindset, including embracing ambiguity, social mindfulness, growth mindset, and making connections.
Engineering Unleashed is a national community, powered by KEEN, that connects thousands of educators across hundreds of institutions who are committed to graduating engineers with the mindset and skills to create value for society.
“Our ongoing collaboration with Engineering Unleashed and KEEN has enriched how we teach by connecting our faculty with a national community of educators and open classroom resources,” said Christopher M. Weyant, PhD, associate dean of undergraduate affairs. These three educators exemplify that partnership in practice, inviting students to link rigorous analysis with real needs and to share what they learn with others.”