Lucas Landherr is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at Northeastern University, where he has been on the faculty since 2012. Prior to joining Northeastern, he was an NRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Polymers Division at NIST in Gaithersburg from 2010 to 2012. He received his B.S. degree in chemical engineering from Lafayette College in 2005, and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 2010. He has received several teaching awards during his time at Northeastern. His engineering education research group has worked to produce new experimental STEM modules for K-12 students and innovative teaching tools for K-12 and college classrooms.
While at Cornell in 2008, he began producing a daily photocomic, “Surviving the World”, and in 2013 began writing the comic “PhD Unknown” with artist Joan Cooke. Lucas’s work in comics for nearly nine years (often under the pseudonym Dante Shepherd) has led to his comics being published in Wired, the books “I Love Charts” and “Hustle Economy”, and other publications.
Lucas’s creative work in comics became connected with his research in education after receiving a Northeastern Provost Grant for Advancing Undergraduate Teaching and Learning in 2015, at which point he began collaborating with professional and student artists to make science comics as teaching materials for chemical engineering courses. The science comics have focused on concepts including assumptions, fugacity, PID controllers, and heat exchangers, and are available for use by all STEM educators (at www.sciencetheworld.com). To date, the science comics have been implemented in classrooms at over 30 universities and high schools.
