Vivien Papp ’26 Earns Top Honor at National Engineering Education Conference
Vivien Papp ’26 (IntE) has received one of the most prestigious recognitions at this year's American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is one of the largest gatherings of engineering education researchers in the country. Her paper, co-authored with Professor and Chair of Integrated Engineering Susan Lord, PhD, presented in the Materials Division where it won Best Paper in the Division and was then selected as the Best Professional Interest Council (PIC) I Paper, placing it among the top five papers at the entire conference. It was also named one of the top five Diversity papers at the conference .
The paper, “A Sociotechnical Module: Integrating Indigenous Use of Materials in a Material Science Course,” makes a pointed argument: “Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (ITK) is rarely integrated into technical engineering curricula, despite offering valuable alternatives to dominant Western material paradigms, particularly in the context of sustainability.” The module Papp and Lord designed for a required third-year materials science course at USD draws on the practices of several North American tribes and nations, including the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest Coast and the Kumeyaay of California. Papp facilitated the module in Lord’s GENG 311 Engineering Materials Science class in Fall 2025.
At the heart of the module are two guiding principles: the Honorable Harvest and the Full-Use Principle. Students were asked to apply these as design considerations during material selection, complementing typical technical considerations such as a load requirement or a cost threshold. Through exit tickets and post-class homework, students demonstrated an ability to interpret Indigenous technologies as sophisticated engineered solutions rooted in both material properties and cultural practice, successfully synthesizing technical reasoning with cultural ethics.
Congratulations to Vivien Papp and Dr. Susan Lord on this incredibly deserved recognition. Papp graduated from the Honors program with a BS/BA in Integrated Engineering with a concentration in Sustainability. The work presented at the ASEE conference was part of her honors thesis and combines her Indigenous heritage with her goals of identifying innovative ways to address climate change and environmental degradation.
Papp’s travel to the conference was supported by USD’s Student Affairs Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR), Associated Student Government (ASG), an Honors Program Lawrence Hinman Research Grant and Dr. Boudrias’ Urgent Challenges fund.