Karen High, Ph.D.
Education
Ph.D., Chemical Engineering
Pennsylvania State University, 1991
M. S., Chemical Engineering
Pennsylvania State University, 1988
B. S., Chemical Engineering
University of Michigan, 1985
Major Areas of Interest
Sustainable Process Design
Multicriteria Decision Making
Engineering Education
K-12 Engineering for Teachers and Students
Recent Research Activities
Dr. High’s research at Oklahoma State University has focused on sustainable process design, and has been named SusCAD. The research is designed to be able to facilitate solving a sustainability-oriented decision-making (e.g. chemical process design) problem, especially good for handling those real-world systems that are described by a mathematical model. This methodology formulates a design task for sustainability as satisfying multiple competing objectives, each of which represents a certain aspect that people may be concerned with in terms of sustaining human society. The evaluation, decision-making and improvement of the target system will be performed iteratively, thus they essentially form a closed-loop feedback scheme.
Engineering education activities include enhancing mathematics, communication skills, critical thinking and creativity in engineering students and teaching science to education professionals. Dr. High is a trainer for Project Lead the Way pre-Engineering. She initiated an engineering program at Stillwater Middle School, and in the summer of 2008, Dr. High was part of a professional development workshop for 80 Northeast Oklahoma middle level teachers to develop integrated engineering curriculum.
Recent Publications
- “SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATOR: Tool for Evaluating the Sustainability of a Process,” with O. Shadiya, Environmental Progress and Sustainable Energy, in press.
- “Designing Processes for Sustainability: Incorporating Optimization and the SUSTAINABILITY EVALUATOR,” with O. Shadiya, Environmental Progress and Sustainable Energy, in press.
- “Process Enhancement through Waste Minimization and Multiobjective Optimization,” with O. Shadiya, and V. Satish, J. Cleaner Production, 31, 137, (2012).
- “Girls Helping Girls: Assessing the Influence of College Student Mentors in an Afterschool Engineering Program,” with S. Backoff, A. Redmond, and J. Thomas, Mentoring and Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, 20 (1), 137, (2012).
- “Enriching Science and Math Through Engineering: A Middle School Case Study,” with J. Thomas, A. Redmond, M. Scott, P. Jordan, and J. Dockers, School Science and Math Association Journal, 111 (8), 399, (2011).
- Thomas, J., A. Redmond, K. High, M. Scott, P. Jordan, and J. Dockers. “Enriching Science and Math Through Engineering: A Middle School Case Study.” School Science and Math Association Journal, in press, 2010.
- Damron, R., and K. High.“Critical Thinking Elements of First Year Engineering Students.”International Journal of Engineering Education, under revision, 2010.