Jacqueline El-Sayed, professor of mechanical engineering, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) and the Richard L. Terrell Professor of Excellence in Teaching at Kettering University in Flint, Mich., is on campus during the spring semester at Harvey Mudd College (HMC) as one of the American Council on Education (ACE) Fellows.

She is one of 34 college and university senior faculty and administrators selected for the prestigious program for 2008-09.

At HMC, El-Sayed shadows President Maria Klawe at many of her meetings, including the President’s Cabinet, Board of Trustees, and The Claremont Colleges President’s Council and Board of Overseers. Confidentiality is an important and well-understood component of the program. Everyone is asked if they object to her presence at the meetings and if they do, she excuses herself.

“Not only will this opportunity help Jackie learn to be a more effective leader,” according to Klawe, “but we will reap huge rewards by learning from her experiences at Kettering in working in a co-op program environment and guiding their teaching and learning program.”

“I am very excited and honored to be at Harvey Mudd College for my ACE fellowship,” said El-Sayed. “President Klawe is brilliant and approachable, and I am extremely fortunate that she agreed to be my mentor. I have been impressed with Harvey Mudd and President Klawe for some time, so it is remarkable to be here.”

“It’s a wonderful form of high-level mentorship,” El-Sayed explained. “Institutions are willing to open up and show us both the good and bad things that happen.” In one of the ACE intensive seminars, a university president and his senior staff role-played for the fellows a recent sensitive situation dealing with academic freedom.

In addition to her duties at Kettering, where she was the first female to receive a positive recommendation for full professor from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, El-Sayed is an appointee of Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to the Michigan Truck Safety Commission. In this role, El-Sayed represents all four-year colleges and universities in the state and is the commission’s current chair.

She was also selected by Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land as chair of the Driver’s Education Advisory and Motorcycle Safety Advisory committees for the Department of State. Her interest in traffic safety began while an engineer at GM Truck Group, where she began as a co-op student. El-Sayed completed the requirements to hold a commercial driver’s license, allowing her to drive “big rigs.”

“Our goal is to save lives on the highway,” explained El-Sayed. Because traffic safety data shows that in the majority of fatal accidents, the passenger car driver is at fault, in addition to targeting unsafe truck drivers, the MTSC worked on including information in the state’s driver’s education program so that it made passenger drivers more aware of trucks. The commission also facilitated the development of a campaign named “Are you truck smart?,” which included public service announcements and videos through the Michigan Center for Truck Safety. A complimentary enforcement program is also facilitated through the Michigan State Police.

El-Sayed also participated in a podcast that is hosted on the national Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance website. The podcast, “Spotlight on the Michigan Truck Safety Commission,” is part of the alliance’s “In the Fast Lane” program.

El-Sayed was a member of the last class to graduate from General Motors Institute (GMI), which became Kettering University. Kettering’s programs, which originally focused primarily on automotive engineering when it was GMI, now include programs in biochemistry, applied mathematics and applied physics, to name a few. It has more than 700 corporate sponsors of co-op education programs, and all students do a senior thesis with a corporate sponsor. The university boasts 100-percent placement rate after graduation. When reflecting on her switch from manufacturing to academia, El-Sayed’s husband Mohamed told her "Now you don’t build cars, you build people.”

Her husband is a professor of engineering at Kettering whose work focuses on sustainable energy vehicles. They have three children. Their oldest son Abdul is a M.D./Ph.D. candidate, Rhodes Scholar and NIH (National Institutes of Health) Scholar at the University of Michigan (U-M). He was the speaker at his U-M undergraduate commencement, where former President Bill Clinton also spoke and recognized his talk. El-Sayed and her husband also have a son, Osama, the junior class president in high school, and a daughter, Samia, in fourth grade (“She loves math,” El-Sayed beams).

El-Sayed was recruited to lead the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning by HMC alumnus Gregory N. Hassold ‘79, professor of applied physics at Kettering when she was the leader for the Kettering faculty governance. He told her that the center needed an excellent educator who was a “firecracker.”

Before she took over as director of the CETL, El-Sayed said, “We used to send faculty off one at time to attend a program, then return and give a talk. This is not transformational, so we brought the professional development program onto campus in order to bring faculty together, eliminate silos and share a common language. We faculty tend to model our favorite professors and are not necessarily taught to be educators.”

Over 100 faculty have gone through the program since it began in 2006.

Does she wish to move up through the administrative ranks and eventually become a college or university president? “I’m not really sure,” said El-Sayed. “Maria is helping me with that.” El-Sayed has a detailed learning contract with ACE, Kettering and HMC that outlines what she is expected to accomplish.

In describing HMC, El-Sayed said, “I feel like I fit in here. The students are great.” She regularly eats with them in the dining hall, and lives only four blocks from campus and rides a bike or walks. She does not have a car.

“Harvey Mudd is a very nurturing environment,” explained El-Sayed. “Everyone has the same mentality: we all want to save the world.”

About the ACE Fellows Program:

Since 1965, hundreds of vice presidents, deans, department chairs, faculty and other emerging leaders have participated in the ACE Fellows Program, the nation’s premier higher education leadership development program in preparing senior leaders to serve American colleges and universities.

This unique program condenses years of on-the-job experience and skills development into a single year. As a result, the ACE Fellows Program is the most effective, comprehensive leadership development program in American higher education today. Of more than 1,500 fellows to date, more than 300 have served as chief executive officers at more than 350 institutions.