Maura Borrego
Assistant Professor of Engineering Education
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Rising Star Recipient
Maura Borrego is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she has worked since December 2004. Her research interests focus on interdisciplinary faculty members and graduate students in engineering and science. Specifically, she has studied how engineering faculty members learn about and apply educational research methods to improve teaching. Her ongoing work focuses on learning in interdisciplinary graduate education programs.
Dr. Borrego received both a National Science Foundation CAREER award and a US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award for her engineering education research. She has been an investigator on over $3 million in engineering education-related research, being personally responsible for $1.5 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. Her results are published in 18 articles in journals such as Journal of Engineering Education, Review of Higher Education, European Journal of Engineering Education, and Higher Education. One of these articles was selected as best research paper published in 2007 by Division I of the American Education Research Association.
Dr. Borrego was instrumental in getting Virginia Tech’s Ph.D. in Engineering Education approved at the state level in 2007. She has developed and taught graduate level courses in engineering education research methods and assessment since 2005. She currently advises three engineering education Ph.D. students, and co-advises three other Ph.D. students in other departments.
All of Dr. Borrego’s degrees are in Materials Science and Engineering. Her M.S. and Ph.D. are from Stanford University, and her B.S. is from University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a graduate student, she researched adhesion of polymer interfaces for microelectronic packaging applications, funded by a Semiconductor Research Corporation Fellowship. Dr. Borrego lives in Christiansburg with her husband, Gilbert.
"Even though I’ve taught some of these courses four times, they’re always interesting, and I always learn something. This is more than a love of learning—it’s finding a wide range of contributions interesting and worthy and modeling this for students."