Instrumentation Specialist

The Instructional Support Engineer works in the Electronics shop and serves as a consultant, providing direct support to faculty, staff, and students in the school’s formal instructional labs for all undergraduate courses in Mechanical Engineering. This includes more than 9 formal courses across 8 instructional labs. This position also supports 3 computer labs used to teach additional courses.

Day-to-day responsibilities include maintenance and repair of instructional lab equipment and ensuring the instructional facilities are ready for each lab session. Equipment consists primarily of custom-designed instrumentation that is not commercially available; as such, this position develops documentation related to specification, design, fabrication, testing, and repair of equipment and develops and trains on these elements. Repair and maintenance involve root cause analysis and complex decision-making related to problems that do not have clear solutions and require new, engineered solutions.

Through these responsibilities, the Instructional Support Engineer ensures labs are running at optimal functionality in order to enable successful completion of course projects, objectives, assignments, and outcomes for faculty, staff, and students.

This position collaborates frequently with new faculty and teaching assistants each semester to provide safety training, equipment training, lab orientations, and prescribe processes if issues arise in working with complex lab equipment/instrumentation. The training materials and topics are to be developed by this position in response to identified needs and deficiencies of knowledge in course instructional staff. This position will also participate in weekly course meetings to ensure the safe and consistent operation of the labs.

This position will provide strategic guidance in the development of new laboratory experiments and apparatus to further modernize the school’s undergraduate program. In this role, given new concepts in lab apparatus, this position will lead the design efforts to physically implement this concept idea. This position will engage collaborators and resources as needed to develop the proposed solution and bring the proposal through the design review process, construction process, and implementation process.

Additionally, the Instructional Support Engineer will hire and supervise undergraduate students working to support the school’s instructional and computer labs.

This position offers a chance to make a meaningful impact at a prestigious institution known for innovation and research excellence. Join our community of lifelong learners and contribute your skills to this critical program. At Purdue, you'll find unrivaled pride and unlimited potential as we persistently pursue the next giant leap together.

• Provide strategic guidance in the development of new laboratory experiments and apparatus to further modernize the school’s undergraduate program.
• Serve as a primary point of contact in the Mechanical Engineering formal instructional laboratories for course instructors and course assistants related to functionality of instructional lab apparatus, design of lab curriculum to target desired educational outcomes, and all information related to maintenance/repair of instructional lab equipment and functional lab setup.
• Develop process documentation related to specification, design, fabrication, testing, and repair of equipment.
• Collect and analyze data on common problems found in the instructional lab and design and develop proposals to mitigate or eliminate these problems.
• Perform root cause analysis on all failures of equipment.
• Engineer solutions and implement as necessary in order to ensure all students can successfully…