University of Southern California (USC) professor Dr. Stephen Lu has been selected to be the recipient of the 2015 International Federation of Engineering Education Societies (IFEES) Duncan Fraser Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education. Dr. Lu, who has a longtime association with Maxxis as a consultant and trainer, will be honored for his contributions to engineering and receive his award at a ceremony scheduled for September 22 in Florence, Italy.

One key component of the relationship between Maxxis and Dr. Lu has been the company’s early support of the program for which he serves as director at USC, Viterbi iPodia (ViP). The ViP program promotes collaborative learning across educational institutions and international borders, using the internet to enable education and contributions from students around the world. In addition to USC, current members of the iPodia Alliance include universities from China, Taiwan, Korea, Israel, Germany, India, Brazil and Qatar. Universities in the Alliance work together toward the program’s goal of borderless classrooms.

ViP also allows for the blending of the hard sciences with social science, and for collaboration among academic disciplines as well as instructors and students, in contrast to the traditional top-down, subject-specific model. Dr. Lu believes that this framework will better serve the needs of civilization in the 21st century. As he says on USC’s website, ViP is designed for a future in which “engineering education must expand from a purely technical subject to become a socio-technical discipline.”

Dr. Lu’s relationship with Maxxis, and his training in Innovative Design Thinking (IDT), allows the company to stay ahead not just in product design, but in long-term planning and creative thinking. Maxxis thanks Dr. Lu as always for his inestimable contribution to its success, and congratulates him for earning this prestigious and well-deserved award.