Nebraska Engineering faculty Jena Asgarpoor and Bonita Sharif are among the 11 Univeristy of Nebraska-Lincoln professors who have been awarded professorships from the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor.
Asgarpoor will be Aaron Douglas professor of practice in engineering. The Aaron Douglas/John E. Weaver professorships were established in 2008 to recognize faculty members with the rank of full professor who demonstrate sustained and extraordinary levels of teaching excellence and national visibility for instructional activities and/or practice.
As director of the Master of Engineering Management program, she has elevated the program to national prominence, overseeing enrollment growth of more than 140%, a graduation rate of nearly 100%, and a decrease in time to degree by a full year. The program’s U.S. News and World Report ranking has risen to No. 6 nationally and to No. 5 among programs for veterans, and it has received the American Society for Engineering Management Founder’s Award for Graduate Program Excellence.
Asgarpoor's instructional scholarship has been recognized nationally with American Society for Engineering Education honors, including the Bernard Sarchet Award, Keating Award, Engineering Management Division Best Paper Award, and multiple Best Presentation awards. She has received multiple distinguished teaching awards from the College of Engineering, including the Holling Family Master Teacher Award/UNL Universitywide Teaching Award.
Sharif will be Susan J. Rosowski associate professor in the School of Computing. The Susan J. Rosowski professorships recognize faculty at the associate professor level who have achieved distinguished records of scholarship or creative activity and who show exceptional promise for future excellence.
Sharif is a recognized leader in software engineering and eye-tracking research, bridging human-computer interactions and software maintenance. Her signature contribution is iTrace, an open-source community eye-tracking infrastructure for software engineers and education researchers to conduct realistic studies on large open-source systems. Backed by sustained NSF funding, including a CAREER award and a Computing Research Infrastructure grant, her program bridges software engineering and applied machine learning, with numerous peer-reviewed publications and multiple best-paper recognitions.
Sharif is a College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award recipient and in the Faculty Teaching Fellows program. Her collaboration with Lincoln's Don’t Panic Labs brings real-world, stakeholder-driven practice into the curriculum. She is a founding board member of Girls Code Lincoln, expanding pathways into computing for K-12 learners.
