Engineering education professor receives Woman of the Year honor
UC Women’s Center gave the annual award to Teri Murphy
Teri Murphy
Teri J. Murphy, professor in the Department of Engineering Education, was named Woman of the Year by the University of Cincinnati’s Women’s Center. The award honors outstanding women faculty and staff who demonstrate a commitment to gender equality and to creating a positive impact on the lives of women.
Ryan Norton nominated Murphy for the award. He worked with her as a peer teaching assistant in Murphy’s Introduction to Engineering Design Thinking II class for first-year engineering students in the spring of 2019. Norton, a 2019 UC electrical engineering graduate and current master’s student in the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, said Murphy’s interactions with her students throughout a challenging course focused on guiding them through the process and addressing difficulties that arose.
“She is a powerful asset to UC and is representative of the empathy necessary in education for us to grow as a university and, most importantly, grow and prepare our students,” Norton said.
Murphy’s driving force as an educator is a desire to help guide students to explore and discover what they truly want to do. “What do you reach for if you have choices on what to do with your time?” This advice, that she shares with her students today, was given to Murphy by her adviser when she was an undergraduate student at Kent State University. The concept – and her advisor’s insistence that she take honors calculus – changed the course of Murphy’s studies and her career. She noticed she gravitated to her calculus homework first because she enjoyed it the most, so she majored in mathematics.
Murphy credits her mother with encouraging her love of reading and writing, which turned her into a lifelong academic. When Murphy was a child, her reward for good behavior was a new book. After earning her bachelor’s in mathematics at Kent State, she went on to get a master’s in mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
She discovered early in her graduate studies as a teaching assistant that her thoughts were often drawn to how she could make her students’ experience in the classroom more impactful. That led her to continue at Illinois to gain her Ph.D. in research in undergraduate mathematics education.
A self-proclaimed ‘Disney addict,’ Teri Murphy (posing here with Minnie Mouse) often dons Disney apparel and espouses the famous Walt Disney quote, 'It’s kind of fun to do the impossible,' to her students. She said she’s inspired by Walt Disney’s drive in pursuit of his dreams despite having to overcome obstacles. A lesson she shares with her students. Photo/Provided.
During her Ph.D., Murphy worked with a program designed to assist undergraduate students who had excelled in high school but came from underperforming schools that may not have fully prepared them for the rigors of college. Murphy was enraptured by her students’ stories about the challenging environments in which they grew up. This connected her to a research interest to uncover the academic needs of students.
Murphy began working at the University of Oklahoma in the mathematics department, which had a research in undergraduate mathematics education track. It was there that Murphy met Teri Reed, who is now assistant vice president for research development at UC and professor of chemical engineering. They began to collaborate on research projects, with their first joint project studying women in engineering. They have joined forces many times since, often with a focus on research in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion.
After a stint as a professor at Northern Kentucky University, Murphy accepted an offer in 2014 for a temporary position at the National Science Foundation as a program director coordinating research funding in the Division of Undergraduate Education.
Following the NSF job, Murphy came to UC in 2017 where her longtime collaborator Teri Reed was now working. Murphy’s experience was a good fit for UC’s pioneering Department of Engineering Education. Murphy and Reed are continuing to work together on projects that Reed spearheads, including efforts related to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, of which UC is a founding member.
The department has a focus on enhancing the first-year engineering undergraduate program, but they are also developing graduate programs in engineering education to produce the next generation of professors who would be prepared to do research on the teaching and learning of engineering. Murphy is the chair of that committee.
Although research is an important part of being a professor, Murphy finds daily motivation in the classroom with her students.
“I really want to do the best I can by my students,” Murphy said. “There is a mindset in teaching that I think is important, I try to walk into the classroom ready for the kinds of questions I think the students will have or the places they are likely to get stuck and a plan for how to help them get unstuck.”
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