Dr. Jennifer Herman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Engineering Education where she teaches courses in technical communications. With a background in the biological sciences and the humanities, Herman’s scholarship explores the relationship between science, language, and visual communications as they cohere in science museums and other public educational media. Of particular emphasis in her scholarship are the physical spaces of science museums—the external architecture and internal built spaces—and how those spaces embody and project a community’s beliefs and aspirations for science and technology. An additional component of her work examines the exhibits inside museums, including how Western culture has come to understand the meaning-making function of exhibits in particular ways, and how exhibits make available to the public particular narratives about science.

Herman’s scholarship is also informed by her teaching; her most recent publication, “Writing as Knowing: Creative Knowing through Multiple Messaging Modes in an Engineering Technical Communications Course” was co-authored with other technical communications instructors and argues that engineering educators should view writing and communication as constitutive of engineering knowledge, rather than a vehicle for transmission of ideas. The chapter appears in the 2016 collection, Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering. Eds. Diana Bairaktarova and Michele Eodice.