Karen M. Bursic, PhD

1037 Benedum Hall | 3700 O’Hara Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15261 P: 412-624-9837 C: 412-889-2754

kbursic@pitt.edu Professor Undergraduate Program Director

Bio

Karen Bursic is an Associate Professor and the Undergraduate Program Director for Industrial Engineering. She received her B.S., M.S., and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining the department she worked as a Senior Consultant for Ernst and Young and as an Industrial Engineer for General Motors Corporation. She teaches undergraduate courses in engineering economics, engineering management, and probability and statistics in Industrial Engineering as well as engineering computing in the freshman engineering program. She is a senior member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, American Society for Engineering Education and a registered Professional Engineer in the state of Pennsylvania.

Research Interests

Dr. Bursic’s research focus is on improving Engineering Education and she has over 20 years’ experience and numerous publications in this area. She has expertise in researching the effectiveness of state of the art teaching pedagogies including: Active Learning (instructional methods to increase student engagement in the learning process); Model-Eliciting Activities (complex, realistic, open-ended client-driven problems based on six specific principles that include model construction, reality, self-assessment, model documentation, generalizability, and an effective prototype); Student Response Devices (hand-held electronic devices that allows students to anonymously respond to a question posed by the instructor and then compare their response to the rest of the class, also known as “Clickers”); and Flipping (video lectures viewed by students outside of class and homework and problem solving done in class). She has also done research and published work in the areas of Engineering and Project Management with a particular focus on the use of teams in manufacturing organizations. She is a well-known and active member of the engineering economy teaching community via the Engineering Economy division of the American Society for Engineering Education.