ENGINEER SPOTLIGHT: Jackie Sullivan - Environmental
Engineer
GROWING UP POOR IN A LARGE
FAMILY, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO PROFESSOR JACKIE SULLIVAN
FORGED A REMARKABLY SUCCESSFUL CAREER, FROM CLIMBING
THE CORPORATE LADDER AT EDS TO TURNING YOUNGSTERS ON
TO ENGINEERING.
It's a blistering summer morning. But climate control
remains far from the minds of the young Denver-area
teens, minorities, girls, and low-income youngsters.
They happily huddle in a cramped classroom, brainstorming
cool features for the remote-controlled model "green"
houses they must then construct. One group dismisses
doorbells ("too boring!") in favor of an automatic doggy
door. Others envision escalators, hot tubs, even a disco
ball. Rock music wafts from a corner. This is engineering
education?
The intense woman with piercing blue eyes surveying
this creative cacophony clearly thinks so. Distinguished
only by a nametag, "Jackie" moves from bench to bench,
prodding imaginations toward solar panels and energy
conservation. "What uses a lot of power in a house—365
days a year?" she asks three boys designing a Hawaiian
mansion. "Bingo! Hot water."
The students, 9th graders in the Denver School of Science
and Technology's inaugural class, don't know this unassuming
University of Colorado-Boulder professor helped launch
their new charter school or pushed to ensure enrollment
of underserved populations. They don't realize this
weeklong "Creative Engineering" workshop is just one
of many such outreach initiatives she coordinates to
get kids jazzed about engineering. Nor do they have
a clue about her business and academic accomplishments,
which include nine years as the top woman on the technical
side of EDS.
And that's just how Jacquelyn F. Sullivan, the founding
co-director of the innovative Integrated Technology
and Learning Program at UCB's college of engineering
and applied science, wants it. "Please go easy on the
me part," she begs, calling herself "a great conductor"
of talent rather than the program's sole star. "I subscribe
to the concept that there is no ‘I' in ‘team'."
The team in question is the energetic band of fellow
professors, graduate students, and staff that orchestrate
one of the nation's most imaginative engineering-outreach
programs. Offerings include college prep engineering
design classes in which Native American high schoolers
build stereo speakers, "Girls Embrace Technology" camps,
and teacher workshops that utilize GPS locators—and
these are just a summer sampling. The goal of all this:
to coax more girls, minorities, and other underrepresented
youngsters into engineering by starting early and making
it fun and relevant to their lives.
The team may supply the sweat, but Sullivan's vision
drives the mission. If she is a crusader, it's because
her horizons were once limited, too. Growing up poor
on a Michigan dairy farm, Jackie never dreamed she would
wind up an engineer and scholar. "Academics were not
on my screen," she recalls.
Indeed, just getting through school was a challenge.
Chores began before dawn, and none of the Sullivan children
could dash down their dirt road for the bus until they
milked all 72 cows. Heeding her 5th grade teacher's
advice to think of education as "a way out," Jackie
would read books in the unheated attic or under the
blanket of the bed she shared with her sister.
Though she "blew the roof" off standardized tests, Jackie
never earned great grades in high school, preferring
to play guitar in a girl band. When she sought college
advice, the guidance counselor tried to steer her toward
secretarial school. At the time, recounts Jackie, "I
didn't have a clue about what I was going to do." Farm
life instilled traits that helped fuel an interest in
engineering and a passion for helping underdog kids.
"I was lucky, resourceful, and resilient," she says.
Running the dairy operation—Jackie's reward for
coaxing more milk from the cows than her brothers—honed
her strong work ethic.
Jackie enrolled in Olivet College, a tiny liberal arts
college 150 miles from home. Just 17, she arrived with
no study skills and probably would "have blown out mid-year"
had her biology professor not noticed that she knew
all the answers in class. He began assigning her daily
research questions that he then quizzed her on the next
afternoon. Before long, Jackie discovered she not only
knew how to study and "could compete if I decided to,
but that I could set the curve in class." She soon was
earning A's and assisting the professor. "It's all about
confidence," she says.
A DEFINING EVENT
The experience—and reading Rachel Carson's environmental
classic, Silent Spring—whetted Jackie's interest
in protecting the environment. And that led her to the
environmental field, which is "all about imagining a
better world and going about creating it." After getting
her bachelor's degree she applied to the University
of Michigan intending to study the effects of Agent
Orange in aquatic ecosystems. But the program wouldn't
send a woman to Vietnam for fieldwork. So she emerged,
at the age of 25, with a Ph.D. from Purdue.
After working her way through school, Jackie left academia
for industry, planning one day to return. She quickly
found her niche on engineering's frontier, first at
the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, where she
launched the environmental division, and later at the
Denver office of EDS leading large teams of software
engineers. Among her projects: helping General Motors
develop just-in-time manufacturing. "I couldn't believe
people paid me to do work I loved," Jackie says. It
seemed that she always ended up in charge. "I'm good
at seeing the big picture, for what can be done, not
what needs to be done," she explains. Her genius lay
in sizing up customer needs, then building the team
that could solve the problem.
The call back to campus came in 1990, when UCB's engineering
college dean asked Jackie to take over a foundering
water resources engineering research center. "Clean
it up or shut it down," he charged her. She had a great
job at EDS, but Jackie relishes challenge and this was
a doozy: a complex water-management decision support
and modeling system for the Colorado River that involved
considering everything from fluid dynamics to complex
Western water policy.
Jackie saw that to rescue the research center she had
to redeploy talent and hold everyone, including herself,
to tight deadlines and budgets. That same vision infuses
every nook of the Integrated Technology and Learning
Laboratory, the hands-on engineering facility she co-led
the creation of in 1992. The dean wanted a facility
that would encourage interdisciplinary collaborative
learning. What emerged was a wholesale revamping of
the undergraduate program to put first-year students
onto the design-shop floor.
Jackie and a team of faculty members spent a year on
the educational concept. They visited cutting-edge programs
nationwide, and had architects tour the San Francisco
Exploratorium to get a feel for the kind of interactive,
engaging projects that would spark student interest.
The result may be the most whimsical engineering building
on any campus. Hands-on interactive exhibits abound.
Articles about student inventors and women engineers
vie for wall space with exhibits explaining fluid dynamics.
Jackie brought to academia from industry (along with
customer focus) a focus on results. While she encourages
her colleagues to take risks, and—yes—make
mistakes, ("I screw up every day," she says), in the
end her team must deliver. Thus, along with all these
K-12 outreach initiatives comes a commitment to measure
how well they work. Are kids going into engineering
after taking pre-college courses? Do single-sex classes
for girls boost confidence and interest in pursuing
science, math, and engineering? Jackie needs to justify
these programs to sponsors, and if they aren't effective,
she will shut them down. Case in point—killing
off a science of sound and acoustics camp that all the
engineers thought sounded cool but received a lukewarm
reception from the kids.
Her K-12 engineering team continues to roll out new
projects. Their latest passion: TeachEngineering.com,
a digital library of standards-based engineering lessons
and hands-on activities, searchable by grade and discipline.
Using engineering as a vehicle for the integration of
science and math, teachers won't have to reinvent the
wheel.
Meanwhile, Jackie has been wrestling with home-front
challenges as well. Diagnosed with breast cancer this
past spring, she underwent her last radiation treatment—jetting
to ASEE's annual meeting just 14 hours later, giving
one of the mini-plenary talks on K-12 engineering. She
insists that cancer hasn't slowed her, apart from causing
her to pause and wonder why she drives herself so hard.
Beyond sending her first daugher off to college this
fall and planning a kayak trip in a remote corner of
Canada, Jackie says she hasn't thought much about the
future. A photo of the cattle ranch near Steamboat Springs,
Colo., offers one clue. She and her husband plan to
retire there one day. With no milking, great views,
and a three-hour drive to Boulder, it won't be hard
to keep Jackie down on this farm.
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