Jennifer Vanantwerp

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Calvin University

Based on studies of engineering students, it is recognized that engineering students who pursue engineering due to altruistic intent or intrinsic interest in engineering are more likely to persist to graduation. We sought to identify similar factors that promote persistence for women in the engineering workplace. Since we know that women leave the...

Retention of the engineering workforce is of national importance for global competitiveness. Retention of women engineers is of particular interest because of the impact of their lower starting representation and higher attrition rate on workforce diversity. Exit rates from engineering careers are highest in the first 10 years after graduation. Thu...

Unmet or thwarted belonging needs have been implicated in multiple studies of women in engineering in college and in the engineering workforce. A wide range of other challenges that women face in engineering are tightly linked to deficits in belonging. Furthermore, many women face intersectional factors across race and ethnicity that make it even m...

This book presents a timely consideration of sexual harassment in engineering by putting it in context with current events in the U.S.: #MeToo, recent presidential administrations, the flurry of media and public interest in recent prominent harassment cases, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through extensive use of a story format, this book provides a wi...

Women are underrepresented in the engineering workforce both because they are underrepresented in undergraduate engineering programs and because they leave engineering careers at higher rates than men. Greater retention of these women after entering the workforce is important not only to support diversity in engineering but also to reinforce the na...

Background Belonging is a fundamental human motivation associated with a wide range of positive psychological, educational, social, and job outcomes. Frequent and predominantly conflict‐free interactions within a stable, relational framework of caring are required to facilitate belonging. Purpose The goal of this study was to understand if and how...

Permalink to paper with summary and introduction: https://peer.asee.org/43777 Abstract: A Panel Discussion focused on practical strategies to overcome gender harassment, at work and in school. The landscape of sexual harassment has evolved since #MeToo went viral in 2017. Thankfully, more violent forms have declined. However, gender harassment an...

We conducted semi-structured interviews of 13 men and 18 women faculty in engineering, math, and physics (pSTEM) to explore their thoughts and feelings about their experiences in the academic workplace. Interview transcripts were deductively and thematically coded according to psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These thre...

Engineering CAReS (Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness Study) is an engineering workplace climate survey that is based on basic psychological needs theory (BPNT) -- a mini-theory associated with self-determination theory (SDT). The CAReS survey uses a combination of existing items and scales from the BPNT and belonging literature as well as items ada...

Invited lecture. Introduction and overview of recently published book: Sex, Gender, and Engineering: Harassment at Work and in School (2022). J. VanAntwerp and D. Wilson. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Reviews outline of book and motivation for writing it, then highlights sections covering: 1. Definition and prevalence of sexual harassment, and es...

Times have changed, but have they changed enough? Indeed, are they changing in the right direction? Is sexual harassment becoming a thing of the past, or is it simply becoming more subtle and harder to detect, while the harmful outcomes for women and other victims continue unabated? This book provides comprehensive literature reviews on sexual ha...

The workplace experiences of faculty in engineering, physics, and computer science were evaluated through the lens of self-determination theory (SDT), which posits three universal human needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness). It has been well-established that meeting these needs in the workplace is associated with higher productivity and greater...

How do faculty understand vocation and how do they speak to students about vocation.

In the past 5 years, research has emerged to clearly show that girls at the beginning of the engineering pipeline do not enter engineering because they prefer professions that they feel have more potential to change society. They simply want jobs that make a difference in the world by positively influencing poverty, health care, the environment, an...

The stated mission of many Christian undergraduate engineering schools involves producing engineering graduates who have a distinct orientation towards serving others with their technological knowledge. This other-orientedness is a distinguishing element of the consensus definition of calling in published literature to date. In the present work, pe...

Retention of engineering students is a much-studied subject. The bulk of existing literature focuses on students in large, Research-I institutions – arguably schools sharing a common context or educational dynamic. Current instruments available to study retention have not focused on how motivations, interests, and individual backgrounds (psychosoci...

Christian faith is to be like yeast in bread dough, permeating every part of a life. Therefore, it naturally also shapes the teaching, learning, and practice of engineering for Christian engineers. A Christian worldview will influence an engineer, whether or not it is acknowledged. Within a Christian engineering education, it is useful to explicitl...

It is no secret that women are under-represented in engineering schools across the U.S. At Christian colleges, this disparity is even higher. Many programs are in place to attempt to increase the number of women engineers. Is this simply a case of political correctness run amok as policy, or do these programs represent a justifiable attempt to corr...

A novel first-year course (Engineering Chemistry and Materials Science) was created to broaden the technical foundation in the BSE program at Calvin College. The content of the new course was drawn from two established courses – an engineering course in materials science (which was subsequently eliminated) and the second semester of first-year chem...

Yeast surface display is a eucaryotic system for the directed evolution of protein binding and stability. For antibody affinity maturation, achievable single-pass enrichment factors are a critical variable. Both reliable recovery of rare clones (yield) and effective differentiation between clones of only slightly improved affinity (purity) are para...

Methodological advances and new applications have fueled significant growth in the practice of polypeptide library screening.

Understanding the structural and dynamic determinants of binding free energy in the antigen-antibody bond is of great interest. Much work has focused on selective mutations in order to locate key interaction residues, but this generally results in reduced affinity. The present work instead examines a higher-affinity mutant to characterize the therm...

Printout. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 152-161).