Contact

2016-03-26_Ping_Neo-Pingchien Neo
Director, International Engineering Programs
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, University of Florida

Office: 203 Weil Hall
Email: pneo@eng.ufl.edu
Tel: 352-294-7926

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Pingchien Neo was born and raised in Malaysia in a tropical climate not unlike that of Florida. She moved to the United States to pursue a B.S. in Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently obtained her M.S. in Nuclear Engineering in ETH Zürich in Switzerland.

Since then, Pingchien has worked and studied in Asia, Europe and the US. The exposure to different countries and cultures gives her a unique perspective on intercultural personal and professional relationships. In her work, she enjoys the opportunity to use her multilingual skills in English, Malay, Mandarin, and German.

She next moved to the University of Florida in 2011, where she joined the faculty of the Nuclear Engineering Program as a lecturer, teaching radiation detection laboratory, risk assessment, and nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation.

In 2014, she had the opportunity to start up the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering (HWCOE) International Engineering Programs office. She hopes to leverage her own international experiences to encourage engineering students to think and act globally. She is passionate about the need to encourage more globally-minded engineers to keep up with the increasingly connected environment. Since then, she has advised numerous engineering students and helped them to gain an international experience through study, research, and internship opportunities. She has worked with engineering faculty to develop thematic faculty-led programs and expanded the program offerings in the college. She has also advised joint study abroad programs between HWCOE and different colleges in UF. 

She started the International Engineering Ambassadors (IEA) student organization and is now the faculty advisor of the program. The IEA serve as peer advisors to share their international experiences and also connect with incoming exchange students to introduce them to the Gator Life. 

She serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Global Engineering Education Exchange from 2019-2021. She has been awarded International Educator of the Year in HWCOE in 2015 and 2016, and the Faculty Leadership Award in 2019.