Daytona Beach, Florida
Earlier this week, Dr. Anna Howard, received the American Society for Engineering Education Southeastern (ASEE-SE) “Outstanding Mid-Career Teaching Award” at the 2018 ASEE Conference titled, “Educating the Engineer of the Future.”
The Outstanding Mid-Career Teaching Award is intended to recognize faculty members who have demonstrated exceptional contributions to engineering or engineering technology education through outstanding classroom performance. As a passionate educator who studies innovative methods in teaching, Dr. Howard is leading the large course redesign with the intention to combine online materials with in-class working groups. Extensive on-line materials will enable more student interaction with experts with the goal of reducing drops, withdrawals, and fail rates in MAE’s introductory courses. Howard also acts as the coordinator of engineering statics (MAE 206), teaching statics to about 80% of our undergraduate students.
Dr. Howard has a long fascination with helicopters that grew into an interest in making them quieter, smoother, lighter and more accepted. She teaches Aerodynamics of V/STOL Aircraft (MAE 452) which moves students from the parts of a helicopter through understanding and predicting behavior of a helicopter in hover, climb, and forward flight. The last third of the class is devoted to introductions to more advanced topics: noise, unsteady aerodynamics, stability, vibration, tiltrotors, rotor-airframe interaction, dynamic stall, and autorotation.
Dr. Howard’s research in vertical flight aircraft has addressed air and ground resonance stability, whirl flutter stability, structural dynamics of tiltrotors, composite tailoring of wings and blades, nonlinear modeling of fluid-elastic dampers, and alignment measurement with magneto-strictive position sensors. In MAE, Dr. Howard collaborates with Drs. Eischen, Gopalarathnam, Nagel, Ramasubramanian, and Silverberg.
Howard speaks about the importance of collaboration in education: