Mark Somerville

Mark Somerville, Ph.D., co-founder of the Big Beacon movement, is the Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Curricular Innovation at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering and a Professor of Engineering and Physics. Not your typical engineer, Mark embraces the idea of re-engineering how future engineers are taught.

For Mark, educating engineers isn’t just about teaching facts; it’s about getting students involved in hands-on research, integrating communication skills into the curriculum, and helping students learn to think critically and extract meaning from experiences. With these goals in mind, Mark led the committee that developed the inaugural curriculum at Olin, and also led the college’s first strategic planning
effort. He has also collaborated extensively with other institutions, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, TU-Delft, and others, to spread change in engineering education. Prior to joining Olin College, Mark was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Vassar.

Mark regularly leads “Engineer of the Future” workshops on such topics as Unleashing Student Engagement for Changing Engineering Education, The Importance of Intrinsic Motivation in Engineering Education, and How to Think About Change in Engineering Education. As a principal in Olin’s I2E2 Summer Institute, which draws engineering educators from around the world, Mark hopes to inspire engineering schools around the world to apply collaborative design techniques to the curriculum revision processes.

Marks’ unique educational path helped him see, early on, how different engineering education could be. As an undergraduate, he attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a BS in Electrical Engineering and a BA in Liberal Arts. The strong contrast between his liberal arts classes, which encouraged engaged dialogue and critical thinking, and his engineering classes, which mandated a formulaic
approach to ‘learning for the test,’ sparked his initial idea for revamping engineering education.

Mark then obtained an MA in Physics from Oxford University, and an MS and PhD in electrical engineering from MIT. His academic honors include the Joint Services Electronics Program Doctoral and Post Doctoral Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellowship, and the Rhodes Scholarship.

Today, when he’s not championing the Big Beacon ideals of effecting sustainable change to foster a new generation of passionate, creative, whole-brained, and technically capable engineers, Mark conducts technical research focused on the physics of semiconductor devices, with particular emphasis development of novel measurement techniques to provide insight into device failure mechanisms in
devices.