Access Lab · Research
What We
Study
Five interconnected research areas at the intersections of disability, identity, student experience, design, and action research in engineering education.
The Work
The Access Lab studies engineering education from a systems lens, with attention to the lived experiences of students and the structures that shape access, participation, and belonging. Our work examines how engineering environments, cultural norms, design, and policies and practices influence who is supported in engineering and under what conditions.
Our research spans accessibility and disability in engineering education, undergraduate student experiences, and sociotechnical design. Across these areas, we use design-based research and critical methodologies to understand barriers, examine how inequities are produced and maintained, and develop approaches that support more accessible and equitable learning environments.
We approach the system of engineering education as complex and interconnected. Questions about disability, identity, design, and student experience are inseparable from the systems in which they occur. Our goal is to advance research that deepens understanding, challenges hegemonic structures that create and reproduce barriers to access and participation, and supports more responsive learning environments.
Disability in Engineering Education
Disability is often treated as an individualized “problem” needed to be “fixed” rather than a systemic reflection of how environments are designed, experienced, and maintained. In this area, our work examines how disabled students experience engineering programs in higher education, how they navigate barriers across classrooms and institutions, and how access is shaped through interactions with faculty, peers, policies, and professional expectations.
Projects examine disabled students’ lived experiences in engineering education, systemic ableism, and accessibility and disability inclusion in the transition from higher education to the workplace.
Student Experience & Identity Development
Students’ pathways through engineering are shaped by prior experiences, institutional messages, cultural norms, and ideas about what engineering is and who belongs in the field. This research area focuses on how students interpret their engineering experiences, how they come to understand themselves in relation to engineering, and how identity and lived experience shape degree attainment and career decision-making over time.
Projects in this area examine engineering student experiences across different contexts, with attention to how engineering culture and institutional messaging shape participation and persistence. Projects span pre-college and undergraduate engineering contexts, including work on gender identity in engineering learning environments, broadening participation in early engineering courses, patterns of persistence and departure, and trust in classrooms. Across this work, we seek to challenge entrenched assumptions about learners, pathways, and engineering work that continue to shape the field.
Accessibility, User Experience, & Universal Design in Learning Environments
Equitable learning environments require attention to how courses are designed, how instruction is delivered, and how students access support. Our work draws from accessibility, user experience, and universal design to examine how engineering education can better anticipate and respond to the needs of diverse learners rather than relying on reactive or individualized approaches to access.
Projects in this area include studies of universal design for learning, digital accessibility, and how engineering programs represent disability and access online.
Sociotechnical Design & Understanding
Engineering design is shaped by social values, institutional contexts, histories, power relations, and the communities affected by design decisions. This research area examines how engineering education can help students connect technical work to social context, with particular attention to access, equity, and responsibility in design.
Projects in this area examine how equitable design is taught in engineering education and how students can be better prepared to proactively engage in equitable design. This work includes research on the opportunities and challenges of teaching equitable design, as well as policy-oriented work on the misalignment between STEM education and accessible design. Across these projects, we study how students come to understand design as sociotechnical work and develop practices that are more responsive to the people and communities engineering is meant to serve.
Critical Research & Community-Centered Design Methods
Our methodological work is informed by critical community-centered design methods, including participatory action research (PAR), which guide researchers in examining how power, context, and lived experience shape educational systems. We write and teach about critical engagement and PAR to help engineering education researchers think critically about power, participation, and accountability in research.
From this perspective, our methodological work supports research that is collaborative, reflective, and oriented toward challenging the conditions that create and maintain inequity.