PHILADELPHIA (February 19, 2002) - Drexel University engineering professor Dr. Eli Fromm, who developed the revolutionary Enhanced Education Experience for Engineers (E4) Program, was honored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) with the inaugural Bernard M. Gordon Prize for inventiveness in engineering and technology education at Union Station in Washington, D.C.

The Gordon Prize, to be awarded biennially, carries a gold medallion and a $500,000 cash award to be divided equally between Fromm and Drexel University.

As an electrical and computer engineering professor at Drexel in the 1980s, Fromm observed an increasing number of students dropping out of engineering studies. Fromm knew it was time for an overhaul of Drexel's traditional undergraduate engineering curriculum for freshmen and sophomores, whose coursework included at least a year of hard science before the introduction of more creative engineering concepts.

"I felt we needed to make changes in the undergraduate programs - more than just course content - but the entire philosophy," said Fromm, a resident of Broomall. "The greater practice and design orientation I had as an undergraduate had given way to theory and analysis. At the same time, many of the students no longer had the opportunity to 'tinker' with things before coming to college. Some of the important issues for a future practicing engineer were beginning to get lost."

Conceived in 1988 and introduced at Drexel in 1989, E4 centered on six basic principles: offering engineering courses to freshmen and sophomores, incorporating liberal arts, basic sciences and mathematics courses into the engineering curriculum within an engineering context and teaching students in a lab, the natural setting for practicing engineers.

Fromm recruited more than 40 Drexel faculty members to co-teach other disciplines such as writing and history with engineering professors in a hands-on lab setting. E4 went on to win the NSF's designation as a national model for undergraduate engineering studies. Drexel renamed the program the Drexel Engineering Curriculum, "tDEC."

With funding from the Engineering Directorate of the NSF in 1992, Fromm's pioneering curriculum expanded to seven other academic institutions through the Gateway Engineering Education Coalition, which, among other things, brought E4 to the entire curriculum, introduced technology into the classroom and established measurable course outcomes.

Gateway Coalition and E4 programs have been extended to more than 60 institutions around the world. Fromm leads the Gateway Engineering Education Coalition from its headquarters at Drexel.

"In today's world, an engineer must be comfortable working with product development teams consisting of marketers, financial people and manufacturing specialists - in addition to other engineers," said NAE President William A. Wulf. "The new environment requires an engineer to have communication skills, understand more about business and a deeper understanding of the design process itself. Dr. Fromm and his colleagues were among the first and most influential in bringing these kinds of skills into the early part of the engineering curriculum."

The Gateway Coalition and tDEC programs have shown dramatic results in such areas as student retention and minority involvement. Participant schools, some of which networked together via the Internet, achieved an 86 percent increase in freshmen retention. The number of engineering degrees at those schools has risen among woman 46 percent, Hispanics 65 percent and African Americans 118 percent.

"The NAE decided to create the prize to emphasize the importance of the continual improvement of engineering education and to underscore our commitment to that improvement," Wulf said.