The Purdue University Northwest (PNW) School of Engineering has started a collaborative program with Argentina’s Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN), a technical university with approximately 70,000 engineering students across the country, and its two main campuses in Buenos Aires.
As part of this program, Federico Gallo has been working and teaching classes in the department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at PNW. His tenure as a visiting professor is an element of a broader initiative that resulted from interactions between Dietmar Rempfer, director of PNW’s School of Engineering, and Uriel Cukierman, director of the Center for Educational Research and Innovation at UTN. As active members of the Global Engineering Dean’s Council (GEDC), they are working to create connections and facilitate the exchange of ideas between different cultures of engineering—and engineering education—across the world.
“We have been fortunate to have Federico bring his enthusiasm to our classrooms,” said Rempfer. “His visit is part of a broader initiative that resulted from my work as a member of the Global Engineering Deans Council and associated contacts with colleagues in Latin America. Among the goals is to develop synergies that allow engineering communities everywhere to address local and regional, as well as global, engineering challenges.”
Gallo added: “Coming to the U.S.A. is a huge experience for me, and I’m learning a lot from it. Every faculty member here is always friendly and willing to help. We work with people from different countries and with very different backgrounds, which is the main reason this experience is so rich.”
After his tenure ends this fall, Gallo is hoping to return to Purdue Northwest in the future.