Rate My Professor Patricia Mead

Dr. Patricia Mead serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Engineering at Norfolk State University, a role she has held since July 2020. She joined the NSU graduate faculty in April 2004 after accumulating over thirty years of professional experience across private industry, public policy, and academia. Her industry tenure includes positions at Eastman Kodak Company, Hewlett Packard Company, and General Motors. From 2000 to 2004, she worked in public policy at the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, DC, where she acted as the primary officer for the publication The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering Education in the New Century (2004) and played a key role in establishing the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship in Engineering Education (CASEE) in 2005. Academically, she has served at both Norfolk State University and the University of Maryland. Mead earned her B.S. in Physics from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1986, B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Old Dominion University in 1986, M.S. in Electrophysics from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, NY, in 1998, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1994.

Dr. Mead's research interests include Laser Micromachining, Engineering Education Reform, the NSF-funded Louis Stokes Research Center of Excellence - SCENE (Southeast Coalition for Engagement and Exchange in Nanotechnology Education), and PEAQs (Partnership for Education and Advancement of Quantum and nano-Systems PREM Center). She currently holds the position of Education Director for SCENE, in partnership with Tidewater Community College and Pennsylvania State University, and serves as a supporting principal investigator for PEAQs with Fort Lewis College and the University of Colorado. Her designated areas of research are Engineering Educational Research and Fiber Optic & Solid State Laser Systems. Teaching interests encompass Lasers and Photonics, Laser Micromachining, Technology Ethics and Policy, and Technical Communications. Among her honors are the NSF CAREER award in 1997 and the Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering (GEM) Fellowship in 1986. Mead is a certified ABET Evaluator since 2013 and has contributed to the FIRST Robotics program in roles such as judge advisor, game announcer, referee, and event coordinator since 2002.