Sherra Kerns's life has taken amazing turns, from raising exotic cats to helping launch Olin College, one of the boldest educational experiments in higher education.
ALL SUCCESSFUL presidents know that the ability to quickly adapt to different situations is critical to both success and survival. Sherra E. Kerns, ASEE's current president, is no exception.
Kerns says it's a lesson she learned on the first day of sixth grade. She had recently moved from rural Texas to suburban New York City, and wanted to make the best impression on her new schoolmates. So Kerns decided to wear her nicest outfit -a three-tiered white square dancing skirt with turquoise trim. Fashions in New York being somewhat different from those in rural Texas, it's safe to say that Kerns was the only girl in a square dancing skirt. She says a kind classmate took pity on her, pulled her aside, and asked in a thick New York accent, "Do you have any other clothes?" When Kerns said she did, the concerned little girl seemed relieved and said, "Good, change at lunch."
The story is one of Kerns' favorite anecdotes, but it's also a tale where she pinpoints the origin of what's become a hallmark of her career: a certain fearlessness with which she enters a totally new environment, adapts to it, and then masters it-whether it's a new hobby, a new field of study, or the ASEE presidency. "I think that if yon have had experiences in which you are put into a really different environment and found out the world wasn't going to end," she says, "it helps make you adaptable, and you learn how to take opportunities that present themselves in your own life."Kerns' carpe diem attitude led her to a distinguished career in engineering from the most unlikely of places - piano and poetry. Having always loved the creative arts, Kerns says that until she found science, she was trying to decide between pursing a music degree at Julliard or a creative writing degree at Mount Holyokc College. Going to school in the post-Sputnik era, Kerns's aptitude for math and science did not go unnoticed. She eventually decided upon physics - a field in which she earned a bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of North Carolina, respectively.
After a decade of physics, Kerns decided to use her postdoctoral studies to move in a new direction. To determine what that direction would be, Kerns developed an exercise she recommends to all emerging scientists. She began asking her mentors two questions: Who is the smartest person within 50 miles of here? What is the most interesting unsolved problem in your field?
The answers she got led her to Duke University's department of biomedical engineering and to a position as a National Institutes of Health postdoetoral trainee. "When I found engineering, it kind of all fit together," Kerns says. "It gives me a place where I can rise any and all of the skills I have."
Since that first step toward engineering in 1977, Kerns has distinguished herself as both a researcher and an educator. Her work enhancing the reliability and information integrity of microelectronic circuits has earned her a reputation as one of the world's leading experts on preserving data in harsh environments, like outer space. She's held faculty positions at Auburn University and North Carolina State University, and she was chair of the electrical and computer engineering department at Vanderbilt University. Kerns also served as director of the University Consortium for Research on Electronics in Space from 1989 to 1999.
These days, Kerns hangs her hat at Kranklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass., where she's vice president for innovation and research - a job she says she has a real passion for. Olin, an independent undergraduate engineering college started from "scratch" less than 10 years ago, has been described as one of the boldest experiments in American higher education in decades.
Since signing on with Olin in 1999, Kerns has had a hand in the school's genesis, creating an environment for young engineers that she hopes will be "the best transforming experience we can provide through engineering education." It's a tall order, but Kerns says it's an engineering educator's dream, a rare opportunity that conies along less than once in a lifetime.
For the last year and a half, Kerns has been juggling that rare opportunity with another-the ASEE presidency. She's kept herself busy as president-elect during the 2003-2004 academic year, gearing up for her term at the society's helm. "You have a lot of learning to do so that you can arrive in context," she explains. "If you leave that learning until the president's year, then by the time you're prepared to be president, you're the past-president."
