Category Archives: Universities

Korean Engineering Education

Different Engineering Education Expectations

The “Engineering Education Innovation Center” of the engineering department at Yonsei University surveyed 350 human resources officials at some 100 small- and medium-sized companies, as well as big companies, including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction, and Nexon. In the survey, they gave engineering graduates an “F” grade in 13 out of 14 categories. Engineering graduates themselves also said, “Education in college is not useful to our work.”

On the contrary, however, engineering professors gave high marks of 97 out of 100 on their knowledge, and answered positively regarding their teaching skills, which revealed the different views colleges and companies have.

The conflict between what is being taught and what is needed in business is the subject of continuing debate globally.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Takes Big Open Access Step

HHMI Announces New Policy for Publication of Research Articles that will require

its scientists to publish their original research articles in scientific journals that allow the articles and supplementary materials to be made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication.

Great news. Some, including me, would prefer a shorter time but this is the limit on the slowest time that will be acceptable not a goal. I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised if HHMI is the largest source of research funds outside of the federal government in the USA. This is one more sign the tactics of the old school journals are failing.

HHMI and Public Access Publishing policy

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has long viewed the sharing of research materials and tools as a fundamental responsibility of scientific authorship. That principle also extends to ensuring that original, peer-reviewed research publications and supplemental materials are freely accessible within six months of publication

Well put; it is amazing how out of touch with the basic concepts of advancing scientific ideas the old style journals are.

Training Grants a Boon to Research and Scientists

Training grants a boon to research, scientists:

According to Petra Schroeder, assistant dean of the Graduate School, there are approximately 30 training grants available at UW–Madison. Most are funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and they direct about $17 million each year toward the training of future researchers.

Each training program has its own specific mission, but most foster interdisciplinary research, providing students with valuable experience in a setting likely to mirror their first job environment. Those involved in the Biotechnology Training Program (BTP) are taught to do research at the juncture of the biological and physical sciences.
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LiGreci is interested in bioremediation, putting microbes to use in cleaning up toxic waste. BTP thrust her into a soil science laboratory on campus. Though LiGreci considers herself primarily a microbiologist, her research lies far outside the comfort zone of most of her peers, involving soil science, chemistry and geology.

According to LiGreci, the exposure she gets to novel lab techniques is eye opening. She learned new modes of culturing bacteria and other lab skills unique to microbiology, expanding her toolkit as a bench scientist. This summer, she will branch out further into the realms of genomics and the intersection between computing and biology when she joins the Joint Genome Institute at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as an intern. There, she will work on projects to assemble genomes of soil bacteria.

Using Bacteria to Carry Nanoparticles Into Cells

Bacteria ferry nanoparticles into cells for early diagnosis, treatment

Researchers at Purdue University have shown that common bacteria can deliver a valuable cargo of “smart nanoparticles” into a cell to precisely position sensors, drugs or DNA for the early diagnosis and treatment of various diseases. The approach represents a potential way to overcome hurdles in delivering cargo to the interiors of cells, where they could be used as an alterative technology for gene therapy, said Rashid Bashir, a researcher at Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center.

The researchers attached nanoparticles to the outside of bacteria and linked DNA to the nanoparticles. Then the nanoparticle-laden bacteria transported the DNA to the nuclei of cells, causing the cells to produce a fluorescent protein that glowed green. The same method could be used to deliver drugs, genes or other cargo into cells.

“The released cargo is designed to be transported to different locations in the cells to carry out disease detection and treatment simultaneously,” said Bashir, a professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Because the bacteria and nanoparticle material can be selected from many choices, this is a delivery system that can be tailored to the characteristics of the receiving cells. It can deliver diagnostic or therapeutic cargo effectively for a wide range of needs.”

Harmless strains of bacteria could be used as vehicles, harnessing bacteria’s natural ability to penetrate cells and their nuclei, Bashir said. “For gene therapy, a big obstacle has been finding ways to transport the therapeutic DNA molecule through the nuclear membrane and into the nucleus,” he said. “Only when it is in the nucleus can the DNA produce proteins that perform specific functions and correct genetic disease conditions.”
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Re-engineering Engineering Education

Re-engineering the engineer, Business 2.0’s take on the Olin education experiment:

You don’t have to spend much time at Olin to sense that something important has changed. Instead of the difficult, and often boring, math and physics classes of the old weed-’em-out-early engineering schools, you find courses like Engineering 2250: User Oriented Collaborative Design. In a typical session, you might encounter kids dressed in pajamas, sweats, shorts, and sandals and an atmosphere that feels more like an art studio than a classroom. On one spring day, a couple of couches and armchairs occupied the center of the room, and a student sat cross-legged atop a table, philosophizing about the lives and demands of makeup artists. Students in UOCD don’t build actual products, touch any technology, or even work a single math problem.

“It doesn’t look like engineering,” admits Benjamin Linder, the assistant professor who helped create the class. Olin’s curriculum is centered on courses like UOCD and Design Nature — the class that produced those climbing critters. Miller, 57, a thin, bald, engaging administrator who is prone to analogies, likens the traditional curriculum to a music school where students learn history and theory but never touch their instruments. Olin, by contrast, introduces project-based courses to its students early and often.

Olin also insists that students spend more than a quarter of their time studying business and entrepreneurship, humanities, and social sciences. “Olin really bends over backward to get the students to recognize the interactions between these disciplines,” says Constance Bowe, who studied the college as a researcher at Harvard Medical International. To help instill the entrepreneurial spirit, the college created the Olin Foundry, in which the school houses and partially funds as many as a dozen student startups.

Students also experience the business world firsthand through Olin’s senior consulting program for engineering. This year 12 corporations — including Boeing, Boston Scientific, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM — paid Olin a combined $700,000 to have groups of five seniors serve as consultants for a full academic year on some of the companies’ pressing technological and engineering problems. “By the time they’re seniors, they’re nearly operating at a professional level,” says David Barrett, the Olin associate professor who heads the program. “It gives them authenticity they wouldn’t get in a classroom.”

Scanning Electron Microscope Rose Art

Rose Petal Installation Inspired by Science:

Carnegie Mellon University School of Art senior Lisa Huyett has created a large-scale installation titled “S.E.M. Rose” (Scanning Electron Microscope Rose), a re-creation of the surface of a rose petal, at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. The artist rendered the magnified image of a rose petal using a scanning electron microscope while a student in the university’s interdisciplinary Art and Biology course.
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Scanning electron microscopy uses a beam of electrons to reveal the nanostructures of material surfaces at up to one million times their normal size. Under the guidance of Joseph Suhan, electron microscopist at the Electron Microscope Facility in the university’s Mellon College of Science, Huyett magnified a rose petal 500 times, revealing bristly, knob-like structures that make up the velvety appearance of the petal.

Universities allowing students to be inspired by science is great. While creating scientists and engineers is important it is also important to let students studying other area to engage with science. I also enjoy the art inspired by science, including previous posts: Art of Science 2006 – Get Your Own Science Art – Art of Science at Princeton

Goldwater Science Scholarships

I have mentioned previously, I work for ASEE (the curious cat blog is not associated with ASEE). At ASEE, we have started a science and engineering fellowship blog. The latest post covers the Goldwater Science Scholarships – for undergraduate students in science and math. Approximately 300 are awarded each year.

For 2007, 28 mathematics majors, 223 science and related majors, 54 engineering majors, and 12 computer science majors received awards (many of the Scholars have dual majors in a variety of mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines). The one and two year scholarships will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established by Public Law 99-661 on November 14, 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry M. Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Applications will be available starting in September for next year. Schools nominate up to 4 students for the scholarship, see the web site for details on the application process.

Singapore Students Engineer New Products

Students design products to help environment and disabled people

“Now it’s in the eighth year and we’ve had 5,000 students on the scheme. This year the quality is quite good, I’m quite happy. Some amazing ideas such as the fish scaling device and the shuttlecock launcher,” said Mr Butler. There is no limit to innovation and creativity.

An automated shuttlecock launcher, which can adjust the launching angle of shuttlecocks, came in tops in terms of design. Currently there are no mechanical shuttlecock launchers in the market. But this launcher can not only be produced at a low cost, but also help beginners execute different strokes. Another practical design is a retractable bamboo system that improves safety when drying laundry. It also comes with a plastic cover to keep out the rain. The above are just a few examples of the 52 innovations that may just find their way into our homes and lives, once these young technopreneurs find the right investors.

I like the increasing efforts to engage university students in actually creating useful innovations. It isn’t easy to actually create winning solutions but the efforts to do so I think teach many valuable lessons. Such efforts support a change to our education system to engaging students in actual engineering projects not just problem sets (for example: Educating the Engineer of 2020: NAE Report – Olin Engineering Education Experiment – Changes at MIT for Engineering Education – Educating Engineering Geeks).

Educating Engineering Geeks

Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems, Director, MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, presents his thoughts on engineering education changes at MIT in this webcast.

So MIT must shift gears, and embrace two basic missions: continuing to produce world-class experts (geeks) – practicing engineers who design complicated systems – and generating world-class leaders (chiefs), who will deploy their technological expertise in the real-world. “My hypothesis is that the great leaders of the next century will have to have a technological background, because we’re going toward a technologically innovative society.” These leaders will be problem definers as much as problem solvers, and, says Sheffi, “either we or China will educate them.”

Sheffi suggests a School of Engineering-wide undergraduate program, where all the fundamentals courses are rethought and taught differently. This means sacrificing problem sets for case studies, and “learning how a subject fits into the grand scheme of things.” MIT should integrate humanities with engineering subjects, ensuring undergraduates understand business, ethics, legal language, environmental concerns, organization and process design. There should also be a formal leadership workshop, required time in a foreign culture and along the lines of the European Union, a five-year educational model. If MIT builds it, others will follow, assures Sheffi.

via: Geeks and Chiefs: Engineering Education at MIT

Engineering Graduate Job Market

Employers find there are few graduating engineers left to hire as dot-com debacle of five years ago fades into history by Mark Savage, Cornell University:

Average B.S.-level salaries for engineering graduates, which had dropped by 10 percent to $52,503 in 2002 from $56,072 in 2001, grew slowly. By 2006 (the most recent year for which validated data is available), salaries had finally surpassed 2001 levels with starting salaries averaging about $57,000 and $66,000, respectively, for engineering undergraduate and master’s degree graduates.
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the marketable skills that engineering graduates bring to the workplace are also of strong interest to a broad range of industries and functions not typically associated with engineering, from consulting and financial services to sales and marketing. Nearly 50 percent of Cornell’s engineering students embrace these nontraditional career paths.

To be sure, these students are eager to use their technical skills, but they want to practice them in a business applications environment, often found in the financial services or consulting sectors. They are less attracted to the traditional “hard core” engineering roles that defined engineering graduates a generation ago. Thus, it is not surprising to find IBM Business Consulting Services, Goldman-Sachs and Capital One standing alongside Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and General Electric among the top 10 employers of Cornell engineering graduates.

Engineering graduates continue to receive excellent salary offers, as I have mentioned previously: Highest paying college degrees. And don’t forget more S&P 500 CEOs are Engineering graduates than are graduates of any other discipline.