Promotions at Tufts CEEO
Merredith Portsmore, Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) Director, has been promoted to Research Associate Professor. Dr. Merredith Portsmore earned both a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and B.A. in English from Tufts University in 1998. Merredith has also received her M.A. in Education from Tufts University in 1999. She completed her PhD in Engineering Education in 2010. She has been director of Tufts CEEO since 2015.
Ethan Danahy, has been promoted to Research Associate Professor at Tufts CEEO. Dr. Ethan Danahy is also the Coordinator of First Year Engineering Courses. Having received his graduate degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Tufts University, he continues research in the design, implementation, and evaluation of different educational technologies.
New Research Assistant Faculty at Tufts CEEO
Jennifer Cross has been hired from her Tufts CEEO Postdoctoral position to Assistant Research Professor at Tufts CEEO. Her primary research interests focus on supporting teacher and student technological fluency, creativity, and computational thinking through transdisciplinary technology integration and education-focused human-robot interaction.
Dr. Jennifer Cross applies user experience research methods that span from developing novel robotics platforms and novel interfaces to professional development and evaluation of classroom outcomes. Many of her projects center on integrating robotics and computational thinking into core classroom subjects, such as Arts & Bots, where English teachers used robotics while teaching poetry, and Robots in Science, where science teachers integrated computational thinking with physical science experiments and models.
Previously, Dr. Cross was a Postdoctoral Research Associate Tufts CEEO, working with Professor Chris Rogers. She completed her Ph.D. in Robotics at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and was advised by Professor Illah Nourbakhsh in the Creative Robotics Education and Technology Empowerment Lab. She was a fellow of both the IES-supported Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. She completed her undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the F. W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, where she was a member of the fifth graduating class.