Sven Bilén
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 Dr.
Sven G. Bilén joined the Penn State faculty as an assistant
professor in January 2000. He holds a joint appointment with
Engineering Design and Electrical Engineering. He is Design
Curriculum Coordinator in the Engineering Design Program and as
such is responsible for developing, defining, funding, and
coordinating the industry-sponsored design projects used in all
sections (approx. 1000 students per year) of ED&G 100:
Introduction to Engineering Design. He has helped define
the recent renovations to the Design Laboratory and classrooms
in the Center for Engineering Design and Entrepreneurship, which
have allowed increased student collaboration in the classroom
and exploration of entrepreneurial activities.
Dr. Bilén is a Co-I for
the PRESTIGE ( Pr eparing E ngineering St
udents to Work I n the G lobal E conomy)
consortium, which was formed in 2002 using FIPSE/EC funding to
expose students to the global economy by using global resources
to teach global product design and development. It is
comprised of seven universities in four countries: three in the
U.S., one in the U.K., two in France, and one in Spain.
PRESTIGE uses a variety of strategies to achieve its goal of
preparing students to work in the global economy through a focus
on design education. These include: students traveling
individually for internships in industry and externally driven
projects on campus; and design projects, both in-class
(multi-team, short-term) and out-of-class (single-team,
long-term), set up using distributed international teams in
bilateral and multilateral arrangements. These virtual teams
use collaborative information technology in their design
efforts. The diversity offered by the four-country arrangement
is used to emulate the value-added role of diverse knowledge,
policies, and perspectives in the global economy and the
opportunity to study its effect on creativity in design teams.
Dr. Bilén has experience
on a number of high profile, NASA-supported design projects such
as running microgravity experiments on expendables, the Shuttle,
sounding rockets, and the KC–135 microgravity research aircraft.
He is the PI for a student nanosatellite project called
LionSat sponsored by AFOSR, NASA, and AIAA. On many of these
projects the design teams employ collaborative technologies to
facilitate virtual teaming between sites.
He is the project
coordinator for the Design Collaboratory “Sandbox”, housed in
the Engineering Design Program, which is a small lab to explore
the impacts of IT on collaboration. Dr. Bilén teaches in the
Engineering Entrepreneurship Minor (ENTR430: Entrepreneurship
and New Product Development). He has mentored many
undergraduate students interested in entrepreneurship, several
international internships (stages ), independent-study
design projects, and honors theses.
He is member of IEEE, AIAA,
AGU, ASEE, and Sigma Xi.
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