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Beverly Louie

Senior Instructor

ChBE Cooperative Education, Director

Women in Engineering, Director

ECCE 110

(303) 492-4967
beverly.louie@colorado.edu

Dr. Beverly Louie is the Director of the Women in Engineering Program. She is a Senior Instructor and Coordinator of Cooperative Education for the Department of Chemical Engineering. She holds degrees from the University of Colorado (BS 1977, MS 1983 in Chemical Engineering). She has a D.Phil. from Oxford University, England (Mechanical Engineering, 1993). She has experience in oil and gas and the power industry, working in water treatment process engineering and plant equipment trouble-shooting and design. She spent a dozen years as a research engineer for the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder. Her areas of research included space-based fluid dynamics, chemical separations, cryogenic properties of materials and transient heat transfer, and vapor liquid equilibria of azeotropic mixtures.

In 1995 Bev began teaching several courses in the Chemical Engineering Department, focusing on the chemical engineering unit operations lab courses (CHEN 3130, 4130) and the freshmen Engineering Projects (GEEN 1400) course through the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory. In her chemical engineering courses she encourages her students to develop their professional skills in open-ended problem solving, teamwork, and written and oral communications. She coordinates the chemical engineering cooperative education certificate program that enables students to alternate work and academic semesters, to gain valuable experience in industry and to earn a salary. Her freshmen engineering students have developed assistive technology projects for clients such as ski walkers, a four-wheeled bike, puzzles, and a spinning chair for the Boulder Valley School District, a hinge, arm support and communications adaptor for Westminster Schools, and a feeding mechanism and soccer adaptor for a wheelchair for Denver Public Schools. She has served as coordinator for the Engineering Projects sections and the end of semester Design Expo events that highlight the freshmen engineering projects and senior design projects in the college. She and a team of freshmen engineering students recently won the Rocky Mountain Humanitarian Hero Award for a 1999 project, a prosthetic arm for an Afghanistan refugee teen.

In 2001 Bev became the Director of the Women in Engineering Program, a college student program that focuses on recruitment and retention of female engineering students, and outreach to K-12 girls to encourage them to consider careers in engineering. This program offers study space and computers, scholarships, peer and professional mentoring opportunities, professional development sessions, weekly interest seminars, K-12 career interest and outreach programs, academic counseling, Girl Scout badge earning workshops, departmental luncheons, free food during finals, female soldering and machining classes, and small group discussions with students and female faculty. She has collaborated with the Director of the Multicultural Engineering Program to develop an annual student leadership conference and annual MESA student and teacher events.

Bev volunteers as a sit-ski instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled at Winter Park, Colorado, and serves as the current President of the Board of Directors of South Boulder Little League. In her spare time, Bev and her husband watch countless soccer and baseball games played by their two sons, works in the garden, and plays volleyball.