JANIS TERPENNY (Senior Personnel)
Janis Terpenny is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education with affiliate faculty positions in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech.  Dr. Terpenny is the site director at Virginia Tech of the NSF Center for e-Design, a multi-university NSF industry-university cooperative research center.  Dr. Terpenny is an NSF Advance Professor and serves on the Advance Leadership Team as coordinator of pipeline initiatives.  She is also a Dean’s Faculty Fellow in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.  Dr. Terpenny’s research goal is to revolutionize how engineered products and systems are designed.  Integral to this goal is research focused on information and knowledge sharing and methods to automate and speed the generation and evaluation of design concepts. This has included design process and methodology, reuse strategies such as product families and platforms, and methods to predict and plan for technology obsolescence in products and systems. Dr. Terpenny is also active in research in engineering education to better prepare students to be problem solvers, collaborators, educators, and researchers. She is also devoted to increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering through personal mentoring, the integration of research and education, and interdisciplinary human centered design projects. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, Dr. Terpenny was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has several years of industrial work experience with General Electric where she completed the two-year information systems management program (ISMP) and worked as a systems analyst, receiving a management recognition award for outstanding performance. She has been the principal or co-principal investigator on over $5 million of research funded by NSF and industry, and has published several book chapters, and over 60 peer reviewed journal and conference proceedings papers. She is a member of ASEE, ASME, IIE, SWE, and Alpha Pi Mu and currently serves as the Design Economics area editor for The Engineering Economist.