Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Jenny Mueller, PhD, will incorporate innovative sustainability learning experiences for students as the new Alfred R. Schmidt Endowed Chair for Excellence in Teaching. The three-year appointment begins on September 1.

“Rose-Hulman’s faculty routinely apply their talent and hard work to creating exceptional learning experiences in our scholarly community,” according to Associate Dean of Professional Development and Professor of English Richard House, PhD. “Through endowments like this one, our benefactors enable those efforts. These positions are awarded to outstanding professors, but they truly benefit the whole institution, especially our students.”

Mueller has dedicated her teaching, service and professional development to promoting sustainability in engineering education since she started at Rose-Hulman in 2010. She developed a course now required for all civil engineering students, an introduction to sustainable design of civil engineering systems, which includes discipline-specific insights and innovative pedagogical approaches. She has also been a proponent of integrating ethical decision-making and social, economic and environmental sustainability metrics through developing new coursework for her department’s senior design course. As the director of the former Home for Environmentally Responsible Engineering (HERE) program, Mueller collaborated with an interdisciplinary team of faculty to create a holistic experience for students interested in sustainability.

Through her work as the Schmidt Endowed Chair, Mueller plans to increase opportunities for Rose-Hulman students to experience sustainability in curricular, co-curricular and international activities, which, in turn, will help students manage future challenges, both locally and globally. 

She plans to expand both the breadth and the depth of student learning opportunities during the summer as well as the academic year, develop learning outcomes for sustainability to track student learning across the Institute, continue to train a network of engaged faculty, and build a database of sustainability-infused course modules, assignments, student projects and tools for all Rose faculty. Her proposed activities advance excellence in education by providing cross-disciplinary opportunities within classroom curriculum and research projects through summer sustainability scholars program and Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) design project on campus. 

“By investing in sustainability education at Rose and building more student opportunities, we will attract more students who are interested in using their skills to make a real impact on our world,” said Mueller.

Additionally, “by anticipating potential impacts of designing products and processes, sustainability education can help students become better entrepreneurs. Viewing challenges with an entrepreneurial mindset is essential to sustainable design and to anticipating potential impacts of any design production or implementation.”  

Mueller will be the third Schmidt Chair, following the work during the past three years by Irene Reizman, associate professor of Chemical Engineering. Reizman developed a framework for integrating undergraduate research into the early college experience, especially first- and second-year Rose-Hulman students, by establishing the Rose Research Fellows program. 

The chair honors the legacy of Alfred R. Schmidt, who taught mathematics at Rose-Hulman for 46 years and was an alumnus of the Institute with a degree in mechanical engineering.