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Julianna Gesun, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Engineering. Her research is internationally recognized for pioneering engineering thriving as an area of inquiry in engineering education. Dr. Gesun’s scholarship represents the first comprehensive investigation of thriving for undergraduate engineering students and examines the individual, instructional, environmental, and systemic conditions that support thriving, engagement and performance in engineering education.

Building on this foundation, her current scholarship extends into human-centered AI, with a focus on AI-supported feedback, student engagement, multimodal indicators of learning, and the responsible use of educational data to strengthen student support and institutional decision-making. Her recent AI-related work includes studies on facial emotion analysis with vision-language models, biometrics paired with survey data and generative AI in online engineering education. Through this work, she advances AI approaches that contribute to thoughtful augmentation of learning and performance while keeping ethics, context and human agency central.

Dr. Gesun’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Society for Engineering Education. She won first place in Purdue University’s Three Minute Thesis competition, and her research has been featured in public-facing venues such as DiscoverE’s Persist Series. She has also shared her work through invited talks, including the Dartmouth Engineering Jones Seminar on Science, Technology, and Society, where her research on engineering thriving was highlighted as internationally recognized and broadly relevant to engineering education.

At Embry-Riddle, Dr. Gesun teaches EGR 115: Introduction to Programming for Engineers, where she brings her research into practice by creating learning environments that support engagement and thriving while preparing students for the demands of engineering practice. She connects foundational programming instruction to real-world applications, such as inviting programming experts to guest lecture in her classroom and introducing current developments in AI that matter to students’ future work. Her teaching has been recognized through the national Autodesk/ASEE Lesson Plans for Social Change Challenge award. 

In addition, she contributes to college-level initiatives focused on campus climate and wellbeing, reflecting a broader commitment to data-informed, student-centered improvement.

Selected Talks Referenced Above:
Dartmouth Engineering seminar video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvKDmn76SMg

DiscoverE Persist Series video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmC8D-3lBok&t=213s

Purdue University Three Minute Thesis winning presentation:
https://youtu.be/gFy4_Q_uhDc

Autodesk/ASEE Lesson Plans for Social Change Challenge:
https://www.autodesk.com/education/educators/asee