Research Projects

Research Focus

As a research scholar, my work has been in the related areas of engineering design, engineering education, and human-centered behavior. My Ph.D. worked under Dr. Scarlett Miller has focuses on the role of creative design risk-taking in engineering design education. Specifically, my research focused on identifying individual attributes and their impact on the creative risk-taking decision making of engineering students.

In addition, my MS thesis under the direction of Dr. Miller, focused on the role of gender and culture on student risk taking preferences – exploring both U.S. and Moroccan universities. The outcome of this work was significant in that it identified differences in creative design practices between U.S. and Moroccan students, and also provided empirical evidence on the role of risk-taking in impacting design practices of Moroccan students.

Formation and Impact of Creative Climate in Engineering Classrooms

Creativity and innovation help individuals and companies to stay competitive in a rapid changing world and to meet the demand of a rapidly changing market. However, due to the serious nature of engineering, engineers often refrain from taking necessary creative risks fearing uncertainty associated with its outcomes. Therefore, it is important to investigate ways to help foster creative risk-taking and aid engineers in taking creative risks at the right time. Previous research have already found that enviornment can influence risk-taking in other disciplines. This study is to investigate whether similar trends can be found with creative climate and creative risk-taking in engineering classrooms.

Team Composition of Individual Attributes and Its Impact on Creative Risk-Taking

Researchers and practitioners alike agree that for companies to survive and thrive they must develop and support radical innovation. However, these ideas are complex and risky, and not all succeed. Because of this, decision makers are often left to make hard decisions in terms of which ideas move on and which to abandon. The goal of this project was to provide pilot evidence to identify the impact of individual attributes on the effectiveness of decision making for radical innovation. Specifically, we seek to identify how individual personality and preferences for creativity could impacted the likelihood of selecting radical ideas using principles from signal detection theory (SDT).

Individual Attributes and Its Impact on Creative Risk-Taking Signal Detection

While teaming is a vital component of engineering, it is important to remember that there is no team without individuals and individual behavior can drive team outputs. One of these individual factors that may manifest itself at the team level is individual risk-taking attitudes, which can be impacted by personality and preferences for creativity. However, a gap exists in research on the impact of the team composition in these factors on creative outputs, as previous research has found that team composition plays a key role in team performance. This study was developed to examine how the elevation and diversity of team personality and preferences for creativity impact the novelty and quality of ideas generated and selected by the team through a simulation study of 60,831 teams.

Investigating the Difference Between Creative Design Actions of Moroccan and U.S. Students

There has been a plethora of design theory and methodology research conducted to answer important questions centered around how ideas are developed and translated into successful products. Understanding this is vital because of the role creativity and innovation have in long-term economic success. However, most of these researches focused on U.S. samples, leaving to question if differences exist across cultural borders. Answering this question is key to support a successful global economy. This project provides a first step at answering this question by examining similarities and differences in generating concepts and screening practices between students in an emerging market, Morocco, and those in a more established market, the U.S., during a design thinking workshop.

Recent Papers: ASME Proceedings | JMD Publication | Master of Science Thesis

Team: (Advisor) Scarlett Miller, Ph.D. | (Collaborator) Jessica Menold, Ph.D. | Aoran Peng

Malevalent Creativity | NCITE

This project is a collaboration of researchers at King’s College of London and Penn State University that aims to see if counterterrorism workers could disrupt malevolent creativity involved in planning and carrying out terrorist attacks. The goal of this work is to study violent extremist (jihadist and right-wing) behavior online and apply engineering theory to develop precise interventions that interrupt and stop would-be attacks.