Dr. Chris Rogers is co-director of the BEND program and oversees all progress in undergraduate research.

Dr. Chris Rogers is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has a proven track record as a collaborator on interdisciplinary projects and as an educational program director. He received the 2003 NSF Director’s Distinguished Teaching Scholar Award for excellence in both teaching and research. His first sabbatical was spent at Harvard and a local kindergarten looking at methods of teaching engineering. He spent 2002 at Princeton as the Kenan Professor of Distinguished Teaching where he worked on developing new ways to assess and value teaching. Through the Center for Engineering Education Outreach he has worked with LEGO to develop ROBOLAB, a robotic approach to learning science and math. ROBOLAB is currently used in 50,000 schools worldwide and is being translated into 16 languages. Dr. Rogers is involved in six different research areas: particle-laden flows (including simulation, experimentation, and a hybrid of the two), telerobotics and controls, slurry flows in chemical-mechanical planarization, the engineering of musical instruments, measuring flame shapes of couch fires, and in elementary school engineering education.

His work has been funded by numerous government organizations and corporations, including NSF, NASA, Intel, Boeing, Cabot, Steinway, Selmer, Fulbright, and the LEGO Corporation. This work has led to the opportunity to fly aboard the NASA 0g experimental aircraft, and he has flown over 700 parabolas without getting sick. Dr. Rogers was an instrumental founder of the Robotics Academy at Tufts University, a program that provides opportunities for learning in the context of multi-disciplinary problem solving. During their two years in the Academy, participants work on a team composed of students from different disciplines. The popular program is successful in part because students are mentored and taught a wide range of practical knowledge.