This is a supplemental section accompanying Dr. Sheppard’s profile.  It provides more detail about her research laboratory at Stanford University, the Designing Education Laboratory.

An eclectic community by design

Another way I have been able to build an engineering education community, in addition to relying on graduate students and faculty colleagues, is within my own research lab here at Stanford. My lab is called the Designing Education Laboratory (DEL). We have really good university support around undergraduate student research. The university funds undergraduate researchers over the summer, so every summer I have two to five undergraduates working in my lab as researchers. A fair number of the undergraduate researchers are also in a sophomore-level Introduction to Solid Mechanics course I teach. I find that these students, after they’ve been through that course, have started to get their head around—a little bit—what it is to be an engineering student. They’ve seen analysis in the course and design projects, too. After that, they invariably have questions about their education.

These students have been a great community with whom to consider what it means to do educational research. They’re often motivated by some aspect of my course that bugged them. They’re excited to think about how to make it better. I pair them up with one of my post-doctoral researchers or one of my Ph.D. students. It becomes a good opportunity for one of those more senior researchers to mentor a more junior researcher. We always have a goal of the undergraduate researchers writing a paper for the American Society for Engineering Education’s annual conference (ASEE). It puts the education bug in their brains, and it’s really a wonderful transformation to watch them go through. They usually start attending my weekly research team meeting and become part of that community, even during the school year.

I also have several master’s students who know they aren’t going to do a Ph.D., but want to do some research while they are here doing their master’s. I have two post-doctoral researchers, several research scientists, and two outside faculty members—one from Penn State and one from Bucknell—who started attending my lab meetings when they were on sabbatical here and continue to join our weekly meeting at least once a month through Skype. So it’s a really pretty weird group.