Ann Saterbak Receives Fulbright Global Scholar Award

Ann Saterbak, a professor of the practice of biomedical engineering at Duke University, earned the Fulbright Global Scholar Award. The Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship program of international and cultural exchange, will support Saterbak as she explores how cultural differences influence the implementation of engineering programs at universities in Uganda, Singapore and Malawi.

Fulbright Scholar Awards are prestigious fellowships that offer scholars unique opportunities to teach and conduct research abroad, playing a critical role in U.S. public diplomacy. Notable awards received by alumni include 63 Nobel Prizes, 98 Pulitzer Prizes and 82 MacArthur Fellowships.

A nationally recognized engineering educator, Saterbak focuses on creating undergraduate courses that broaden student’s problem-solving skills using real-world problems, inquiry-based learning and hands-on experiences. In her role at Duke, Saterbak serves as the founder and director of the Duke Engineering’s signature First-Year Design Program, an introductory engineering program that immerses students in hands-on, community-driven design projects in their first months in the engineering school. In 2021, she worked with a team of collaborators to launch Biomedical Engineering Education, a Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) journal that shares research articles, teaching tips and other advances that are useful for biomedical engineering educators.

For her numerous contributions to the field, she was elected a fellow in BMES and the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), and she is a frequent presenter of educational materials at the annual ASEE and BMES conferences.

Saterbak will draw on this experience for her Fulbright project, where she’ll work with program leaders at universities in Africa and Asia to understand how cultural differences influence the adoption of evidence-based teaching practices (EBTP) like problem-based learning, project-based learning and active learning.

“The use of EBTP in STEM university classrooms is supported by an extensive body of literature, but most of these studies describe methods that are only used in the U.S. and Europe,” said Saterbak. “There is limited research about the implementation of EBTP and its impact on student learning in Asia and Africa, and I think these are areas that are well positioned to lead a transformation in higher education.”

Working with engineering programs at Makerere University in Uganda, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS), Saterbak will examine how the cultural behaviors and thinking of students and faculty influence the teaching of engineering courses.

For example, student design teams at Duke typically learn from both their instructor and different mentors. While these experts may offer various types of experience, they can also give conflicting advice or suggestions that students must decide to follow or ignore. Students in the U.S. are also more individualistic and independent, so establishing trust among team members can be more challenging. Alternatively, in MUBAS, design teams only receive advice from their instructor, so the authority and the experience of the instructor won’t be muddled by different perspectives. Because society in Malawi also emphasizes collectivism over individualism, team members typically have an easier time trusting one another to complete their work.

Understanding these cultural differences and tracking how faculty adapt their teaching practices to influence student learning, Saterbak says, will ideally make it easier to implement similar teaching practices in other universities throughout Asia and Africa.

The second component of Saterbak’s project involves mentoring engineering faculty at the universities as they adopt more evidence-based teaching practices into their curriculum as well as documenting the impact of EBTP for publication in international engineering education journals. Saterbak will also teach faculty development workshops with local faculty in both Uganda and Malawi.

“This project is born out of 25 years of teaching engineering, a decade of collaboration with engineering faculty in Africa and an urgent need to support the global revolution of engineering education to develop engineers to solve pressing technical global challenges in local contexts,” said Saterbak.