Gary began professional life as an engineer, earning a mechanical engineering degree at Lehigh in 1974 and working as an environmental engineer before pursuing his MS and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Since then, a consistent topic of his research has been the study of the nature and practice of engineering and the education of engineering professionals. He launched an academic career at Michigan Tech in 1981 before moving to Virginia Tech two years later. He climbed the academic ladder in Blacksburg, becoming full professor in 1999 and Alumni Distinguished Professor in 2004. Always a dedicated teacher, Gary has received numerous teaching and mentoring awards from Virginia Tech. He also served as Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship in Engineering Education at the National Academy of Engineering from 2004-2007.
A prolific scholar, Gary has drawn upon anthropological methods to understand engineers and engineering educators. Since 1991, he has engaged in a long-running study of the construction of persons in engineering education at Virginia Tech. Similarly, since 2003 he has examined the emergent debates about engineering education in several countries. Gary has published three books: Engineering Cultures (a video textbook with Juan Lucena in 2003); The Machine in Me: An Anthropologist Sits Among Computer Engineers (1998); and Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies (with Joe Dumit, 1998). He also has authored or co-authored several important journal articles, including "Engineering Ethics and Identity: Emerging Initiatives in Comparative Perspective," Science and Engineering Ethics (with Juan C. Lucena, and Carl Mitcham, 2007); "Knowledge and Professional Identity in Engineering," History and Technology (with Juan C. Lucena, 2004); "When Students Resist: Ethnography of a Senior Design Experience in Engineering," International Journal of Engineering Education (with Juan C. Lucena, 2003); and "Engineering Studies," in Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society (with Juan C. Lucena, 1994).
Gary has contributed time and energy to numerous organizations, including the ASEE. He delivered a Distinguished Lecture in Chicago in 2006, and has published articles in the ASEE Proceedings and Journal of Engineering Education. In addition, Gary is Program Chair for the Liberal Education Division for the 2008 meeting. But his most important contribution on behalf of teaching and scholarship about engineering education has been as co-founder of the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES). Beginning in 2004, he brought together a group of scholars who share an interest in the study of engineers, engineering, and the profession. He secured NSF funding for a workshop on engineering studies ("Locating Engineers: Education, Knowledge, Desire," Virginia Tech: September 2006) attended by 37 scholars from 11 countries, hosted and developed the website for the nascent group, and then led successful efforts to establish the journal Engineering Studies, to be published by Routledge.
In sum, few people are as deserving of the recognition of the Liberal Education Division, represented by the Sterling Olmsted Award, as Gary Downey.
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