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Katherine Kuchenbecker Highlight
We're not going to grow if we don't challenge ourselves. Your brain is a muscle, and your skills improve over time through effort, by working hard and expending effort.
About Katherine
- In high school, she felt pulled in several different directions: she loved sports, art, design, math, and science.
- To try to cover as many of her interests as possible—especially in math and design—she decided to major in engineering.
- After college, she thought she wanted to go into product design, and she was lucky enough to get a few internships in the field.
- However, once she was working in product design, she realized she didn’t like it, and that terrified her; for a moment, she thought she’d taken the wrong path.
- Instead of panicking, she decided to follow the threads of the things she liked back to the beginning and start down a new path; she decided to go back to graduate school.
- She went back to Stanford University for a master’s degree in mechanical engineering; while there, she realized she loved teaching.
- She continued on to get her Ph.D. so that she could become a professor; she now teaches engineering and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Known as the “Queen of Haptics,” she studies and teaches the science of touch; in 2010, Popular Science named her one of its 10 most innovative minds in science and engineering.