Cindy Finelli receives ASEE ECE Division Distinguished Educator Award

Cindy Finelli, David C. Munson, Jr. Collegiate Professor of Engineering, was honored with the 2025 ECE Division Distinguished Educator Award from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) at this year’s ASEE Conference, where the work of nearly 100 University of Michigan researchers was presented. Recipients of the award have a proven record for outstanding teaching effectiveness and educational scholarship. 

“Professor Cindy Finelli is a distinguished ECE educator whose dedication to advancing teaching, learning, and mentorship has significantly impacted the field of ECE education and set a high standard for educational excellence,” said colleague Peter Seiler. 

Seiler praised her use of effective and inclusive teaching practices in her own classroom, her innovative approaches for promoting social responsibility in her students, and her mentorship of student researchers in Education Education Research (EER). 

Finelli led a committee to develope the EER program at Michigan and served as the program’s inaugural Director for the past ten years. The program’s model of embedding EER faculty within their engineering departments of expertise is unique among higher education institutions. In this program, and in her own research, Finelli exemplifies cooperation and collaboration. 

She has collaborated with Prof. Susan Lord, Professor and Chair of Engineering at the University of San Diego, on several projects. Their most recent collaboration focused on the NSF-funded Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project called “Integrating Sociotechnical Issues into Electrical Engineering Starting with Circuits.”

Michigan colleague and professor Fred Terry has used the modules developed in that project in the course EECS 215: Introduction to Electronic Circuits. He saw first-hand that the students appreciated understanding how their technical decisions can have unanticipated human impacts.

Finelli has also collaborated with sociology and mechanical engineering professor Erin Cech for several years in an NSF-funded project intended to build ethical engineering leaders by increasing public welfare awareness in graduate students.

Former student and assistant professor at the University of Virginia, Caroline Crockett, said “Cindy truly cares about her students and wants them to be successful. This is evident in her

evidence-based teaching practices and in her research interests.”

For example, Finelli is investigating how to improve teaching practices in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education for neurodivergent college students. And, for the good of the entire field, she developed a specialized taxonomy for Engineering Education Research and created a website to facilitate its use.Finelli was named the David C. Munson, Jr. Collegiate Professor of Engineering in 2023 for her outstanding leadership and contributions to the area of EER. She is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of ASEE. She has received several best paper awards and numerous other professional honors and awards, including a Premier Award for Engineering Education Courseware. She has served as Deputy Editor for Journal of Engineering Education and on ASEE’s “Task Force on Faculty Teaching Excellence.” In 2025, she received the U-M Cinda Sue David STEM Equity Leadership Award.