Dr. Janis Terpenny is the department chair and Joseph Walkup Professorship of Industrial and Manufacturing
Systems Engineering at Iowa State University. She comes to ISU from Virginia Tech, where she
was a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and in the Department of Engineering Education
and an affiliate of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Dr. Terpenny also served
as a program director for the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation
(NSF) prior to her move to ISU. She is the director of the Center for e-Design, a multi-university NSF
industry/university cooperative research center (I/UCRC). Her research focus is engineering design (process
and methods of early design; knowledge and information in design; product families and platforms;
obsolescence in products and systems; and complexity of products and systems) and design education
(multidisciplinary teams; impacts of project choice and context; and the retention and success of underrepresented
students). She has 9 years of industry work experience with the General Electric Company
(GE), including the completion of a 2-year corporate management program. Throughout her career, she
has managed over $8 million of sponsored research and is the author of 150 peer-reviewed publications.
She is a member and Fellow of IIE, a member and Fellow of ASME, and a member of ASEE, INFORMS,
Alpha Pi Mu, and Tau Beta Pi. She serves as an associate editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanical
Design and for the Engineering Economist. She has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching,
in research, and for service.