Dr Rehan Shah, in collaboration with Dr Alexandra Werth (Cornell University), has been awarded one of the prestigious Cornell Global Research Seed Grant Awards for 2026 administered by Cornell University in partnership with its Global Hubs partner universities, including Queen Mary, for an educational scholarship research project.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound impact on engineering. To stay at the forefront of these changes, higher education institutions are increasingly embedding AI-oriented instruction into engineering programs to ensure curricula remain relevant. As AI reshapes the engineering landscape, an important question emerges: are engineering students adequately equipped with the mathematical foundations and competencies necessary to effectively develop, fine-tune, deploy, and evaluate AI models?

Motivated by this, their proposed funded project titled "Towards an AI-Motivated Mathematical Skills Inventory for Future Engineers" aims to develops a framework for a skills-based mathematical assessment instrument that bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical AI-oriented, engineering applications. To achieve this goal, Dr Shah and Dr Werth will establish a synergistic, firm and lasting collaboration between their research groups at Queen Mary and Cornell respectively to accelerate and translate mathematics and engineering education research.

The collaboration will feature mutual visits (with Dr Shah visiting Cornell and Dr Werth visiting Queen Mary), joint data collection, and analysis and will also involve student researchers from both institutions. The project will culminate in peer-reviewed journal publications, applications for external grant funding, and a proof-of-concept framework for a cross-national mathematical skills inventory for engineers.

Their project builds on their initial scoping work conducted over the past year, which featured two international conference proceedings papers (co-authored with Queen Mary student Mr Ilanthiraiyan Sivagnanamoorthy), presented and published at the IEEE EDUCON conference in April 2025 and at the ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition in June 2025, in addition to a UK-wide one-day in-person workshop titled 'Designing proficiency-oriented assessment inventories in undergraduate mathematics', featuring 25 academic and educator participants from a diverse range of UK universities, as part of an Interdisciplinary Collaboration grant funded by the London Mathematical Society (LMS) that was hosted and led by Dr Shah in May 2025 at Queen Mary.

In addition to establishing capacity for future collaborations through the exchange of ideas between colleagues at both Cornell and Queen Mary focusing on discipline-based STEM education research, this project has the potential to improve for teaching, learning, and assessment from a cultural, institutional, and disciplinary perspective by developing a novel framework to measure engineering students’ competencies of these critical mathematical flexibility and logical reasoning skills using an international dataset to transform education and career pathways to help broaden participation in science and engineering.