Tekinay is the first Turkish person to receive this accolade.
SEFI, the European Society for Engineering Education, is the oldest and globally largest network of collaboration in engineering academe. The SEFI Fellowship Award recognizes meritorious service to engineering education worldwide, and Prof. Şirin Tekinay is among the recipients this year - the first Turkish person to receive this accolade. Tekinay has participated in all aspects of higher education, as a professor, dean, vice rector, and rector. She has also been the president of Global Engineering Deans Council and a board member of European Society for Engineering Education.
Tekinay sees engineering as a tool to solve global issues: “The to-do list to make life on Earth sustainable, healthy, safe, and joyful is captured in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The list includes complex challenges in need of multidisciplinary solutions all with social, economic, and environmental components. Myopic piecemeal, short-term solutions that don’t consider the high complexity of interactions within and among social, natural, and human-made systems have caused more problems. Therefore, even those that sound like social issues to ears trained in disciplinary silos of the 20th century, like how to combat poverty, hunger, gender inequality and inequality in general, require engineering methods and tools to converge on timely and sustainable solutions.”
Tekinay holds dear the goal of re-defining professional identity to be inclusive of all kinds of diversity, e.g., disciplinary, generational and gender: “Engineering education, globally, is suffering from a lack of full participation, especially of girls, access to advanced tools, and full support from governments, and employers. For over a decade now, I have been working on morphing engineering education towards a student-led, convergence and problem-based, technology-supported, design-oriented system.”
Published October 2022
