2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: An Integrated Approach to Engineering Design Across the Curriculum

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Postcard Technical Session

Meeting real world challenges requires engineers with diverse experiences and skills who can function effectively on multidisciplinary teams. Educators have long strived to prepare students by providing relevant experience in undergraduate engineering programs. Motivated by the increasing complexity of modern problems, as highlighted in documents like The Engineer of 2020, there has been a growing movement to develop engineering programs specifically designed with integrative and interdisciplinary approaches to engineering education. Owing to the relative newness of these types of programs, there are ongoing conversations on the best practices for developing curriculum that balances breadth and depth as well as overcoming logistical challenges of accreditation and determining where and how to administer such programs within an institution. Further, it is vital for the growing community of integrated engineering programs to evaluate if these programs meet the stated goals. In this work in progress manuscript, we describe the experience and lessons learned from developing and launching one such program, The Engineering Design Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The program includes a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Design degree, which began in 2020 and was ABET accredited in 2025. A minor in Engineering Design and Innovation was added in 2023. To take full advantage of the dedicated engineering design faculty, the program also includes “Project Lab,” a non-credit bearing course open to all engineering students where students work in teams to solve a client problem. Our aim is that this description of our work to date is helpful to other institutions that may be exploring starting an integrated engineering program, as well as continue to spur discussion on how best to evaluate the outcomes of these programs.

Authors

Dr. Timothy M Wick http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8922-0939 University of Alabama at Birmingham [biography]

Dr. Timothy Wick, PhD is a tenured Professor and Director of the Engineering Design program the School of Engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The engineering design program provides engineering students formal and informal opportunities to practice hand-on, real world design/build project experiences by matching student teams with external design project clients. Dr. Wick is the Founding Director of the School of Engineering Bachelor of Science in Engineering Design degree program. The ABET accredited program offers depth in engineering design, innovation and project management and breadth in an engineering discipline of interest to the student through an engineering minor. The program includes a 15-hour engineering design, innovation, and product development sequence that incorporates hands-on, project-based experiences throughout a curriculum to help students develop and practice these skills. The program trains students to be a design engineer with an integrated skills set across product development, project management and engineering problem solving to create functional and elegant products and processes. Dr. Wick is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a member of the American Society of Engineering Education. Dr. Wick received his B.S. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his Ph.D. from Rice University, both in Chemical Engineering.
Dr. Ian Charles Edwin Berg http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2302-7006 University of Alabama at Birmingham [biography]

Dr. Ian Berg is an Instructor in the School of Engineering where he supports the Engineering Design and Biomedical Engineering programs. Dr. Berg earned his undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After graduating, he spent 3 years working in the medical device industry before returning to UIUC to complete his PhD in Biomedical Engineering. His thesis focused on the biomechanics of liver progenitor cell differentiation. He joined the Sethu Lab in the Cardiovascular Diseases Division of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2021 where he has been developing 3D, iPSC-based models of cardiac tissue to investigate bacterial infection. Ian continues to support the tissue engineering projects in the Sethu Lab. His teaching involves project-based courses where students must use design thinking and their engineering skills to identity and build solutions to real world problems.
Dr. Ashley S McGuire http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1957-3135 University of Alabama at Birmingham [biography]

Ashley is the STEM Librarian for Engineering & Chemistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She enjoys working with students, staff, and faculty to enhance everyone's learning and access to information, for both scholarly and personal pursuits. The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (SoTL) is a particular passion of hers, which is reflected in her work in co-developing and co-instructing the graduate Technical Communication for Engineers course at UAB.

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