Bioengineering professor Holly Golecki has earned the prestigious NSF CAREER Award for her project, “Supporting Professional Formation of Robotics Engineers through a Human-Centered Design Approach.” Her five-year initiative aims to make robotics education more accessible and engaging by emphasizing real-world applications in healthcare and agriculture. Through partnerships with schools across diverse communities, Golecki’s team will develop adaptable curricula that connect engineering principles with human needs. Her recognition highlights the department’s growing leadership in engineering education research and its commitment to preparing future engineers to design with empathy, creativity, and purpose.
Written by Ben Libman
Bioengineering professor Holly Golecki
The Department of Bioengineering is proud to announce professor Holly Golecki’s receipt of the NSF CAREER Award for her project, “Supporting Professional Formation of Robotics Engineers through a Human-Centered Design Approach.” This five-year project totaling over $600,000 seeks to understand the role of human centered design in supporting engagement in engineering across all levels of education by emphasizing the impact of robots in healthcare and agriculture. According to the abstract, “By centering end users, we can reveal for students that robotics requires a multidisciplinary approach.”
“I am honored to receive the NSF CAREER Award,” said professor Golecki. “This award is a result of the incredible work of many students who have joined my team over the years helping to lay the groundwork for this project, the encouragement of mentors who have been an incredible resource in my career, and my supportive family.”
By making soft robotics relevant to the real world, Golecki hopes to make a subject that can be daunting more engaging: “I am excited to understand how learning robotics from a different perspective, a human-centered one, can change student thinking about how robots can be used in applications like healthcare. We plan to evaluate the impact on career thinking in robotics at every level.”
Golecki wants the educational impact of her work to be as wide as possible, and is dedicated to meeting each institution’s unique needs. “We have a broad group of schools who we will be working with on this project both locally, here in Illinois, and nationally in urban, suburban, and rural areas. We plan to iterate on the curriculum to ensure it meets the needs of teachers and students in all of these areas.”
Professor Golecki is experienced in both soft robotics education and in bringing engineering to new audiences. In Golecki’s 498 and 598 soft robotics course, students design, prototype, and demonstrate their own soft robotics. Students created models of human tissues, mechanical analogues of living creatures, and many other unique designs. Golecki has also worked with the First Generation Scholars Research Program, providing first-generation college students with the skills and mentorship they need to succeed.
Golecki is spreading her message by any means necessary, including one forum unconventional in academia: “We are excited to include podcasting as part of the educational outreach efforts in this project. In addition to sharing our findings on podcasting platforms, we plan to interview top roboticists so they can share their newest findings and career trajectories with students through freely available podcasting platforms.”
Professor Holly Golecki has been a teaching professor in the Department of Bioengineering at The Grainger College of Engineering since 2019. She earned her B.S. and M.S. from Drexel before receiving a Ph.D. from Harvard in 2018.
Though NSF CAREER Awards rarely go to teaching faculty, this is the second such recognition received by the Department of Bioengineering at Illinois Grainger Engineering. This is a mark of our department’s commitment to teaching excellence and efforts in engineering education research.
Students in classrooms today will shape the future in ways we can’t imagine. Golecki wants to ensure that the scholars creating our future come equipped with the tools and confidence to forge a better tomorrow. “I am excited about the future of robotics where we see new materials, new designs, and new manufacturing strategies being used to meet the needs of society.