Engineering Faculty Spotlight: Ed Koeneman
Ed Koeneman is an electrical engineering technology instructor here at Grand Canyon University. Ed has an impressive background with 25 years of experience as a product design engineer, with 15 of those years spent running a medical device company that Ed and his father founded. The company, Kinetic Muscles, creates rehabilitation devices to help people who have suffered from strokes regain proper function of damaged limbs.
When Ed sold the company, GCU’s engineering program was starting to pick up speed. This was during a time that Ed was mentoring several dozen biomedical engineering students at Arizona State University – it was here that he found his calling and discovered that being a teacher was the right career for him.
A Passion for Teaching Students
With his background in engineering and entrepreneurism, Ed fits right into the engineering program here at GCU, which prepares students to lead and serve in the field of engineering with an entrepreneurial spirit within the context of a Christian worldview. Ed has been a professor at GCU since 2016, when he started teaching physics classes as well as writing curriculum for the electrical engineering technology program, a growing major in the College of Science, Engineering and Technology. The electrical engineering technology program prepares graduates to provide hands-on assistance to electrical engineers by working in a production environment to address problems. Ed’s industry experience has allowed him to bring firsthand knowledge from the field to curriculum writing and the classroom to help students gain a relevant education and a competitive edge.
Currently, Ed teaches the Intro to Circuits and University Success classes and continues to write curriculum for the upper division classes. He teaches with the hopes that his students graduate with the technical skills needed to pursue a career in engineering and carry on into the professional world with the social skills necessary to adapt to various work environments. One last hope that Ed has for his students is that they leave with the leadership skills that will help them progress and take their career to the next level.
A Hope for Building the Future
Ed is looking forward to watching the Robotics Club grow and get ready for their first competition in November. Ed said that working in the college over the past two years has been a spectacular time in his life, because the faculty are some of the most fun and interesting people that he has worked with in the past 25 years of his career. He believes the highlight of the community is that his peers are supportive of his work and collaborative with any projects or answering any general questions. The community that is being built at GCU is something that will hopefully stand out nationally in the years to come.
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Written by Judah Esparza, a business management and marketing major, and Jessalyn Johnson, an English literature major, at GCU.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Grand Canyon University. Any sources cited were accurate as of the publish date.