The Purdue University Board of Trustees approved the appointment of Polytechnic faculty member as a named professor. Alejandra Magana, professor of computer and information technology, was approved for the W.C. Furnas Professorship in Enterprise Excellence, which recognizes professors who are “very active in research and/or the scholarship of teaching.”
Magana has achieved international and national recognition in her area of scholarship – discipline-based education research. Her research program has developed new knowledge on how model-based cognition in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) can be promoted by means of expert technological tools such as computation, modeling and simulation. Her work has resulted in learning innovations derived from research at the undergraduate level with permanent integration into courses. As a result, thousands of undergraduate students in engineering technology, physics and engineering have been exposed to instructional innovations that have engaged them in productive disciplinary practices.
In 2015, Magana received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award to investigate modeling and simulation practices in undergraduate engineering education. Magana came to Purdue in 2007 as a master’s student and was named professor in the Department of Computer and Information Technology in 2019.
Source: Purdue trustees approve distinguished, named and chaired faculty; new degree programs; posthumous degree (Purdue News)