About Dr. Rivera

Research Keywords

Professional Development; Agency in Communities of Practice; Transformational Change; Collaboration and Inclusion in Teams, Inclusive Pedagogy.

Full Bio (~100 words)

Last update: November 3rd, 2022

Dr. Rivera-Jiménez is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Engineering Education (EED) and an affiliate faculty to the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Florida. She is the director of the Engineering Communities & Participatory Change (ECoPAC) Research Group. Her research focuses on understanding the role of engineering communities while enacting their agency in participatory and transformational change. She is particularly interested in broadening the participation of minoritized communities by studying the role of professional development in shaping organizational cultures. As an education practitioner, she also looks at evidence-based practices to incorporate social responsibility skills, collaboration, and inclusive environments into the curriculum. She graduated from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez with a B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. She earned an NSF RIEF award recognizing her effort in transitioning from a meaningful ten-year teaching faculty career into engineering education research. Before her current role, she taught STEM courses at diverse institutions such as Hispanic-serving (HSI), community college, and R1 public university. Outside the classroom, she serves as a creator and facilitator of professional development workshops for students, faculty, and industry on social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion in engineering.

Positionality refers to the stance or positioning of the researcher in relation to the social and political context of the study—the community, the organization or the participant group.

Coghlan, D., & Brydon-Miller, M. (2014). Positionality. In The SAGE encyclopedia of action research (pp. 628-628). SAGE Publications Ltd.

My Positionality

In 2022, I became an Assistant Professor after 11 years of working as a contingent faculty at diverse institutions such as Hispanic Serving Institution, Community College, and research-intensive. I am a Latina chemical engineer in academia navigating her professional identities as an educator, social researcher, and communicator. It all started from my interest to use evidence-based practices in my engineering classroom to help my students work in collaborative and inclusive environments. I also work in facilitating professional development for students, faculty, and industry in social justice topics in the engineering profession. As a contingent faculty, I had to figure out how to start my social research from a faculty position that is inherently limited by years of traditional roles and peer bias. My research is interdisciplinary by nature, although I consider myself a more political engineer and educator, as those are the areas I have been developing through my career. My research lies at the intersection of societal change, engineering communities, agency, and education of engineers. I am primarily interested in understanding how engineering communities within professional societies influence (or hinders) agency to create transformational changes in the professional formation of engineers. I use a broad range of theoretical frameworks, cross-disciplinary boundaries and apply multiple research methods.