Access Lab · Research
What We
Study
Four interconnected research areas at the intersection of disability, identity, and accessible design in engineering education.
The Work
The Access Lab investigates the structures, systems, and lived experiences that shape who belongs — and who thrives — in undergraduate engineering. Our research is interdisciplinary by design, drawing on disability studies, critical qualitative methods, identity theory, and sociotechnical design to examine engineering education from the inside out.
These four areas overlap and inform one another. A student’s experience of disability in an online course is also a question of accessible design; the language universities use to describe disability is also a political and ethical question. We treat that complexity as a feature, not a complication.
Disability & Accessibility in Engineering Education
Engineering education has a disability problem — not because disabled students can’t succeed, but because engineering environments are often built without them in mind. This strand of our research examines how disabled students experience faculty interactions, online learning environments, institutional policies, and the everyday culture of undergraduate engineering programs.
We ask: What barriers do disabled engineering students encounter, and what does it cost them to navigate those barriers? How do universities talk about disability — and what does that language reveal about underlying assumptions? How do students resist ableist structures, and what conditions make resistance possible?
Intersectional Student Identity & Experience in Engineering
Engineering has long centered a narrow image of who an engineer is. This strand of research examines what happens to students whose identities don’t fit that image — and how multiply marginalized students, including disabled women, transgender and gender nonconforming students, and disabled students of color, navigate the particular pressures of engineering culture.
We use intersectionality as both a theoretical framework and a methodological commitment: the experiences of a disabled Black international woman in engineering are not simply the sum of being disabled, Black, international, and a woman. They are shaped by the specific ways those identities interact.
Universal & Proactive Accessible Design
Accessibility in education is most often treated as a reactive process: a student discloses a disability, requests accommodation, and the institution responds. This research area asks what it would mean to design engineering education — its courses, platforms, assessments, and physical spaces — to be accessible from the start.
We examine the gap between STEM education’s stated commitments to inclusion and its actual design practices, and explore how AI tools and digital platforms in engineering education embed ableist assumptions — and what it would mean to redesign them with proactive accessibility in mind.
Sociotechnical Design & Critical Research Methods
The design of engineering education is itself a sociotechnical problem: it involves human relationships, institutional structures, disciplinary cultures, and material technologies all at once. This strand of the lab’s work focuses on the methodological and conceptual tools we use to study and change those systems.
We examine how engineering students develop and sustain adaptability across career transitions, how high school engineering education can be designed for access and inclusion from the outset, and how critical research practices can be applied rigorously in engineering education contexts.