Alissa Burkholder Murphy

Alissa Burkholder Murphy is a senior lecturer primarily in the Center for Leadership Education, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Burkholder Murphy is the director of the Multidisciplinary Design Program, which brings students and faculty from disparate engineering disciplines together to tackle consequential design challenges. The program offers a suite of courses, including a yearlong capstone engineering design experience, a hands on prototyping lab, and a social impact design course taught with a Baltimore community partner. She teaches an engineering design process rooted in understanding the needs of stakeholders, ideating a breadth of creative solutions, and prototyping and testing to quickly mitigate risks.

In her early career, Burkholder Murphy was a mechanical engineer in the Bay Area medical device industry. From 2010 to 2014, she co-managed a local design team in Myanmar to develop income-generating products for rural farmers. She transitioned to academia in 2014 when she joined Stanford University’s school faculty before starting the JHU Multidisciplinary Design Program in 2018.

Burkholder Murphy received a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins in 2005 and an master’s in mechanical engineering at Stanford University in 2007.