Biography

Sigrid Berka is the Executive Director of the International Engineering Program (IEP) at the University of Rhode Island, Professor of German and also the Director of the German and Chinese IEP, responsible for building academic programs with exchange partners abroad, corporate relations, and fundraising for the IEP. Sigrid is co-editor of the Journal of International Engineering Education (JIEE) and a certified Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) coach facilitating intercultural competency training for IEP students. Biannually the IEP organizes the Colloquium on International Engineering Education. Sigrid recently received the DAAD Alumni Association’s Excellence Award for Educational Exchange (2019) and the URI Administrative Excellence Award (2019). Under her leadership, the IEP was awarded NAFSA’s Senator Paul Simon Spotlight price for innovative campus internationalization (2011), and the Andrew Heiskell Award (2012) by the Institute for International Education. Berka was educated at RWTH Aachen, Washington University, St. Louis and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In previous appointments, she taught German Studies at Barnard College in New York and served as Managing Director of the MIT Germany program within MIT’s International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI).