The Role of Spatial-Visual Skills in a Project-Based Engineering Design Course

Dr. Yang’s research interest is in the process of designing products and systems, particularly in the early phases of the design cycle. Dr. Yang earned her SB in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and her MS and PhD from Stanford University’s Mechanical Engineering Department, Design Division under an NSF Graduate Fellowship. More recently, she was an Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California, and before that a postdoctoral instructor of design in the mechanical engineering department of the California Institute of Technology. She has been a lecturer in design at Stanford University. She is the 2006 recipient of an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. Dr. Yang’s industrial experience includes serving as Director of Design at Reactivity, a Silicon Valley software company now a part of Cisco Systems. She has done research into collaborative design tools at Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group and Lockheed Artificial Intelligence Center. In addition, she has explored the user interaction issues for software design, as well as ergonomics issues of force-feedback devices for Immersion Corporation.