Lynch, Perez, Gibson honored with NAIT award
By Heather Bowers
IV Leader, Dec 7, 2006
A paper about a nationally-recognized project at Illinois
Valley Community College has been named Best Paper Overall at a national
conference. The paper, co-authored by professors Dr. Rose Marie Lynch, Dorene
Perez and Jim Gibson, describes the Making Industry Meaningful In College
project.
The award was presented at the National Association of
Industrial Technology Convention which was held Nov. 15-18 in Cleveland, Ohio.
NAIT officials commended the IVCC team for being the first community college
professors to win the award.
Of the 290 proposals submitted for the conference, 194 were
accepted for conference presentation, 20 papers were selected for publication,
and nine were nominated for Best Paper.
Gibson, program coordinator of electronics, accepted the
award and presented the paper at the NAIT convention. In 2005, he was named
Outstanding Faculty at the NAIT convention.
The MIMIC project places students in engineering design,
electronics and business into teams to design, produce, market and sell
products. As a result of a $230,000 grant from the National Science Foundation,
the two-year engineering design and electronics programs are being built around
the project.
Perez, the program coordinator of the computer aided design
and computer aided engineering program, is the principal investigator of the NSF
grant. Lynch, a communications professor, and Gibson are co-principal
investigators for the grant.
An earlier paper about MIMIC, also co-authored by the three
professors, was nominated for a Best Paper Award at the American Association for
Engineering Education National Conference held in Chicago in June 2006.
The MIMIC project has been featured at several national and
international conferences including the ASEE International Conference in
Beijing, China in 2004.
MIMIC was created 11 years ago by Perez and accounting
professor Alice Steljes, now retired from IVCC. Susan Koepke, accounting
professor, supervises the business students in the project.
MIMIC is sponsored by IVCC’s Tech Prep Team and has been
supported by a Carl Perkins grant