Laura Bottomley

Biography

Dr. Laura Bottomley is the Director of Engineering Education and Senior Advisor for Academic Affairs in the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University. She is also a Teaching Associate Professor in the Colleges of Engineering and Education.  She has taught every grade K through graduate school and has reached close to 200,000 students. She has received awards from the White House twice with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics, Science and Engineering Mentoring program. Bottomley is the founding Director of the Engineering Education program at NC State University. She has served in various roles in her professional societies, IEEE and ASEE, for more than thirty years. Bottomley is a Fellow of the American Society of Engineering Educators and a Fellow of IEEE. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech in 1984 and 1985, respectively, and her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from NC State in 1992. She previously worked at Texas Instruments on the GPS system, at AT&T Bell Labs on ISDN standards and at Duke University teaching classes and directing a lab in the electrical engineering department. She has consulted with NASA, Lockheed Martin, Ericsson, IBM, and others.

Bottomley served as Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Education and Editor, Special issue on diversity from 2014-2019. She created a webinar for the IEEE Educational Activities Board (“A Train the Trainer Module for Pre-University Engineering Outreach Programs). She served as the lead author for the tutorial “The Role of Standards in Electrical Power Systems,” through the IEEE Educational Activities Board and IEEE Standards Association.

She represented IEEE on a National Academy of Engineering Committee: Engineering Equity Extension Service, recruitment of women into engineering, from 2007-2008. She also served as a keynote speaker for the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, September 2019. She was named an IEEE Fellow, in 2015, for leadership in increasing student interest in STEM education, and she received the IEEE EAB Meritorious Achievement Award in Informal Education in 2009. Bottomley has worked in the field of engineering education for more than 30 years. She is among the pioneers in the field of K-12 engineering outreach, and among the first to apply engineering research approaches to engineering education in the K-20 continuum. She started the Engineering Outreach program at both Duke and NC State Universities, for which work she was recognized by a Presidential Award for Excellence (PAESMEM).

Bottomley also started the Women in Engineering program, and helped bring the percentage of women engineering students from 14% to 33% in 2022. She founded the Engineering Education academic program at NC State, which will offer MS and PhD degrees, as well as a certificate in engineering education with a focus on integrative education for all students, and a particular focus on issues associated with research to practice. Dr. Bottomley has received numerous awards for her work, including being selected as a Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, Baylor University, 2022 Semi-finalist.

Position Statement:
If elected to the position, what are the candidates plans and how will they help support the IEEE Education Society? I would value the opportunity to serve in this capacity to work together with others to keep the IEEE Education Society moving forward! We have been leaders in the world of professional societies with regards to the scholarship of education. I want to see us stay that way, AND continue to push the frontiers of scholarship around both theory and practice. I also would like to work toward obviating the need to put special attention on issues of inclusion, because we have developed a habit of inclusion in everything that we do. I would also like to continue efforts to link the IEEE Education society with education groups in other professional societies in new and creative ways, not to replace current efforts, but to continue them and expand them!