Moving Forward from a Pandemic: How the Field of Materials Science Has Adapted (2022 Student-led Symposium): On-Demand Oral Presentations
Program Organizers: Gianmarco Sahragard-Monfared, University of California, Davis; Christine Smudde; Jared Stimac, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Mingwei Zhang, Uc Davis
Monday 8:00 AM
March 14, 2022
Room: Special Topics
Location: On-Demand Room
Learning from the Pandemic: Justine Johannes1; Gilbert Herrera1; P Randall Schunk1; Jeffrey Nelson1; 1Sandia National Laboratories
The pending threat of COVID-19 to our families and mankind at large, motivated the technical community to act with urgency to understand challenges, assemble the appropriate teams and deliver solutions to counter threats facing the medical community. This presentation will focus on fast response solutions that leveraged a breadth of capabilities and partnerships to address significant supply-chain issues for critical medical supplies, develop key manufacturing and re-use technologies and identify longer term solutions to enable efficient vaccination approaches. This work was conducted under a maximum teleworking posture, with minimal in-person meetings, driving a shift in work execution, communication approaches, and partnership challenges. The opportunity to learn from these recent experiences and understand what it will mean for the future of materials science and how work is executed will be discussed.
Supporting Educators through Software during Remote Teaching: Kaitlin Tyler1; 1ANSYS
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a fast shift to remote teaching. This caused many challenges, including no access to physical labs, no access to computer labs and campus-wide software licenses, and an increased need for interactive tools and activities for students that could be accessed remotely. We at Ansys provide multiple software solutions for teaching in different engineering disciplines, including materials. During the pandemic, we found materials educators using our software to teach in different ways, such as flipped classroom and interactive teaching, to work around the challenges caused by remote teaching. Details on our Academic team’s support for both educators and learners and our plans as the teaching space continues to change and evolve in this post-pandemic landscape will be shared.
The Interrupted University: Lessons from Engineering Design in Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic: Sunniva Collins1; 1Case Western Reserve
With the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, undergraduate students across the country were sent home in March 2020, and universities had to pivot to on-line teaching and learning in a matter of days. Once past the immediate crisis, the problem of returning to campus safely and modifying instructional methods became a central discussion for university administrators. Engineering design principles and tools, such as the theory of constraints, creative problem solving techniques, data-based decision making and prototyping, were used at CWRU in Cleveland, OH to formulate the university’s response. These examples will be discussed, along with experiences in planning and instructing large team-based courses that never had the opportunity to meet in person.