Leader in Education

Lorena A. Barba has a Ph.D. in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology and BSc/PEng degrees in mechanical engineering from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Chile. She is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Prof. Barba has previously lived in England and Chile (where she grew up) and has several years of experience in higher education. She is an advocate of open-source software for science and open educational resources, and shares her courseware on iTunesU, YouTube, and GitHub. She is interested in education technology, social learning and massively open online courses, as well as innovations in STEM education, including flipped classrooms and other forms of blended learning.

Prof. Barba received the NSF Faculty Early CAREER award (2012), was named CUDA Fellow by NVIDIA Corp. (2012), is an awardee of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) First Grant program (2007), is an Amelia Earhart Fellow of the Zonta Foundation (1999) and a leader in computational science and engineering internationally. Her research includes computational fluid dynamics, high-performance computing, computational biophysics and animal flight.

Dr. Barba is well-regarded in the open science community for her Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on numerical methods in computational science, groundbreaking in its openness. She teaches open research practices in her courses and has built new open platforms to deliver her content widely. Dr. Barba is a well-known advocate for transparency and openness and most recently wrote a perspective piece for Science on her experience teaching reproducibility.

2016 Annual Meeting Leamer-Rosenthal Prize Winner Interview