GRESES PÉREZ ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING
Professor Pérez’s journey to Tufts took many twists and turns that all followed a general bent: a passion for engineering and education. Her career began in Puerto Rico where she worked as a civil and environmental engineer on flood maps and sediment analysis. Later, she was an elementary school science teacher working primarily with bilingual students in Texas, beginning her teaching career at a time when engineering standards were just being introduced to classrooms. All along the way, Professor Pérez saw firsthand how connection with the local community was integral to engineering practice. “I quickly realized that the element of what people know in their communities was very important for the role of what we were doing as engineers.” Her connection with students was incredibly impactful, even very recently. “Just this year, one of the students that I taught in elementary school called me saying that she’s going to apply to college and that she’s going to become a civil engineer. I remember that we did a study of water quality in a creek near the school—we did some testing, and they discovered that there was lead in the water. And they felt really empowered to spread the word to the other children who typically will play there to say, ‘there are pollutants in the water, and there are things that we can do to avoid that.’ So engineering is an avenue to generate those kinds of changes in their communities.”
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Empowering people, especially students, towards using engineering to make their community a better place also played a large role in Professor Pérez’s graduate education. “I was a doctoral student at Stanford in the learning sciences. I mostly studied how people learn engineering across their lifespan from when they are children until undergrad and beyond.” Over the past few years at Tufts, Professor Pérez’s research followed that same general interest. “I look at engineering in communities, first in the general context, and then I do applications to specific disciplines and how we can connect communities with engineering. I also think about the language and cultural practices of communities and the ways that people make sense of ideas in their local context, the ways that people understand the world around them, and how much of all of that is already engineering and has not been explicitly connected with the things that engineers do.” She currently oversees a multitude of projects, including one working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado that is researching how we can “rethink energy incentives by incorporating input from local communities,” another where students are prototyping video games to “bring communities knowledge about engineering as a way to help us think about inequities…the things that engineers do, or the different pathways that one could could imagine oneself as an engineer,” and one where a graduate student is researching
“Black epistemologies in making, in particular how youth understand hip-hop through an engineering lens.” Nearly all of these projects involve working with local communities that are multilingual, immigrant, and/or underserved, creating pathways to engineering education and empowering communities. But that’s not all! Professor Pérez was recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant to facilitate climate technology engineering education in Somerville schools, bringing increasingly relevant engineering educational practices to the engineers of tomorrow in our local community. It should come as no surprise that representation is important for Professor Pérez. Making sure that students can envision success, especially in STEM fields, is important to the work that she does. “If we look at engineering faculty, it’s a very homogeneous group of of people. [The students I work with] have found both an intellectual community in the lab but also a community that understands where they come from and values where they come from.” There is no doubt that with Professor Pérez’s hard work, and the space that she has provided over the years both in her lab and across the whole United States, that this world will be a brighter place.
