I’m John Brocato, and I work as a Technical Communication Lecturer in the School of Chemical, Materials, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Georgia, and I also serve as the university’s ASEE Campus Representative. Prior to this role, I coordinated and taught in the Shackouls Technical Communication Program in the James Worth Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University. In this position, I helped establish one of the earliest embedded engineering-communication programs in the United States and helped foster a culture of professional writing and speaking within the college’s eight departments and eleven degree programs. I have continued this tradition at Georgia by developing a similar culture of communication in a relatively new college of engineering (established in 2012). In addition to teaching my school’s Intro courses, I created and teach two new courses: BIOE 2100 The Bioengineering Professional Persona and ENGR 6950 Engineering Writing and Presenting. The former course examines what it means to be a bioengineer in modern society and engages students on a wide variety of sociotechnical issues; the latter course works iteratively with engineering graduate students on the writing and presenting they are already doing in their programs of study: thesis and dissertation proposals and chapters, article manuscripts, presentations, posters, and more. I also established and lead one of the college’s few Study Abroad programs, Bioengineering Studies in Germany / Maymester in Munich, and I further work college-wide assisting faculty members with the communication in their technical courses. Although my positions have been 100% teaching, I have also published on engineering-communication pedagogy for many years, including papers on engineering ethics and communication; active-learning pedagogies; and the intersection of engineering and theatre. Finally, having been an ASEE member for over 20 years, I have held a number of roles in the Society, including Southeastern Section President and Zone II Chair, and I am also an ASEE Fellow as well as a longtime Campus Representative, a role for which I have won numerous Section and National awards.
 
Candidate’s Statement:
I’m John Brocato, past ASEE Zone II Chair and an ASEE Fellow, and I wish to be considered for the office of Vice President of Member Affairs. During my time in ASEE, I have held multiple leadership roles at the section and national levels: Campus Rep Coordinator, President-Elect, President, Immediate Past-President, and the current Proceedings Editor in the Southeastern Section; Webmaster/Newsletter Editor, Program Chair, and Division Chair in the Liberal Education/Engineering and Society (LEES) Division; and National Campus Rep as well as Zone II Chair. I also served as Mississippi State’s longtime ASEE Campus Representative (2004-2019), for which I won numerous awards at the Section and Zone levels.
 
Serving ASEE as Vice President of Member Affairs would be one of the true highlights of my career. Although it may sound clichéd, our members truly are the lifeblood of our Society, and it would be an absolute honor to serve in a role whose primary mission involves listening to our members and ensuring their needs are promptly and thoroughly met. Listening, incidentally, is one of my most critical and desirable leadership qualities along with ability to collaborate effectively with a diverse group and my detail-oriented work ethic. I believe a leader’s essential role is to help all of those they serve, and this can only be done well if the leader is an excellent listener who possesses an empathic, service-oriented ethos. I am especially committed to amplifying voices too often marginalized or underserved: people of color, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, and so on. Additionally, I am a highly organized, detail-oriented person who is passionately committed to working in the most thorough and efficient way possible, never asking someone to perform any task that I would be unwilling to do myself.
 
I thank you for your consideration.
 
Institutional contact info: Lillian Balance, Communications and Marketing Manager, UGA College of Engineering

Dr. Pritpal Singh is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Villanova University. He received his BSc in Physics from the University of Birmingham in England in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Applied Science/Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1984.
  
Dr. Singh has been working in solar energy research for over 40 years, working right from the cell level to the systems level. He teaches postgraduate courses in power electronics, renewable energy systems, sustainable product development for low resource settings and information, communication, and energy technologies for development (ICET4D). He ran his own solar business in India for five years and has consulted for the US Department of Energy and two private companies on solar electric systems. He has worked with UNICEF in Nicaragua, Burundi and Zimbabwe giving workshops on renewable energy and entrepreneurship. He has recently worked on humanitarian projects in Ecuador in renewable energy and connectivity with colleagues from the Escuela Politecnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Dr. Singh served as the IEEE Special Interest Group for Humanitarian Technology (SIGHT) Education Subcommittee Chair from 2017 - 2019 and is presently the Chair of the 2022 Partnerships Committee of the IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee. He served as the Technical Chair for the 2020 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference and will serve as Co-Chair and host of the 2023 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference.
 
For ASEE, he has served as the Middle Atlantic ASEE section, Zone 1 Chair and has hosted the Middle Atlantic Section meeting three times. He is currently meetings chair for the section. He has been involved with the International Division for several years and is presently a Member-At-Large for the Division. At last year’s annual conference, he organized a dinner for the International Division to help recruit new members to the Division.
 
Dr. Singh is the 2022 Duncan Fraser Global Engineering Education awardee.

Candidate Statement

Membership in ASEE has been declining and there is a need to consider ways of attracting new members and retaining existing members. It has been my pleasure to serve ASEE at several levels over the past decade. I held leadership positions in the Middle Atlantic Section of ASEE including the Chair of the Section twice. I have also served as the Zone 1 representative on the ASEE Board of Directors. I have also hosted the Middle Atlantic ASEE Section conference three times at Villanova University. I am also a member at large of the International Division a member at large of the IEEE Education Society where I also serve in the role of Chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity and Inclusion.

I have been working with the ASEE Board to establish a new membership grade of Senior Member. At present, there are only member and Fellow grades of membership in ASEE and I feel there is a need to recognize members who have actively served ASEE for many years but have not reached the level of accomplishments to earn the distinction of Fellow grade. If I am elected to the position of VP Member Affairs, I will work to get this new grade over the finish line.

A second initiative that I would like to further develop is that of ensuring that there are active campus representatives in every college/university. Many higher education institutions do not have campus representatives to promote the benefits of ASEE on their campuses. There has been some work done in this area by a former VP Member Affairs and I would like to build on this earlier work.

Both of these initiatives have the potential to bring in new members and retain existing members. If I am elected to the VP Member Affairs position, I will be delighted to work with the Regional ASEE Zone Leaders as well as the Board of Directors to move these two initiatives forward.