Her research area is engineering education. She is the Founding Director of the Center for Research and Learning in Engineering at Michigan, which supports college-wide initiatives in engineering teaching and learning, and currently serves as its Faculty Director for Engineering Education Research. Her current research focus on student’s resistance to active learning, faculty adoption of evidence-based teaching practices, student teams in the engineering classroom, and institutional change. Prof. Finelli is a member of MICDE’s Education committee whose goal is to continuously review and develop the institute’s educational programs and campus wide teaching of computational sciences, in and out of the classrooms.