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Starting in Fall 2017, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering will offer a new course in social media and digital communications designed specifically with engineers and scientists in mind.
The course, Social Media for Scientists and Engineers, will be part of Viterbi’s Engineering Writing Program (EWP) and taught by Sarah Mojarad. Mojarad was recruited to USC from Caltech to teach at both Viterbi and The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She currently co-teaches a similar course at Caltech with renowned scholar Mark Davis. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently profiled the class and described it as possibly the first-full length course of its kind to teach students in STEM disciplines about the professional use of digital communications through a series of issue-based case studies. Mojarad announced that she was joining USC at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, TX where she and Davis were presenting on the panel “Getting to Yes: Communication and Entrepreneurship.”
Speaking about the expansion into social media, Steve Bucher, the Program Director of EWP said, “We are thrilled that Sarah Mojarad will soon join EWP to help develop our social media pedagogy. She will be developing a program to help our engineers communicate their ideas in new, innovative ways. Her contributions will help our students articulate their research and ideas for a variety of audiences, which is vital in today’s world.”
Mojarad also consults for programs that are supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) and National Cancer Institute (NCI), and has recently presented her work to the National Science Board (NSB) of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health-National Cancer Institute (NIH-NCI), the Department of State, and at numerous universities in the United States and throughout the world.
“I intend to build a program at USC that further educates students in science, engineering and medicine how to communicate effectively amongst their peers and to those outside of their fields. I envision this program to be yet another bridge between Viterbi and the Annenberg School. By approaching science communication through the science/technology side, we would create an overall science communication program unlike any other in existence,” said Mojarad. She will be joining USC in May 2017.
Published on March 10th, 2017
Last updated on March 20th, 2017
