Patrick Finley is an award-winning designer, Assistant Professor, and Chair of the Graphic Design program in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. His scholarship, teaching, and outreach activities focus on connecting with industry through creative partnerships and an experiential-focused pedagogy. Key projects have engaged with major technology businesses such as Meta and GoPuff, HBCUs, entrepreneurs from historically marginalized groups, BIPOC artists and designers, and regional nonprofits that benefit communities of color and under-resourced communities. These works have been awarded at many international and national design competitions, and selected works have been published in print by Logolounge (12 & 13), Redesigning Logos, and numerous quarterly releases of GDUSA. It's through these experiences that he finds value in providing students with real-world experiential learning opportunities both in and outside of the classroom. Since 2013, Finley has taught over 700 students in everything from introductory principle courses to advanced interaction design courses. His approach to each course is to provide students with a framework to creatively navigate complex problems, assign project-based topics that meet increasingly changing industry demands, and collaborate with design professionals to bring hands-on learning activities into the classroom. These methods have ensured that his students are solid conceptual thinkers, can collaborate within interdisciplinary teams, and create exceptional portfolio-worthy work. His former students found careers working for companies such as Disney, ESPN, Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon. Patrick holds a BFA in Graphic Design with a minor in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and an MFA in Graphic Design with an emphasis in Human-Computer Interaction from Iowa State University.