2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

From Railroads to Electrified Roadways: How Lessons from United States Engineering Education Can Power Tomorrow's Infrastructure

Presented at Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES) Technical Session 2: Identity, Professionalization, and Belonging I

Some of the largest engineering projects in the United States have been national infrastructure projects such as the creation transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system. These large-scale infrastructure projects require a combination of training new workers, and helping the existing workforce to develop new skills, to bring those projects to reality in an effective and efficient manner. With the advent and popularization of modern electric vehicles, United States infrastructure is facing another potential change involving the electrification of roadways, mass installation of charging stations, and development of dynamic wireless power transfer systems. We, as engineering educators, need to prepare the current and future workforce to be able to meet the demands of electrifying infrastructure and to address the challenges associated with such a large change. In this paper, we investigate the history of how engineers and other workers were educated and trained for previous national infrastructure projects and highlight the educational and policy trends that helped these projects succeed. Additionally, we show ways to leverage this history to improve the current education of engineers and other workers for the purpose of electrifying roadways.

Authors

Lazlo Stepback Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE) [biography]

Lazlo Stepback is a PhD student in Engineering Education at Purdue University and Adjunct Faculty at Ivy Tech Community College. His current research interests focus on engineering ethics and how students ethically develop as engineers. He also works with the ASPIRE engineering research center looking into engineering workforce development for electrified roadways. He earned a B.S. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines (Golden, CO) in 2020.
Dr. Matthew W. Ohland http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4052-1452 Purdue University at West Lafayette (PWL) (COE) [biography]

Matthew W. Ohland is the Dale and Suzi Gallagher Professor and Associate Head of Engineering Education at Purdue University. He has degrees from Swarthmore College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Florida. His research on the longitudinal study of engineering students and forming and managing teams has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation and his team received for the best paper published in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2008, 2011, and 2019 and from the IEEE Transactions on Education in 2011 and 2015. Dr. Ohland is an ABET Program Evaluator for ASEE and represents ASEE on the Engineering Accreditation Commission. He was the 2002–2006 President of Tau Beta Pi and is a Fellow of the ASEE, IEEE, and AAAS. He was inducted into the ASEE Hall of Fame in 2023.
Amanda Katz Utah State University

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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