Cheryl Farmer

Ms. Farmer serves as Director of Precollege Engineering Education Initiatives for the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. As the founding director of the NSF-funded UTeachEngineering program, Ms. Farmer has led the development, launch, and evolution of the Engineer Your World program. Now in its eighth year, Engineer Your World provides a two-year (and expanding) curriculum sequence that integrates computational thinking with hands-on engineering design and problem-solving; teacher professional development and support programs that enable any STEM-literate, constructivist educator to be successful in the classroom; and dual-enrollment opportunities that empower students not just to earn college credit for their work, but also to experience and rise to expectations for college-level coursework at a top school of engineering. With a growing network that now serves 270+ educators and 10,000+ students across 26 states, the District of Columbia, and South Korea, Engineer Your World is committed to expanding opportunities in engineering education for all students, regardless of future career aspirations. In 2012 Ms. Farmer initiated a national effort to develop research-based Standards for Professional Development for K-12 Teachers of Engineering; from 2012 to 2015, she and Dr. Stacy Klein-Gardner of Vanderbilt University co-led this effort that resulted in the publication of the standards by the American Society for Engineering Education. Ms. Farmer is currently a member of the National Academy of Engineering’s panel on building educator capacity in K-12 engineering.