Director of Professional and Technical Communication
Education
- Ph.D. English (2009), University of Georgia
- M.A. English Literary Studies (2004), Georgia State University
- B.A. English (2000), Emory University
Expertise
- Professional and Engineering Communication
- Victorian and Children's Literature
- Visual Rhetoric
- Writing Center Research
About
Brandy Ball Blake (she/her/hers) serves as the director of professional and technical communication at the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech.
Dr. Blake coaches ISyE students on professional writing, presentations, visual design, and data visualization. She primarily focuses on developing and updating the school's communication program so that it meets the needs of ISyE students and faculty. She works primarily with Senior and Cornerstone Design classes but also assists undergraduate and graduate students with research documents, career documents, and application materials, including those for the NSF Graduate Fellowship program.
Prior to assuming her current position, she was the Director of the Communication Center, where she worked extensively with students and professors across Georgia Tech, managed day-to-day operations of the Center, developed initiatives to help STEM students improve communication, and developed and led numerous workshops on communication skills. She originally came to Tech after receiving her PhD from the University of Georgia.
Research
Dr. Blake's current research is on engineering and science communication as well as perceptions of engineers in culture and how those perceptions shape the way engineers communicate. She has published on writing center studies topics such as tutoring engineers, creating and administering dissertation boot camps, and tutoring with multimodal communication techniques.
Teaching
Dr. Blake has taught classes on communicating science and technology to the public and perceptions of engineers in literature and culture, as well as numerous literature and English courses. Currently she teaches a special topics course in which she helps students in ISYE 4800 prepare their pre-proposals for senior design.
Representative Publications
*Blake, Brandy Ball. “From STEM to Center: Or What I Learned from Tutoring Engineers.” WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. 44:7-8 (March/April 2020).
*Blake, Brandy Ball, and Karen Head. "Storyboard(ing): Multimodal Tool and Artifact." Multimodal Consulting: Strategies for Twenty-First-Century Writing Consultations. Eds. Brian Fallon and Lindsay Sabatino. Utah State UP, 2019. https://www.upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/3603-multimodal-composing
*Blake, Brandy, Joy Bracewell, and Charles Stivers. “'Just Write? …Not Quite: Writing 'Procedure' for STEM-Focused Dissertation Boot Camps. ” The Writing Lab Newsletter. 39.9-10 (May/June 2015): 13-17.
*Blake, Brandy Ball, and L. Andrew Cooper, eds. Monsters. Fountainhead Press V Series. Fountainhead Press, 2012.