Mitzi Vernon

Mitzi Vernon is a Professor of Industrial Design in the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. Her career spans 25 years of practice and teaching in industrial design, engineering and architecture. As Principal Investigator of the project, Fields Everywhere, she has been recipient of several patents and grants supporting her research in using design to teach science to children. She was one of the inaugural speakers for VT TEDx, delivering Mapping the Invisible; is co-PI of the NSF project, Studio Collaborative, studying the design studio as an educational model for the design of software-intensive systems; and is an Edward Singleton Diggs Teaching Scholar. She has also been honoured with a 2008 Dell ReGeneration International Design Educator Award and the prestigious William E. Wine Award for Excellence in Teaching.