Drexel
Engineering professor Eli Fromm will receive a $500,000 prize today
for innovation in engineering education.
Fromm is the first recipient of the Bernard M. Gordon Prize,
which will be given biennially by the National Academy of
Engineering.
The Drexel University engineer realized more than a decade ago
that traditional education in his field may be too narrow and
limiting. Engineering courses usually start with several years of
hard science before the students are allowed to exercise their
engineering or design skills.
Fromm, 62, set out to design a more integrated approach toward
training engineers, one that would involve English and history
teachers, and would leave young engineers with a more diverse
education. His program also allowed students to get their hands on
real engineering projects earlier.
"We had to assure science teachers that these ideas wouldn't
dilute their courses and show that it wasn't necessary to take an
entire calculus class before applying its concepts," said Fromm, who
lives in Broomall, Delaware County. "It took some convincing."
The program, called The Enhanced Education Experience for
Engineers (E4), started in 1987. "If presented the right way, those
kids can do incredible things," he said.
It has since expanded to seven other academic institutions and
taken the name Gateway Engineering Education Coalition.
Participating schools saw an increase in the number of freshmen
staying in engineering. The schools also experienced a dramatic
increase in female and minority engineering graduates.
"In today's world, an engineer must be comfortable working with
product development teams consisting of marketers, financial people
and manufacturing specialists," said William Wulf, president of the
National Academy of Engineering. "The new environment requires
engineers to have communication skills, to understand more about
business. . . . 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."
Fromm will receive his monetary prize, along with a gold
medallion, at a ceremony today in Washington, D.C.
He gets to keep half the prize money; the other half goes to
Drexel to continue the kinds of programs he has developed.
Fromm said he hoped to build on the Drexel portion of the gift
with additional philanthropic contributions. His goal is to
establish at the university an endowed think tank that could bring
together educational leaders from around the world to discuss ways
to improve how engineering is taught.
He also said he hoped to use the money to further explore ways in
which telecommunications technology can be used to link students
with distant laboratories.
The Bernard M. Gordon award, named after the chairman of Analogic
Corp. in Peabody, Mass., is intended to identify teaching
experiments and techniques that are innovative and effective.
Faye Flam's e-mail address is [email protected].
Staff writer James M. O'Neill contributed to this article.