Rick Vaz

As a Senior Fellow in WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning, which I established in 2016, I work with colleagues across campus to help advance project-based learning at colleges and universities around the nation and the globe. We also support project-based learning here on the WPI campus. Most of my scholarly and professional activity has centered around experiential and international education. Through my involvement in organizations such as the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the American Society for Engineering Education, I work to promote WPI’s approach to undergraduate education as a national model. On campus, I continue to be involved in WPI's signature offering, the Interactive Qualifying Project.

I received my PhD in electrical engineering from WPI, focusing on signal analysis and machine vision. I held systems and design engineering positions with the Raytheon Company, GenRad Inc., and the MITRE Corporation before joining the WPI Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty in 1987. While I greatly enjoyed my work as an engineering faculty member, over time my interests in interdisciplinary teaching and learning and international education resulted in increasing involvement in WPI’s student project programs, both on campus and elsewhere. I served as Dean of Interdisciplinary and Global Studies for ten years, and have advised hundreds of undergraduate research projects in Australia, England, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Namibia, the Netherlands, Thailand, and the United States.