Bonnie Ferri has been named as the recipient of the 2017 IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award. This very prestigious honor recognizes inspirational teaching of undergraduate students in the fields of interest to IEEE and is sponsored by the IEEE Education Society. Ferri will be presented with this award at the IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, to be held October 18-21, 2017 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

A professor and associate chair for undergraduate affairs in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Ferri is being recognized “for pioneering mobile hands-on learning and flipped classroom techniques for undergraduate engineering education.” She has had a major impact on Georgia Tech undergraduates by promoting and managing a program where students own their own devices so that they can do experiments anytime and anywhere. She has developed a method to control a course, that is, to adaptively improve the course based on feedback of data analytics.

Ferri currently co-chairs the Commission on Creating the Next in Education at Georgia Tech, which is charged with making recommendations for the Institute to become a leader in innovative education among technological research universities. Her innovations also reach far beyond Georgia Tech to impact engineering education on an international scale. She has conducted NSF-sponsored workshops at the premier engineering education conferences, devised and shared best practices at numerous cross-disciplinary events, and published her work on student learning, strategies, and results in the top conferences and journals in the field of engineering education. She has also co-developed two Coursera massively open online courses, Linear Circuits and Introduction to Electronics, in which over 100,000 students have enrolled from all over the world.

A faculty member in ECE since 1988, Ferri was the first female Ph.D. graduate in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech and was ECE’s first female faculty member. She has served as the School’s associate chair for undergraduate affairs since 2013 and was its associate chair for graduate affairs from 2006-2012.

“Bonnie’s reputation among students and colleagues consistently upholds not only the tremendous impact that she has had on our students, but also the caring and compassionate heart she has for them, her clear vision of their potential, and her ardent desire for their success,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and ECE professor. “We sincerely appreciate her many years of hard work and dedication to our students and to improving instructional programs at Georgia Tech and in the engineering community as a whole.”