Our People

Dr. Jean Mohammadi-Aragh believes that learning is fun and that we should leverage computing to improve learning. These two principles form Jean’s Perspective in Engineering Education and motivate her dedication to improving the ways in which we teach students to engineer.

Jean earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering at Mississippi State and then spent several years creating scientific visualizations and virtual reality applications. Six years later she was happily designing what she calls “video games for scientists” when she was asked to guest lecture for a first-year engineering course. The experience was life-changing: Jean quit her job and went back to school! Earning her Ph.D. in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech enabled her to career-shift from helping scientists learn to helping students learn.

These days, Jean continues to learn through all of the fun research projects described on this website. Then, she uses her new knowledge to create engaging opportunities for undergraduate students to learn basic electrical and computer engineering concepts and for graduate students to learn how to engineer educational experiences with digital systems. Jean is especially passionate about welcoming students to engineering and supporting them in ways that help them find their home.

Phyllis Beck is a blend of art and science having completed an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at MSU and a Master’s in Computer Science. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science where she focuses on applying Artificial Intelligence, Natural language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to the engineering education space. She has worked for companies such as Profound Logic Software, the Air Force Research Laboratory in conjunction with Oak Ridge National Labs and also currently works as an R & D Intern for Sandia National Labs conducting Natural Language Processing and AI research.

She has had work presented in numerous conferences such as Frontiers in Education, American Society for Engineering Education and SIGCSE and at ASEE 2019 our team won the John A. Curtis Award. Most recently she was nominated and inducted into the Bagley College of Engineering Hall of Fame. Outside of research and programming she has a wide variety of interests including art, woodworking, hobby electronics, amateur radio, video-games and algorithmic trading and investing.

Erik Brown is a career-long learner and leader. Over two decades with ExxonMobil, he, and the teams he has led, has served to support and maintain global Windows servers, spearheaded automated server provisioning, engineered unified authentication solutions, and, recently, developed hybrid operational-financial models using the Technology Business Management framework which provide data to IT leadership to aid in decision-making.

Erik graduated from Mississippi State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering, attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in pursuit of a Master’s of Lay Ministry (incomplete), and currently is attending Mississippi State University as a Master’s Degree student in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His interests are in gaining skills using Neural Networks and SVMs to identify potential insights that would aid in providing a business advantage to his company. He also is interested in researching ways to improve the tools used in a distance-based educational approach for all engineering students.

John Hutton has been in the Computer Engineering field since ’91 and has worked on RISC CPUs (HP PA-RISC), High End Server design (HP Superdome), and consumer electronics (Microsoft Surface products). He enjoys all phases of electronics design from architecture and design phases, to schematic and board implementation, to test and verification, and including lifetime support. With his three children all out on their own, he headed back to school with the long term plan of teaching engineering. John is starting to investigate digital systems directed at helping undergraduate computer science and engineering students conquering beginning programming classes. John and his wife, Marlene, enjoy living in the beautiful state of Colorado.

Sujan Poudyal had a penchant towards Mathematics, Science and research in general from his school days. Because of this he joined Electronics and Communication Engineering in Nepal. After completion of Bachelor study, he got fascinated towards computer and decided to further continue his study in computer field. Recently he is PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering department at MSU.

His works are related to the educational dataset where he tries to employ the Machine learning algorithm to create insight. Recently his work got accepted for the conference. The work is related to applying some machine learning algorithm to the students attention dataset in order to classify students into different classes based on their attention pattern.

Kristin Sandberg is a Mississippi State Bulldog through and through. She is currently pursuing her third degree from MSU, her doctorate in Engineering Education. Kristin graduated with her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 2012. She then began her career with Chevron as an Instrumentation and Electrical Design Engineer. In this role she designed instrumented and electrical systems to ensure the safe and reliable operation of Chevron’s largest refinery in the U.S. located in Pascagoula, MS. Kristin decided to pursue her master’s degree in Industrial Engineering – Management Systems and completed this degree in 2018. While working as a team lead for the instrumentation and electrical design group, Kristin was given the opportunity to be an adjunct lecturer for the Mississippi State Engineering on the Coast program. After teaching electrical engineering classes for two semesters, she had completely fallen in love with academia. She has a passion for preparing the next generation of engineers to be problem-solving, life-long learners. This passion led her to leave her career of over 8 years and pursue teaching and engineering education full time. She is currently a lecturer for the Electrical and Computer Engineering department while pursuing her degree. She loves that each semester is a chance to get better as an educator, and she continues to learn from each group of students she gets the pleasure to work with

Sou Sassi is a person who traveled the world, lived in different cultures, and encountered people from various countries. She is a PhD candidate in Engineering Education, and she holds a BS and MS in Aerospace engineering. Experiencing being a female in engineering in different countries, led her to conduct her current multicultural study. This study focuses on the cultural reasons that lead students to pursue an engineering career, and the reasons behind the large gender disparity in engineering in the US versus the gender parity in other cultures. Her interests vary from technical engineering to behavioral and cognitive engineering. The technical engineering aspect came from her MS project where she explored and designed CubeSats (small satellite). The cognitive and behavioral engineering comes from working on projects that explore the engineering identity and communities of practice. She currently lives in Austin Texas, where she enjoys cooking and decorating, but she dislikes the heat.

Shaylin Williams is invested in figuring out ways to improve the engineering education experience for future generations of engineers. She completed her Bachelor’s in General Engineering with a Business Administration Emphasis at the University of Mississippi in May 2020. As an undergraduate, Shaylin participated in several research projects. She worked on two projects in a chemical engineering lab related to creating thermal barrier coatings for food packaging and soil remediation. She also completed an REU project in the area of healthcare engineering at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Shaylin is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Engineering Education at Mississippi State University. She is leading a conference paper for the Pathways project. As partners, Mississippi State University and Ohio State University are conducting a longitudinal study to investigate how varying first-year experience (FYE) structures affect students’ engineering identities and involvement in communities of practice.

Danielle Grimes earned her with her B.S. in Biological Engineering in 2014 and her Ph.D. in Engineering Education in August 2019. Her dissertation was titled, “Investigating the Impact of Stereotype Threat on Engineering Students”. Danielle currently teaches engineering at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. Her research interests include diversity and inclusivity, stereotype threat, and women in engineering.