Multidisciplinary Design Faculty
Alissa Burkholder Murphy
Alissa is an alumna of Johns Hopkins and returned in 2019 as teaching faculty to launch the Multidisciplinary Engineering Design program. Alissa received her graduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and worked in the medical device industry in the Bay Area before moving to Myanmar in Southeast Asia for 4 years. There she worked for Proximity Designs to make low cost, high value agricultural products. Since returning to the states, Alissa has taught at Stanford’s d.school, teaching human centered design to teams of multidisciplinary students across the university. She has continued to practice engineering design, most recently working with a medical device start-up to ideate, prototype, and test early concepts for an innovative surgical tool.
Alissa graduated from Johns Hopkins with a BS in Engineering Mechanics, focusing in medical device design. She played on the basketball team, admits to having a favorite desk on c-level in MSE library, and met her partner in Latrobe Hall. Please reach out to Alissa with any questions you have about multidisciplinary design courses at [email protected].
Jenna Frye
Jenna Frye has been a leader in art and design education for nearly 20 years. Her creative work and ideas about education have been showcased nationally and at several annual conferences including the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, and the College Art Association. She joins the multidisciplinary design faculty eager to explore the problem-solving potential of mixing art and design with engineering. You’ll likely find her designing learning toys and games for her students, fiddling with the latest techno-crafts, or maybe just playing with blocks.
Nusaybah Abu-Mulaweh
After earning a BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Nusaybah completed her PhD in Engineering Education at Purdue University. She worked in industry as a software engineer, and then went on to teach in the EPICS Program, a large multidisciplinary community-engaged design program, at Purdue University. In her time in EPICS, Nusaybah mentored multidisciplinary teams who worked with community partners through a human-centered design process, and was inspired to pursue her dissertation on empathy development for undergraduate engineering students in community-engaged design courses.
Her research continues to focus on empathy in engineering, and she is very passionate about integrating empathy development in engineering at Hopkins to foster a more inclusive culture in which students learn to respond innovatively and responsibly to global challenges.