Education  |  Engineering  |  Research  |  UW Notebook

January 6, 2025

Q&A: How a UW teaching professor adds the context behind the science in her chemical engineering courses

Alex Prybutok (center, maroon sweater) with the students in her first course as a teaching professor at the UW: CHEM E 465 Reactor Design. She was a tutor for a Reactor Design course when she was an undergraduate student.Alex Prybutok/University of Washington

While science majors are often told their field exists outside the realm of politics and culture, many scientific discoveries have societal implications. For example, HeLa cells (pronounced “Hee-lah”) have been used for major medical and scientific advances, and yet the cells themselves were acquired from a Black woman without her knowledge or permission. Recently, her family was partially compensated for this by settling a lawsuit with one of the major companies that market these cells.

Alex Prybutok, University of Washington assistant teaching professor of chemical engineering, studies anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in engineering education. As part of her doctoral studies, Prybutok co-founded a workshop called “Contextualizing Your Research” that helps researchers learn how to add the context behind science into their classes. She continues to do this work at the UW by adding context in her own classes and creating resources for other professors to use.

For the start of winter quarter, UW News asked Prybutok about her journey to becoming a teaching professor and how she brings a cultural lens to her chemical engineering classes.

Let’s start by talking about your role as a teaching professor. The concept of a teaching professorship as a promotable career option is still quite new in academia. How did you learn about this career path, and when did you know that this was what you wanted to do?

Alex PrybutokAlex Prybutok/University of Washington

Alex Prybutok: I have always enjoyed math and science, so from second through sixth grade, I attended Elm Fork, a summer science camp at the University of North Texas. The summer after 6th grade, I needed a volunteer project for my bat mitzvah, and Elm Fork hired me as their youngest junior volunteer. My role there was largely to help prepare for each day’s activities and support the campers throughout the day. I fell in love with it and volunteered every summer after that. Though my bat mitzvah project required only 25 hours of service, which I completed that first summer, I wound up doing over 300 hours by the time I turned 18. After that, they hired me to be a counselor to design and run the camps.

By the time I started college at the University of Texas at Austin, I knew that I loved teaching and wanted to become a faculty member. At the time, I thought that tenure track faculty was the only path that existed, so I joined a research lab. I worked for two years in an antibody and protein engineering lab, and though I learned a lot, I never really loved the work.

Meanwhile, I pursued teaching activities that seemed enjoyable to me, including serving as a tutor for Reactor Design and a grader for Process Control, two classes I now teach. Then I learned about a professor at UT Austin who was doing engineering education research. She was studying how engineering students come to see themselves as engineers, the factors that contribute to it, and how this relates to retention and sense of belonging. I found her work fascinating. She offered me a position in her lab. I took it on the spot, leaving proteins and antibodies behind.

This happened right at the start of my senior year, and it made me want to go to graduate school to study engineering education. Unfortunately, I was given the advice that nobody would hire me with an engineering education degree.

Now I see how this advice undervalues teaching in academia and the contributions of engineering education researchers. But at the time, I decided to apply to chemical engineering programs with the goal of doing computational immunology related research, which I found interesting. I had convinced myself that I could tolerate being a tenure track faculty if it meant I got to at least do the teaching part (which… is a wild thought).

In graduate school at Northwestern University, I met a few full-time teaching professors, a role that I had no idea existed. These folks, particularly Jennifer Cole, an associate professor of instruction at Northwestern, became my role models and mentors, and I decided I wanted to be one.

While in graduate school, I helped co-found my department’s Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee during the summer of 2020 with three other graduate students. This work wound up being integrated into my thesis, which my advisers were extremely supportive of and encouraged me to do, and opened the door for my current research area.

The “Contextualizing Your Research” workshop was part of your work with your department’s ARDEI committee. What was the goal of the workshop, and what were the outcomes?

AP: The goal was for the participants to think more critically from an equity lens about the impacts of their research. We started off with case studies about HeLa cells, water scarcity, air quality, climate change and plastic pollution. I was in charge of writing the case study about HeLa cells.

One of the biggest outcomes we saw was how much people wanted to have these conversations and take action. This workshop continues to be run every summer. We also added materials to a free website so that other institutions can host their own workshops. And we published a paper about this work. It won the 2023 Best Diversity Equity and Inclusion Paper at the American Society for Engineering Education.

Not all of the outcomes are positive, though. The unfortunate reality is that workshop attendance has decreased since 2020, even though people find it valuable. For many people, engaging in DEI work is not required, incentivized or evaluated, so they instead prioritize things that are on their ever-increasing required to-do lists. Unless universities start valuing and actively incentivizing DEI work, it will be difficult to see real long-term change.

Are you planning on running similar workshops at the UW?

AP: I’d like to! But I can’t run these workshops alone. At Northwestern, there were always at least four of us hosting the workshops. And ideally, each small discussion group would have its own facilitator. We’ve trained others to help facilitate before, but I’d probably need to train several folks here to help me run the workshop effectively. Another option would be to ask the folks at Northwestern, such as Jennifer Cole, to co-run them virtually with me here.

I think the biggest issue is that time, as a currency, is limited. It will be hard to get people on board, not in terms of their ideology and desire to help, but because people have limited time.

How is this content making its way into the classes you are teaching at the UW?

AP: I have definitely been using this content in my classes. I cover the HeLa cell case study in my CHEM E 467 Biochemical Engineering class every year, and these discussions are always some of the students’ favorites.

Social justice concepts also regularly show up in my UW courses, through lecture, homework and projects. For example, in my CHEM E 465 Reactor Design class, I give a lecture on using kinetics to model the spread of disease. We talk about the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the things we discuss is how the base-case model makes assumptions that can’t possibly account for inequities in society that impact the differences in how frequently people are exposed to the disease and how long it takes them to recover.

I also work with other faculty to integrate examples in areas that are not my area of expertise. For example, I used a project from Rachel Getman, a chemical and biological engineering professor at The Ohio State University, on how the chemical industry impacts various social justice areas, including pollution, water scarcity, climate change, decarbonization and more. For the project, students made short videos covering these topics, and then interacted with videos from other students. The video submissions I got this year were unbelievably amazing — the amount of effort and care my students put into the project was inspiring. On my course evaluations, the students reported that they found this project valuable to their learning and noted that it covered an important topic.

I think it’s important to show students that the engineering content they’re learning and the jobs they’ll have one day will impact real people. These students need to know that they have a responsibility to think about their work from an equity and social justice perspective so that they can make sure all members of society can equally reap the benefits of engineering.

Do you have any advice for students going into winter quarter 2025? How about for your fellow faculty members?

AP: I think I should also take this advice: Take care of yourself both physically and mentally. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by day-to-day tasks and to-do lists. I know I do. To some degree my anxiety propels me, but it also can come at the cost of burnout and exhaustion if I’m not taking proper care of myself. I find that I’m able to be more effective and efficient when I’m more rested. Find time to do things that relax you — whether that be a hobby, time with friends or family, or even just being a lump on the couch watching crappy TV (one of my hobbies of choice).

For more information, contact Prybutok at prybutok@uw.edu.