Chandrasekhar Radhakrishnan named 2026 Engineering Unleashed Fellow

Chandrasekhar Radhakrishnan, a teaching associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been named a 2026 Engineering Unleashed Fellow in recognition of his leadership in undergraduate engineering education.

Radhakrishnan is one of 30 faculty members from 23 higher education institutions across the country selected for the 2026 cohort. The fellowship recognizes educators who demonstrate excellence in developing and applying an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering education.

The path to the fellowship

The designation follows Radhakrishnan's participation in an Engineering Unleashed Faculty Development workshop, where he worked alongside peer coaches and faculty colleagues from institutions nationwide. Over the course of the program, participants developed and implemented projects designed to enhance student learning while fostering curiosity, connections, and value creation, key elements of the entrepreneurial mindset framework promoted by Engineering Unleashed and the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN).

Radhakrishnan’s path to the fellowship began with his participation in an Engineering Unleashed Faculty Development workshop. The workshops bring together faculty from institutions across the country to explore ways of applying entrepreneurial thinking in teaching, learning, research, industry and leadership.

Following the workshop, Radhakrishnan worked with peer coaches for up to a year to develop his project and share his work with the broader Engineering Unleashed community. His peer coaches nominated him for the fellowship, and his application was subsequently selected by an independent review committee of past Engineering Unleashed Fellows.

For Radhakrishnan, the fellowship provides an opportunity to continue developing an approach to engineering education that connects technical knowledge with the broader context in which engineers work.

“Engineering students must be able to recognize meaningful problems, understand stakeholder needs, navigate uncertainty, and evaluate how technical decisions involve tradeoffs,” he said.

Entrepreneurial mindset in ECE coursework

Radhakrishnan’s fellowship project builds these habits into ECE courses at multiple levels of the curriculum. The work began in the junior-level ECE 343 lab and is expanding to introductory and advanced courses, including ECE 110, ECE 329, ECE 330 and ECE 469.

“Developing these skills prepares ECE students to make better design decisions and respond effectively when requirements are incomplete or competing.”

In ECE 343, students take on the role of engineering interns while designing a power converter. Rather than focusing solely on whether their design works, they must consider competing technical and business priorities, cost, stakeholder needs and incomplete information.

In ECE 110, students are given more information than they need to complete a design project, requiring them to determine what information is relevant.

In ECE 469, students work through a more open-ended challenge to design a lab module for instructional use.

The course activities are designed to help students develop what Radhakrishnan describes as entrepreneurial mindset habits, including curiosity, systems thinking, experimentation, persistence and customer awareness.

“These habits help students become not only capable problem-solvers but also engineers who can identify opportunities and create solutions with meaningful societal impact,” he said. “Entrepreneurial thinking helps students connect what they design with why it matters and whom it serves.”

The project will ultimately reach an estimated 1,500 students annually. Radhakrishnan and his collaborators are using student reflections, coursework and interviews to assess how effectively the activities help students develop these habits. The team also plans to create resources that can be adapted by other educators.

Engineering Unleashed Fellow

Engineering Unleashed is a community of more than 7,000 members from 420 institutions working to prepare engineers to approach complex problems with curiosity, adaptability and an understanding of the people and needs their work serves. 

As a 2026 Engineering Unleashed Fellow, Radhakrishnan will receive a $10,000 grant to further develop his work. Fellows will also have opportunities to advance their projects, participate in conferences and share their work with the Engineering Unleashed community. The 2026 cohort will meet in person in October to exchange ideas and learn from one another’s projects.

Grainger Engineering Affiliations

Chandrasekhar Radhakrishnan is a Grainger Engineering Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.