Kathryn W. Jablokow is an American engineer focused on engineering education, the engineering design process, and the cognitive psychology of engineering creativity. She is a professor of engineering design and mechanical engineering at the Penn State Great Valley School of Graduate Professional Studies, [1] and a program director for engineering research initiation in the Division of Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation of the National Science Foundation. [2]
Jablokow is the youngest of three children of Herman R. Weed (1922–2022), a biomedical engineer and professor of electrical engineering at the Ohio State University; her mother was a teacher of German. [3] She was educated in electrical engineering at Ohio State University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1983, master's degree in 1985, and Ph.D. in 1989. [1] [3] Her graduate research, involving the design of large machines that walk, was supervised by David E. Orin, and she also counts Robert E. Fenton as a faculty mentor. [3]
She was a NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at RWTH Aachen University before returning to the US to join the Penn State faculty in 1990. [1] Her doctoral students there have included Jessica Menold, [4] who returned to Penn State to become a faculty member there. [5] At Penn State Great Valley, she was associate chief academic officer from 2017 to 2020; she began a two-year term at the National Science Foundation in 2021. [3]
In 2009, Jablokow was named an ASME Fellow. [6] She was the 2016 winner of the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. [7]