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. She is also the director of the Systems Modeling and Realizations Technologies Lab at Virginia Tech. Dr. Terpenny’s research interests focus on the early stages of engineering design, including: design process and methodology, enabling technologies, representations, and knowledge systems that lead to reduced costs, improved quality and satisfaction, and reduced time to market of innovative high value products and systems. Dr. Terpenny is also interested in the effects of interdisciplinary design teams, human-centered design and industry collaboration on student learning, motivation, recruitment and retention in engineering.