Mitch Gerhardt

PhD student

Mitch is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Engineering Education and a master's student in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, with prior experience as a software engineer before returning to academia. His research concerns what and how students think about engineering knowledge.

Research areas

Epistemic thinking
Graduate STEM education
Natural language processing

Advising

Advisor: Andrew Katz

Projects

How do engineering faculty understand generative AI, and how do those mental models shape instructional decisions?

Publications

Automated Analysis of Knowledge Types in Computer Science Textbooks: A Natural Language Processing Approach to Understanding Epistemic Climate

Mitch Gerhardt and Andrew Katz, Proceedings of the 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2025. doi.org/10.18260/1-2--55491
Using Generative Text Models to Create Qualitative Codebooks for Student Evaluations of Teaching

Andrew Katz, Mitch Gerhardt and Michelle Soledad, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2024. doi.org/10.1177/16094069241293283 Earlier preprint
Using Generative Text Models to Create Qualitative Codebooks for Student Evaluations of Teaching

Andrew Katz, Mitch Gerhardt and M. Soledad, arXiv preprint, 2024. doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.11984

Education

2nd year PhD Student in ENGE
Master's in Computer Science
B.S. in Electrical Engineering

Contact