Elizabethtown College Assistant Teaching Professor of Physics Judson Wagner has been named a 2026 Engineering Unleashed Fellow by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), in recognition of his dedicated commitment to innovation and leadership in undergraduate engineering education.
This year’s cohort is composed of 30 individuals from 23 higher education institutions across the country. Fellows will travel to an in-person meeting from Oct. 27 through 29, to collaborate and share their ideas.
“I am thrilled to see Dr. Wagner’s leadership recognized through this fellowship and excited about the opportunity it provides to extend this work beyond our campus,” Elizabethtown College Dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science and Professor of Engineering, Sara Atwood said. “This fellowship highlights both the strength of our partnership with the KEEN Network and Etown’s growing role as a contributor to national conversations about engineering education.”
Wagner was awarded the honor for his work in founding the KEEN Mindset Mentor program, a peer leadership model in Etown’s School of Engineering and Computer Science, supported by KEEN. The fellowship provides Wagner with a monetary grant and professional support to advance his ongoing project, aimed at large-scale dissemination and adoption of the program.
“This fellowship signifies that something happening at Elizabethtown College is worth other institutions paying attention to, and that something is our students,” Wagner said. “Our Mindset Mentors are students trained to help their classmates learn how to learn, and this fellowship gives their work a national platform.”
Participants in the program’s two tiers, KEEN Mindset Mentors and Engineering Mindset Associates, are trained to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and insightful mentorship skills to support their peers, both academically and socially.
During his fellowship, Wagner aims to extend the program in four distinct directions, including formal credentialing of Mindset Mentors, national dissemination of training curriculum, developing a K-12 framework in collaboration with a partner school district, and working with business partners to expand the same training into the workplace setting.
“I want our graduates to leave here as engineers who bring the best out of the people around them,” Wagner said. “That is what Educate for Service, Engineering for Society sounds like inside a classroom, and this is how we teach toward it.”
About the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN)
The Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) is a partnership of more than 70 colleges and universities in America focused on reaching undergraduate engineering students with an entrepreneurial mindset. KEEN offers conferences to exchange best practices, collaborative grant work, faculty mentorship, on-campus programs, and ambassadors to professional societies. Elizabethtown College joined KEEN in January 2023.
