Oregon State University Making Progress in Adding Women to its Engineering Faculty

Oregon State University reports the number of women on the faculty of its engineering school has rapidly increased and is now among the highest in the nation.

The university says that 50 of the 200 tenured or tenure-track faculty in the College of Engineering are women. According to the university, that number has more than doubled over the past five years. This puts the school in the top three large research universities in the country when it comes to the percentage of women on the engineering faculty.

Kelsey Stoerzinger, who’s is in her second year as an assistant professor of chemical engineering, said that scientific research is strengthened by having a diverse mix of voices. “If you don’t bring everyone’s perspectives to the table, you might be limited in how you go about solving a problem, or you might be limited in even identifying what problems are to be addressed.”

Dr. Stoerzinger said the presence of so many women on the faculty means her students will have a different experience than she had as a student. “Certainly the average engineering professor I had was not a woman,” she said.

Dr. Stoerziner is a graduate of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she majored in materials science and engineering. She earned a master’s degree as a Churchill Scholar at the University of Cambridge in England and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology