Russ Pimmel earned his BS in Electrical Engineering at St. Louis University and his MS and PhD in the same discipline at Iowa State University. He has held faculty positions at the Ohio State University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Missouri-Columbia before joining the University of Alabama in 1992. In addition, he has worked for Emerson Electric Co., Battelle Northwest Laboratory, and the McDonnell-Douglas Co.

He has performed research in biomedical signal processing and modeling, pulmonary mechanics, artificial neural networks, radar signal preprocessing, and engineering education. He has taught courses in most areas of electrical engineering; early in his career he concentrated on the biomedical engineering courses and, more recent, he has taught mostly computer engineering courses. He currently leads the College of Engineering’s Teaching Improvement Program. In this capacity, he organizes and leads a weekly discussion group that reviews engineering education research papers, arranges and frequently leads several workshops each year for the engineering faculty, and invites national leaders in engineering education to visit as a part of the Dean’s Lecture Series.

When the University of Alabama became part of the NSF-funded Foundation Coalition, he became interested in the new instructional methodologies being explored in engineering education. He experimented with cooperative learning and teaming in teaching communication skills, ethics, design methodology, and other professional skills in a senior capstone course. After a very positive experience in this course, he began using these approaches in all of his courses. He has published and presented papers on this work and he has led several workshops on these topics.

Selected Publications:

Pimmel, Russ L. “A Practical Approach for Converting Group Projects into Team Projects.” Submitted to Journal of Engineering Education, 2001.

Pimmel, Russ L. “Cooperative Learning Instructional Activities in a Capstone Design Course.” Journal of Engineering Education (2001). (In press) Burian, S.J., S.R. Durrans, S. Tomic, R.L. Pimmel and C.N. Wai.

“Rainfall disaggregation using artificial neural networks.” ASCE Journal of Hydrologic Engineering (1999).

Cordes, D., A. Parrish, R. Borrie, B. Dixon, J. Jackson and R. Pimmel. “Teaching an Integrated First-Year Computing Curriculum—Lessons Learned.” Proceedings of The 1998 Annual ASEE Conference, Seattle, WA, 1998.

Yoo, H.Y. and R.L. Pimmel. “The Effect of Weight Precision and Range on Neural Network Classifier Performance.” Neurocomputing 6 (1994): 541-549.

Ahmadian, A.H. and R.L. Pimmel. “Recognizing Geometrical Features of Simulated Targets with Neural Networks.” Intelligent Engineering Systems through Artificial Neural Networks 2 (1992): 409-414.

Baranowski, S. and R.L. Pimmel. “An Evaluation of Kohonen’s Second Learning Vector Quantization Neural Networks.” Intelligent Engineering Systems through Artificial Neural Networks 2 (1992): 203-208.

Chiang, J. H. and R.L. Pimmel. “Training Neural Pattern Classifiers with a Mean Field Theory Learning Algorithm.” Intelligent Engineering Systems through Artificial Neural Networks 2 (1992): 285-290.

Kirk, W.J., III and R.L. Pimmel. “Texture classification using multilayer neural networks with back propagation training.” Intelligent Engineering Systems through Artificial Neural Networks 2 (1992): 529-534.

Park, D.S. and R.L. Pimmel. “Prediction of the Performance of Neural Network Pattern Classifiers Using Problem Difficulty Measures.” Intelligent Engineering Systems through Artificial Neural Networks 2 (1992): 279-284.

Pimmel, R.L. and W.J. Kirk. “Effects of Range and Resolution on the Performance of Neural Network Classifiers with Discrete Weights.” Intelligent Engineering Systems through Artificial Neural Networks 2 (1992): 299-304.