Dr. Bottomley's Story

Dr. Laura Bottomley is the Director of Engineering Education at NC State University. She founded the Women in Engineering (WIE) program and The Engineering Place (TEP) for K-20 Outreach in 1997 and 1998 respectively. She is faculty in both the Colleges of Engineering and Education. She has taught every grade level, K-graduate school. Dr. Bottomley is a Fellow of IEEE and ASEE and has served on numerous national committees including the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessment for engineering and technological literacy (NAEP TELS), various IEEE extension projects and on the National Academy of Engineering committee, Guiding the Implementation of K-12 Engineering. Among her recognitions are two Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics, Science and Engineering Mentoring Awards (PAESMEM) from the White House (one programmatic and one individual) and an Informal Education Award from IEEE. 

She was also inducted into the YWCA Academy of Women for her contributions to eliminating racism and empowering women, and, in 2012, was named one of 125 Transformational Women at NC State.  In 2021, she was named a semi-finalist for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Excellence in Teaching by Baylor University. She was selected as a TEDx speaker in 2022. Bottomley received her bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech in 1984 and 1985, respectively. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from NC State in 1992. She has recently starred in several episodes of the television show, “NC STEM Explorers.”

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Under Bottomley, NC State’s Women in Engineering program is successfully boosting the number of women engineers in academia and industry.  WIE was selected as the outstanding program for 2008 by WEPAN, the Women in Engineering Program Advocates Network and featured in ASEE Prism Magazine in 2015 for its success. In 2015 the Women and Minorities in Engineering Programs received the ABET Claire L. Felbinger Award for Diversity. Most recently, ZDNET.com listed NC State as the highest ranked public, non-historically black college and university (HBCU) top college of engineering for women and minorities. TEP reaches thousands of students, teachers and parents each year through camps for K-12 students, programs that send college students into schools, and teacher workshops in STEM and engineering for K-12 teachers.