Aleksander Czekanski, associate professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering, has been elected as a Fellow of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA).

Fellows of the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) are elected based on the candidates ongoing and sustained contributions. Czekanski was elected for his research on design engineering education and contribution to engineering education society.

Recruited to Lassonde as the NSERC-Quanser Chair in Design Engineering for Innovation, Czekanski has been working to understand how exposure to the design engineering process can provide students with an enhanced educational experience. Under the umbrella of design engineering education, he has investigated a variety of themes ranging from the use of design competitions to improve underrepresented attributes to determining key learning outcomes for design engineering students and understanding student perceptions of the engineering practice.

A regular contributor to the CEEA, Czekanski has published nine conference papers in this area since 2015. This research has even been applied to courses at Lassonde. One conference paper took a critical look at design project scope selection for mechanical engineering design-spine courses. Several mechanisms that could improve the learning outcomes and experiences of the students were identified and these mechanisms have since been implemented in several courses.

The importance of engineering education has extended to students educated by Czekanski. Each member of his research group has taken this priority seriously, with three graduate students receiving the President’s University-Wide Teaching Assistant Award (Minha Ha, 2018; Mohamed Abdelhamid, 2019; and Roger Carrick, 2020). Ha was also the recipient of the 2020 Engineering Education Award from the CEEA in recognition for the research and practices she has developed while in Czekanski’s group.

Czekanski is also the principal investigator for “Additive Manufacturing: Engineering Design and Global Entrepreneurship (AM-EDGE),” an NSERC CREATE grant awarded in 2020. He is the co-principal investigator for an NSERC CREATE grant awarded in 2021, “Smart Autonomous Robotic Technology for Earth and Space Exploration.” The 2021 CREATE grant has started developing a training program for undergraduate students, graduate students and research fellows to become experts in the design and implementation of additive manufacturing  technologies. He was a previous awardee of the President’s University Wide-Teaching Award, Lassonde Educator of the Year Award and the Lassonde Innovation Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentorship.

Czekanski also served as president of the CEEA throughout the pandemic. He worked in concert with CEEA to support online learning and develop virtual workshops for the community. Lassonde will host the CEEA Conference in 2022 with the theme of “Transforming Learners to Transform Our World.”