Gillian Saunders-Smits is a Senior Lecturer/ Associate Professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands specializing in Engineering Education within the Cognitive Robotics department. She has been teaching engineering for more than 20 years and has served as the online education coordinator, project education coordinator and Master track coordinator. She actively develops online courses and platforms for open learning. She received her MSc and PhD from Delft University of Technology in 1998 and 2008, respectively, and was nominated for the edX award in 2021/22.

From 2000 – 2022 she worked at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, and from 2020-2022 she was seconded to the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Education and Learning (LDE-CEL).

She has a real passion for quality engineering education and firmly believes that engineering education like engineering design is never finished and that we should always continue to look for the optimum.

research interest

• engineering education
• transversal skills and competences
• curriculum development and evaluation
• teaching innovations
• online education
• life-long learning