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Boeing's Starliner mission to the International Space station has not been their finest moment. Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore first travelled to the station in early June aboard a Boeing Starliner spacecraft for what was expected to be a week-long test mission. But issues with helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters forced NASA to decide Starliner's problems were not well enough understood for the space agency to allow Williams and Wilmore to return to Earth on it. Jason Rabinovitch is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Before that he worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for more than six years
Since its inception, air travel has been a huge boon for humanity. Unfortunately, it also creates a sizeable carbon footprint, as flying contributes around 2 percent of all carbon emissions globally. Enter sustainable aviation fuels, an alternative to traditional jet fuel that field experts say is pivotal to helping to decarbonize the industry. How can we ensure it is adopted not just by some countries and governments but the wider world? After all, SAFs are expensive and not easily scalable. On this episode of Morning Shot, Dr. Bhupendra Khandelwal, Associate Professor in Fuels and Combustion, Mechanical Engineering Department, The University of Alabama, shares his insights. Presented, Produced & Edited by: Emaad Akhtar Photo credit: Straits TimesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This week it was my pleasure to welcome Dr. Barry Kudrowitz to the show for a chat about his great book, Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and Design. Dr. Kudrowitz is a professor of product design and department head in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. There, he founded and directed the product design program from 2011-2021. Barry received his PhD from the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying humor, creativity, and idea generation. He is interested in how creativity is perceived, evaluated, and learned. In addition, Barry has years of experience working with the toy industry and has taught toy design for over a decade. In this episode, we delve into how changing our mindset can transform mundane chores into enjoyable activities, explore why traditional icebreakers often fail, and discuss the vital role of creativity in every aspect of our lives. Barry will share practical examples of how educators and professionals have successfully implemented these concepts to create more engaging environments. Prepare to rethink how you approach work, creativity, and play with insights that blend academic rigor with real-world practicality. Related Episodes: Creativity Podcast Playlist Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and Design ______________________________________ Connect with Barry: Website Book ______________________________________ Connect with Erik: LinkedIn Facebook Instagram ______________________________________ This Podcast is Powered By: Descript Descript 101 Castmagic Ecamm Podpage Rodecaster Pro Top Productivity Books List Make sure to support the show by checking out the sponsors! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Research published last month in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences by Prof. Abraham and his colleagues once again show ocean temperatures, more specifically ocean heat content (OHC), once again dramatically increased in 2023. (As I noted last year, many believe OHC is the best way of measuring anthropocentric warming because it is comparatively less variable on a year-to-year basis.) Oceans, that cover over 70% of the earth's surface, absorb roughly 90% of the sun's heat trapped by an increasing Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) due to our continuing inability to meaningfully curb our greenhouse gas emissions. Oceans also serve as immense carbon sinks. Oceans determine the Earth's energy, water and carbon cycles and increasingly warming oceans have an increasingly deleterious effect on the Earth's climate and weather. Think: human survival, i.e., warming ocean water (and rising ocean acidification) disrupts marine life that in turn substantially threatens the availability of food we eat and the oxygen we breathe. John Abraham, Ph.D., is a Professor and Program Director in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. His studies largely concern geophysical science related to the climate crisis that includes the rate at which the planet is warming, particularly oceans. His team's warming measurements provide insights on future climate crisis effects over the coming decades. Professor Abraham also studies the impact of increasing heat on the human body - information that has important health consequences particularly for at risk and minority populations. Professor has conducted approximately 400 published scientific studies. He is a frequent television and radio guest having participated in over 100 TV and radio interviews. Professor Abraham earned his BS, MS and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota.Prof. Abraham and his colleagues' January Advances in Atmospheric Sciences article, titled “Another Year of Record Heat for the Oceans” is at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-023-2385-2. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thehealthcarepolicypodcast.com
敬佩 jìngpèi - admire 企業家 qǐyèjiā - entrepreneur 張忠謀 Zhāng Zhōngmóu - Morris Chang (founder of TSMC) 工研院院長 Gōngyán Yuàn yuànzhǎng - Director-General of Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) 工研院 Gōngyán Yuàn - Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) 哈佛大學 Hāfú Dàxué - Harvard University 就讀 jiùdú - study; attend (school) 截然不同 jié rán bùtóng - completely different 只要努力,就能出頭 zhǐyào nǔlì, jiù néng chūtóu - as long as you work hard, you can succeed 美國夢 Měiguó mèng - American Dream 觸手可及 chùshǒu kějí - within reach; attainable 麻省理工學院 Máshěng Lǐgōng Xuéyuàn - Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 機械系 jīxiè xì - Mechanical Engineering Department 物理 wùlǐ - Physics 工程 gōngchéng - Engineering 以...聞名 yǐ... wénmíng - known for; famous for 理工 lǐgōng - Science and Engineering 台積電 Táijīdiàn - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) 半導體製造廠 bàndǎotǐ zhìzào chǎng - Semiconductor manufacturing company 半導體 bàndǎotǐ - Semiconductor 飛利浦公司 Fēilìpǔ Gōngsī - Philips (a Dutch multinational technology company) 一路堅持到底 yīlù jiānchí dàodǐ - persist all the way; keep going till the end 數一數二 shù yī shù èr - one of the top 經營理念 jīngyíng lǐniàn - management philosophy 密不可分 mì bù kěfēn - inseparable 代工策略 dàigōng cèlüè - foundry strategy (referring to TSMC's business model) 代工 dàigōng - foundry; contract manufacturing 製造商 zhìzào shāng - manufacturer 設備 shèbèi - equipment 技術 jìshù - technology 戰略 zhànlüè - strategy 大膽 dàdǎn - bold; daring 核心技術 héxīn jìshù - core technology Follow me on Instagram: fangfang.chineselearning !
A professor and head of the Department of Graphic Design, Apparel Design, Retail Merchandising, and Product Design at the University of Minnesota. He received his PhD from the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying humor, creativity, and idea generation. Dr. Kudrowitz is interested in how creativity is perceived, evaluated and learned. He has years of experience working with the toy industry and has taught toy design for over a decade. Dr. Kudrowitz co-designed a Nerf toy, an elevator simulator that is in operation at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., and a ketchup-dispensing robot that was featured on the Martha Stewart Show. He is also the associate editor of the Journal of Food Design.
Claire chatted to Sara Adela Abad Guaman from University College London about adaptable robots inspired by nature. Sara Adela Abad Guaman is a Lecturer at University College London's Mechanical Engineering Department. She is also the head of the Adaptable Robotics Lab. Inspired by biological organisms, Sara aims to develop robots and mechanical systems with enhanced adaptability to variable environmental conditions. Her vision is to use bioinspiration and morphological computation to address global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and sustainability. Win a Robot Talk T-shirt Exciting news! The Robot Talk T-shirt competition is back for the new season. For a chance to win, all you have to do is share your favourite episode of Robot Talk on social media and tag us @RobotTalkPod. One lucky winner will be selected each month to receive an exclusive free organic cotton t-shirt. Check out the Living with AI podcast If you enjoy Robot Talk and you're looking for a new podcast to listen to, you might like to check out the Living with AI podcast!
This week, it's all about recent breakthroughs that point the way toward a future with better, faster, and more secure computers, as well as nearly unlimited clean energy. Listen now, for word from the National Science Foundation, about some new research being done now at the University of Rochester, which could make it easier to mass produce quantum computers. We'll also hear an easy to understand explanation of nuclear fusion from our featured guest , Physics Professor, Dr. Susan Ramlo, who now teaches in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Akron.
This week, it's all about recent breakthroughs that point the way toward a future with better, faster, and more secure computers, as well as nearly unlimited clean energy. Listen now, for word from the National Science Foundation, about some new research being done now at the University of Rochester, which could make it easier to mass produce quantum computers. We'll also hear an easy to understand explanation of nuclear fusion from our featured guest , Physics Professor, Dr. Susan Ramlo, who now teaches in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Akron.
After two years since the launch of This Academic Life podcast, we reflect on how we did, how we are going forward, and answer some common questions that many listeners have asked over time. We thank all of our listeners, everyone who has contributed, our guests, and our editing team. Special thanks to Jared Duffy and Angella Chen who are our editors, RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal who composed the music for our show, Pania Newell who is the creator of the fantastic artwork for each episode. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we talk about some of the benefits of professional memberships and some fun facts about them. Reference list: https://www.infotrack.com/blog/10-benefits-of-joining-a-professional-association/ https://www.impactio.com/blog/the-benefits-of-society-membership-as-a-career-academic Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of South Carolina offers academic programs and research opportunities in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and nuclear engineering led by experienced faculty. USC-ME is a Tier 1 research department, ranked #31 nationally and #1 in the state by the National Research Council. The Mechanical Engineering Department at UofSC is among the front-runners in innovation and technology and boasts one of the largest mechanical engineering programs in South Carolina. With approximately 900 undergraduate students, 180 graduate students and 34 full-time faculty, 5 full-time instructors, and 11 staff members, the department provides world-class, diverse, interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge engineering education to our students. High-quality engineering education is a key activity conducted within the Mechanical Engineering Department at UofSC across a range of courses ranging from introductory general engineering skills to highly specialized cutting-edge concepts. It is critical that students are well-educated in the fundamental concepts of general and mechanical engineering so that they can be developed into competent, successful engineers to make meaningful contributions to the engineering community. Mechanical engineering students, Annsley Gray, Michele Lunga, Matt Moore, and Evan Watson under the direction of the course instructor, Dr. Joshua Gray, corporate sponsor, Dr. Subramani Sockalingam, and faculty advisor, Dr. Odell Glenn, created a project entitled "Novel Demonstration Kits for Fundamental Mechanical Engineering Concepts" aimed to create a learning environment that would prove successful for students attempting to pass two historically rigid classes in the mechanical engineering department to further their degree achievement. The senior design team developed in-class demonstration kits incorporating novel approaches on the following key concepts related to EMCH 200, Statics and EMCH 260, Solid Mechanics: Force and moment equilibrium, Moment of inertia, Friction, Stress-strain, Mohr's circle, Beam bending, Torsion, and Material failure. The team engaged in weekly meetings with the project sponsor and faculty mentor, market research, as well as interaction with students in these courses. Product Specifications were established through discussion and student testimonials during EMCH 200 classes and Supplemental instruction sessions. Ensuring that these needs are met will guarantee the project sponsor and their goal of consumer satisfaction. The three design concepts were #1, "The Length Game Design". Students will use the torque along the length of a wrench (also known as the moment arm) to find the force exerted on the wrench. The mechanical engineering students constructed the wrench from pre-manufactured ratchets. The topics covered in this game are torque, mechanical advantage, and moment. Three topics for which concepts have been considered difficult for students to initially grasp. The 2nd design concept entitled "Seasaw Demonstration" Moments and equilibrium design concepts were implemented here. Students used a 3D-printed design with premanufactured weights. In this design, students are given an unknown weight and a known length ratio for each side. They will then use the force balance equation to determine the weight needed on the other side to balance the seesaw. Design #3 was entitled "3D Vector Plot Diagram". Visualizing 3-D can be very difficult for students to grasp especially in freshman and sophomore-level courses. Here students use strings on a smaller-scaled 3-D cube to simulate the x, y, and z-axis. The goal is to get students to visualize 3-D components. All 3 of these designs have been developed and are ready to be implemented in classrooms for trial testing. Annsley Gray is a senior mechanical engineering student having internship experience in manufacturing settings with reliability engineering and will be working at Sylvamo Paper Mill as a reliability engineer post-graduation. Michele Lunga, also, our team leader and coordinator, has an eye for detail and organization. She plans to continue with manufacturing and design after graduation. Matt Moore is a senior mechanical engineering student who plans to pursue a career in the aerospace or automotive field, as well as pursue music on the side. Evan Watson is a senior mechanical engineering student and has a strong interest in hands-on engineering and problem-solving. Each of these students will graduate in either Fall of 2022 or the Spring of 2023. I have had the distinct pleasure of instructing these students during the rigor of Engineering Statics, Engineering Solids, Engineering Dynamics, Engineering Lab II, and Fluid Mechanics as well as their present advisor for the final Senior Design. To witness the year-long final assessment and implementation of rigorous coursework in a design project from these students was nothing less than amazing.
The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of South Carolina offers academic programs and research opportunities in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and nuclear engineering led by experienced faculty. USC-ME is a Tier 1 research department, ranked #31 nationally and #1 in the state by the National Research Council. The Mechanical Engineering Department at UofSC is among the front-runners in innovation and technology and boasts one of the largest mechanical engineering programs in South Carolina. With approximately 900 undergraduate students, 180 graduate students and 34 full-time faculty, 5 full-time instructors, and 11 staff members, the department provides world-class, diverse, interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge engineering education to our students. High-quality engineering education is a key activity conducted within the Mechanical Engineering Department at UofSC across a range of courses ranging from introductory general engineering skills to highly specialized cutting-edge concepts. It is critical that students are well-educated in the fundamental concepts of general and mechanical engineering so that they can be developed into competent, successful engineers to make meaningful contributions to the engineering community. Mechanical engineering students, Annsley Gray, Michele Lunga, Matt Moore, and Evan Watson under the direction of the course instructor, Dr. Joshua Gray, corporate sponsor, Dr. Subramani Sockalingam, and faculty advisor, Dr. Odell Glenn, created a project entitled "Novel Demonstration Kits for Fundamental Mechanical Engineering Concepts" aimed to create a learning environment that would prove successful for students attempting to pass two historically rigid classes in the mechanical engineering department to further their degree achievement. The senior design team developed in-class demonstration kits incorporating novel approaches on the following key concepts related to EMCH 200, Statics and EMCH 260, Solid Mechanics: Force and moment equilibrium, Moment of inertia, Friction, Stress-strain, Mohr's circle, Beam bending, Torsion, and Material failure. The team engaged in weekly meetings with the project sponsor and faculty mentor, market research, as well as interaction with students in these courses. Product Specifications were established through discussion and student testimonials during EMCH 200 classes and Supplemental instruction sessions. Ensuring that these needs are met will guarantee the project sponsor and their goal of consumer satisfaction. The three design concepts were #1, "The Length Game Design". Students will use the torque along the length of a wrench (also known as the moment arm) to find the force exerted on the wrench. The mechanical engineering students constructed the wrench from pre-manufactured ratchets. The topics covered in this game are torque, mechanical advantage, and moment. Three topics for which concepts have been considered difficult for students to initially grasp. The 2nd design concept entitled "Seasaw Demonstration" Moments and equilibrium design concepts were implemented here. Students used a 3D-printed design with premanufactured weights. In this design, students are given an unknown weight and a known length ratio for each side. They will then use the force balance equation to determine the weight needed on the other side to balance the seesaw. Design #3 was entitled "3D Vector Plot Diagram". Visualizing 3-D can be very difficult for students to grasp especially in freshman and sophomore-level courses. Here students use strings on a smaller-scaled 3-D cube to simulate the x, y, and z-axis. The goal is to get students to visualize 3-D components. All 3 of these designs have been developed and are ready to be implemented in classrooms for trial testing. Annsley Gray is a senior mechanical engineering student having internship experience in manufacturing settings with reliability engineering and will be working at S --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/odell-glenn-jr/support
Every academic has to do service at some point in their early career. We explain the inner workings of picking services that are both enjoyable and beneficial for you career as well as our experiences with service. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss different nationally competitive student fellowships and provide some advice on how to prepare a strong packet. Reference list: https://grad.ncsu.edu/student-funding/fellowships-and-grants/national/nationally-competitive-graduate-fellowships/ Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss some fun facts about the Nobel Prize from its origin to the most common recipient types. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we are honored to host Ms. Morghan Carr, a coast guard veteran, to discuss her journey into a STEM career and learn more about how we can help other veterans who are interested in joining the STEM workforce. It's important to note that Morghan volunteers for ArmySmart which provides free online tutoring to service members and veterans to help them achieve their further education goals. Reference list: https://womenvetsstem.edc.org https://www.armysmart.org Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Miss Morghan Carr (guest) is a Civil Geotechnical Engineer working in Portland, Maine after receiving her Master's of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of New Hampshire and serving in the United States Coast Guard. Her unique career path into a STEM career was facilitated by her experiences and benefits earned from the U.S. Military, and she aims to encourage more Veterans to pursue STEM careers. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss your options for your future in academia. Do you continue the route of being a professor and attain full tenure or do you pivot to an administrative role? Both have their positives and negatives, we discuss and layout our thoughts on the issue. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss whether prestige matters in academia and how it shapes academic hierarchy. This topic is based on a paper published recently in Nature entitled “Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention” authored by Daniel Larremorem et al, which presented an analysis based on a large dataset from US faculty census collected in the past 10 years. Reference list: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-if-you-didn-t-get-your-ph-d-at-an-elite-university-good-luck-finding-an-academic-job.html Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy focuses on ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy.Marina Freire-Gormaly, Ph.D., EIT, LEED GA is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University. Her research focuses on the development of stand-alone solar-powered reverse osmosis water treatment systems and energy recovery systems for remote communities that lack access to grid electricity. She also is interested in machine learning applications for the smart design of innovative energy and water systems. Her research interests are also in advanced manufacturing, smart systems using the Internet of Things & artificial intelligence, and advanced additive manufacturing methods. She completed her Ph.D. and M.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto in Mechanical Engineering. She has previously been a course instructor for undergraduate energy-related engineering courses at the University of Toronto. She has also worked at Ontario Power Generation (OPG) on the Darlington New Nuclear Project and the Darlington Refurbishment Project. She contributed to a World Bank project evaluating Canada's ‘Regulatory Indicators for Sustainable Energy (RISE). She currently serves as the Chair of Student and Young Professional Affairs for the Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineers (CSME). Nitish Ranjan Sarker is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Water and Energy Research Lab at the University of Toronto (U of T). He is also associated with the Centre for Global Engineering at U of T and teaches strategies and challenges of replacing high GHG-emitting energy technologies with renewable and low-carbon alternatives to senior year undergrad/ graduate students. Additionally, Nitish volunteers as the program director of the International Water Association Young Waters Professional in Canada and manages several Pan-Canadian networking and professional development events to dissipate the understanding of the social, economic, and technological aspects of Canadian water research. As a cross-disciplinary researcher, Nitish focuses on technological and systemic innovation of water and clean-energy technologies, broadly relevant to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and how to customize them appropriately based on the target community's needs and constraints. Nitish was also vested with the Mortenson Global Engineering Award earlier this year. CREDITS: This podcast is co-hosted by Dr. Erica Di Ruggiero, Director of the Centre for Global Health, and Ophelia Michaelides, Manager of the Centre for Global Health, at the DLSPH, U of T, and produced by Elizabeth Loftus. Audio editing is by Sylvia Lorico. Music is produced by Julien Fortier and Patrick May. It is made with the support of the School of Cities at U of T.
In this episode, we talk about how faculty choose research topics and how one can come up with novel ideas for research. We also share a few tips for junior faculty as they step into their independent research career. Reference list: https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psn/2016/09/academic-conferences https://www.watermarkinsights.com/resources/blog/top-five-ways-your-college-can-support-veterans Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Returning from the break we dive into how to prepare for the new school year including tips on how to balance your workload and block out time for yourself. Reference list: Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Lise Tantin (Guest) is an 8th grader in Salt Lake City, Utah. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
The early years of a faculty position can be an exciting and challenging experience. In this episode, we will provide 5 unspoken tips for early-career faculty. These tips are gathered from our own experiences, which can benefit those who are going through the early years of their academic life. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) References: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-017-0817-5 https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/976 https://whatisthemeaningofmylife.com/tag/academic-life/ https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7715&context=dissertations Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
The h-index, or Hirsch index, measures the research impact and productivity of a particular scientist. Since its inception in 2005, it has become a standard way to somewhat objectively quantify an individual's research impact. In this episode, you will learn what it is, what is expected of this H-index from researchers at different stages of their research careers, and ethical practices in increasing your H-index. We also raise concerns in the un-intended use of H-index for the academic world we are in today. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) References: https://www.journal-publishing.com/blog/good-h-index-required-academic-position/ https://phys.org/news/2020-07-albert-einstein-mediocre-h-index-bogus.html http://www.webometrics.info/en/hlargerthan100 https://www.aacc.org/cln/articles/2019/september/scientific-impact-and-the-h-index https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/102/46/16569.full.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index#Comparing_results_across_fields_and_career_levels https://www.slideshare.net/AnneWilHarzing/citation-metrics-across-disciplines-google-scholar-scopus-and-the-web-of-science Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss the taboo topic of a professor's salary and the importance of academic salary transparency. We also discuss how administrators can work with junior faculty and help them ease the salary negotiation process. Reference list: https://www.ccdaily.com/2021/04/a-look-at-faculty-presidents-salaries/ https://www.lifeofaprofessor.com/post/are-professors-rich The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2018-19 https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/07/02/327289264/episode-550-when-salaries-arent-secret Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we talk about academic conferences. Why you should go, what you need to do to prepare, and what are the do's and dont's when you get there. Reference list: Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/psn/2016/09/academic-conferences Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss with Dr. Aleeta M. Powe, an associate professor of instruction in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Louisville, on the challenges and needs that lecturers face in academia. Reference list: Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Episode Notes In this episode, we talk about instructors' stresses when turning in those final grades. As we wind down the semester, it is time to see if all of your lecture preparation, classroom demonstrations, careful selection of homework questions, creation of in-class quizzes, and your best science jokes have paid off - it is time to “Turn in Those Grades.” Reference list: Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, Lise Tantin talks about the broad view of STEM from a middle schooler's point of view. She shares her thought on how the STEM programs are evolving and what the new topics attract youth these days. Guest bio: List Tantin is a student at West High School's magnet ELP program in Salt Lake City-Utah. She will be graduating from eighth grade this year. She is interested in neuroscience. https://www.txstate.edu/chemistry/About-the-Department/Faculty-Profiles/schilter.html Reference list: Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Lise Tantin (Guest) is an 8th grader in Salt Lake City, Utah. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Non-traditional path to a tenure-track positionIn this episode, Prof. Schilter talks about his unusual path to a tenure-track position and how his position as a senior editor of Nature Reviews Chemistry is helping his career today as a researcher and educator. Guest bio: David Schilter attended The University of Sydney, where he received a BS with First Class Honours and the University Medal (2001−2004). He continued at Sydney to pursue graduate work in bio-inorganic and supramolecular chemistry, for which he was awarded a PhD (2005−2009). Combined postdoctoral/lecturing stints at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2009−2014) and the Institute for Basic Science (2014−2016) saw him extend his repertoire into bio-organometallics and carbon materials, respectively. This experience was further complemented by his editorial roles at Springer Nature, where he helped launch Nature Reviews Chemistry while also serving at Nature Catalysis and Nature Communications (2016−2021). A passion to return to academia and exploit this diverse knowledge saw him join the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Texas State University as Assistant Professor (2021−). His interests lie in the synthesis and characterization of molecular inorganic complexes relevant to biology and catalysis. https://www.txstate.edu/chemistry/About-the-Department/Faculty-Profiles/schilter.html Reference list: Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. David Schilter (Guest) is a Professor of Chemistry and BioChemistry at Texas State University. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode we discuss how social media sites and academics go hand in hand. Whether it's promoting your work, making connections, or helping get your students names out there every platform has its benefits and drawbacks. Reference list: Wired Academia: Why Social Science Scholars Are Using Social Media LINK Social Media in Academia LINK Social media for professional development and networking opportunities in academia LINK Academia goes social media, MOOC, SPOC, SMOC and SSOC LINK The social media in academia and education LINK Social media for scientists LINK Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss some frequently asked questions regarding grants management once the funding has arrived at the awarded institution, including: course buyout, summer salary, overspending, and indirect cost recovery (or overhead returns). Reference list: OMB Uniform Guidance for Grants and Contract Agreements OMB Uniform Guidance (2014) | GRANTS.GOV Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss the culture of overwork and how we can strategize to overcome it. Good reads are listed in the Reference list in this show notes. Reference list: https://voicesofacademia.com/2020/09/04/confronting-the-culture-of-overwork-less-is-more-by-brittany-uhlorn/ https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/12/11/what-interests-do-busyness-and-overwork-academe-serve-opinion https://archeothoughts.wordpress.com/2018/09/21/the-cult-of-overwork-in-academia-a-confessional-post/ https://thevarsity.ca/2021/03/14/opinion-combatting-toxic-academic-culture-work-to-learn-not-work-to-work/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8282063/ Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Edited by Angella Chen Edited by Jared Duffy Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Professor Anna Stefanopoulou (William Clay Ford Professor of Technology, Mechanical Engineering Department, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and I discuss: the green energy transition in transportation through hybrid systems and optimising internal combustion engines, batteries in hybrid vehicles and the circular battery ecosystem, AI in internal combustion engines and hydrogen fuel cells, revolutionalising fuel cell cars, mentoring and what one wished to know when 20 years old. Music: "Fortitude" by Lance Conrad Source: Storyblocks --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/panagiota-pimenidou/message
In this episode, we discuss the war in Ukraine and its impact on the scientific community and academia as a whole. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Useful Resources and References: The view from Kyiv: Head of Ukraine's research agency calls for international help | Science|Business https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00505-9 https://physicsworld.com/a/horror-and-hope-for-ukrainian-scientists/ https://monitor.icef.com/2022/03/international-educations-continuing-response-to-the-war-in-ukraine/ https://www.dfg.de/en/service/press/press_releases/2022/press_release_no_01/index.html https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/african-students-wonder-what-next-after-ukraine-war-upends-education-2022-03-24/ https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/mapping-host-countries-education-responses-influx-ukrainian-students https://www.science.org/content/article/ukrainian-researchers-flee-trauma-and-terror-war https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-science-community-condemns-russian-invasion-of-ukraine/ Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Angella Chen Jared Duffy Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) has become an ubiquitous part of academics. In this episode, we talk with an DEI expert, Mr. Matt Pinchinat, who is the director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Guilderland Central School District in the capital region of NY. He's also an adjunct faculty at Clarkson University. He answers some emergent questions on why DEI is necessary in academics and what we expect to achieve through DEI activities and initiatives. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Useful Resources and References: https://www.guilderlandschools.org/equity-diverrsity-and-inclusion-at-guilderland/ https://asm.org/Articles/2021/May/Addressing-Diversity,-Equity-and-Inclusion-in-Acad https://peopleadmin.com/2016/09/dei-why-it-matters-and-whats-standing-in-the-way/ https://academicpersonnel.ucmerced.edu/Evidenced-Based_DEI_Best_Practices https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/words-to-action https://www.heritage.org/education/report/diversity-university-dei-bloat-the-academy https://www.academicdiversitysearch.com/what-is-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-academia/ Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Mr. Matt Pinchinat is the Director of DEI at Guilderland Central School District in NY and an adjunct faculty at Clarkson University. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Angella Chen Jared Duffy Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Recommendation letters are an important part of students' applications for different fellowships, scholarships, as well as grad school. In this episode, we will talk about who to ask for these letters and what is the typical format of these letters. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Useful Resources and References: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/recommendation-letters-for-a-promotion-2061686 https://csw.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/avoiding_gender_bias_in_letter_of_reference_writing.pdf Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Editing team: Angella Chen Jared Duffy Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In our anniversary episode, we discuss faculty on “Side Track”: moving before tenure with Dr. Andre Clayborne who is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and BioChemistry at George Mason University. Dr. Clayborne has successfully navigated the transition between universities while on the tenure track. He candidly shares with us his experiences, concerns, and challenges on his “train” to tenure. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Useful Resources and References: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18078/how-frequently-do-pre-tenured-assistant-professors-switch-institutions Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Andre Clayborne (guest) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and BioChemistry at George Mason University. https://science.gmu.edu/directory/andre-clayborne Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Recommendation letters are an important component of a postdoc/faculty application as well as a faculty promotion packet. These letters have unique requirements and are not the same as typical letters of recommendation. In this episode, we talk about who you should ask for these letters and how to write these letters. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Sponsor: De Gruyter: This episode is sponsored by De Gruyter and its portfolio in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. For “Students and Researchers in Mathematics” De Gruyter's 2022 catalog is now available on This Academic Life website. Useful Resources and References: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/recommendation-letters-for-a-promotion-2061686 https://csw.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/avoiding_gender_bias_in_letter_of_reference_writing.pdf Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
On this episode of the Additive Insight podcast, we bring you the fifth instalment of our Innovators on Innovators series, featuring Candice Majewski of the University of Sheffield's Mechanical Engineering Department and Alex Kingsbury, an AM Industry Fellow at RMIT University. Despite never having met in person, Majewski and Kingsbury have long enjoyed discussing their work in additive manufacturing on social media platforms, with the former more familiar with polymer technologies and the latter specialising in metals. Over the course of their Innovators on Innovators episode, the pair discuss how they came to work in the 3D printing space, the importance of standards being developed to allow industrialists and academics to better understand each other, and their wishes for the future of AM. Learn more about Long-term Resin Performance and Industrial-Scale Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) Workflow Solutions from our episode sponsor 3D Systems at mytct.co/3dsystemspod and mytct.co/PodSLS
Our Sixth installment will feature Marwa Zaatari and William Bahnfleth. Marwa Zaatari is a Partner at D ZINE Partners based in Austin, Texas. Doctor Zaatari has a Ph.D. in Environmental and Water Resources Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in the Architectural and Civil Engineering Department. She also has a MS in Projects and the Built Environment from the American University of Beirut, and a BE in HVAC, Energy and Controls for the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Lebanese University in Lebanon. William Bahnfleth is a Professor of Architectural Engineering at Penn State University and a past Director of the Indoor Environment Center at Penn State. Doctor Bahnfleth has a Ph.D., MS and BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also very active in a number of volunteer committees, including as the Chair of the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force. About the Program Indoor Environments: Global Research to Action is a new video show & podcast that explores how research can be translated to practice on a variety of topics related to our built indoor environments. The International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate (ISIAQ) and the Indoor Environmental Quality Global Alliance (IEQ-GA) have partnered to create this unique show. This monthly program is hosted by Healthy Indoors' publisher, Bob Krell, and IEQ-GA president, Donald Weekes. Check out all the episodes at: https://global.healthyindoors.com/c/indoor-environments/
Teaching evaluations can have many purposes including assessment of an instructor's teaching effectiveness. It can also impact one's academic career such as reappointment or promotion and tenure. In this episode, we talk about the history of teaching evaluations, how and when they are effective, and how we can possibly improve students' participation and its effectiveness in the future. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Useful Resources and References: https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/course-evaluations-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4842911/ https://www.press.jhu.edu/news/blog/grading-college-history-evaluating-teaching-and-learning https://asccc.org/sites/default/files/publications/GuidelinesDevelopingFacultyEval_0.pdf Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Sabbatical for academic professors is a sacred opportunity to rejuvenate research ideas and initiate research collaborations. In this episode, we talk about the history and various forms of sabbatical. We also share how we planned and made our own sabbaticals as meaningful enrichment experiences. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Useful Resources and References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatical https://blog.trello.com/sabbatical-leave http://inside.scrippscollege.edu/grants/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/sabbatical-funding.pdf https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/the-changing-sabbatical/ Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
The grant culture in research institutes (i.e. academia, industry, and national labs) has been evolved over the past decades and led to an environment where chasing fundings has had a significant impact on shaping the new culture. In this episode, Dr. Anastasia Ilgen, a Principal Member of Technical Staff at the Geochemistry Department, Sandia National Laboratories, shares her experience and insights on writing proposals and securing research funding. She discusses how to build cohesive research programs and design proposals with an appropriate combination of risks and likely successes. Guest info: Dr. Anastasia G. Ilgen is an experimental geochemist, specializing in chemical reactions at solid-water interfaces. She leads several research programs at Sandia, and is active in the American Chemical Society Governance. She grew up next to the active volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia. She enjoys hiking with her family, traveling, cooking and baking, and taking care of her numerous pets. https://www.labpartnering.org/experts/d93065b9-0e86-452f-a296-3d1024837e6d https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/careers/chemical-sciences/profiles/anastasia-ilgen.html Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
The fall season is time to look for faculty positions and universities are also getting ready to find the most suitable candidate(s) for their openings. This episode talks about some aspects of this search. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) An interesting read: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/06/10/how-write-effective-diversity-statement-essay Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
The fall season is time to look for faculty positions and universities are also getting ready to find the most suitable candidate(s) for their openings. This episode talks about some aspects of this search. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) An interesting read: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/06/10/how-write-effective-diversity-statement-essay Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Do professors get their summers off? You'll learn about how the three of us spent our summer. Research continues, administrative tasks pile up, and the summer is simply too short! Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) An interesting read: https://www.higheredjobs.com/Articles/articleDisplay.cfm?ID=1711 Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Academic and entrepreneurship are strongly linked in many ways as they work together in contributing to technology and economic developments in our society. Today, we'll learn from an academic entrepreneur, Dr. Adam Ryason, The CEO and founder of “Intelligent Medicine Inc.” and learn how he started his exciting adventures. Intelligent Medicine Inc. is a software and simulation startup company based in upstate NY. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Dr. Adam Ryason is the CEO and founder of Intelligent Medicine Inc. https://www.intmed.us/#about Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Graduate school can be exciting and yet stressful for a graduate student. In this episode, we talk with a couple of Ph.D. students who are a married couple, Keawepono (Pono) and Priscilla Delgado Wong. Both Pono and Priscilla are currently biomedical engineering students at Georgia Tech. They share their journeys as graduate students. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Pono and Priscilla Delgado Wong are currently Ph.D. students in the biomedical engineering department at Georgia Tech. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).Notes here Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Have you ever wondered about doing undergraduate research? In this show, we learn about the benefit of doing undergraduate research from Prof. Cynthia Furse, a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Utah. She has mentored more than 175 students throughout her career and in this show, she shares her thoughts about all aspects of undergraduate research. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) References for listeners: https://www.ece.utah.edu/undergraduate-research/ Contact list: You can find more information about Prof. Cynthia Furse on https://utah.instructure.com/courses/558911 https://faculty.utah.edu/u0029376-CYNTHIA_M_FURSE/hm/index.hml If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Cynthia Furse (guest) is a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Utah. Dr. Furse is a Fellow of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Episode 1 features Dr. Satyandra K. Gupta, Smith International Professor in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department and Director of the Center for Advanced Manufacturing in the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California; and Craig Schlenoff, Group Leader of the Cognition and Collaboration Systems Group and Program Manager of the Robotic Systems for Smart Manufacturing Program in the Intelligent Systems Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). SK and Craig discuss the evolution of robotics technologies, the impact on the manufacturing industry, how to develop a roadmap for implementation, and their predictions for the future of robotics.
Have you heard of quantum education? In this show, we learn about it from Dr. Tina Brower-Thomas, a research professor in the graduate school at Howard University. She also holds a visiting faculty appointment at Harvard University. At the forefront of national quantum education, she shares with us how she got into this field and some initiatives she is currently leading. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) References for listeners: http://ciqm.harvard.edu/staff.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G1T7UGNo58 https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+black+female+scientists+in+the+united+states&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS791US791&oq=number+of+black+female+scientists+in+the+united+states&aqs=chrome..69i57.47910j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21321 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21321/data-tables https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19304/digest/field-of-degree-minorities#blacks-or-african-americans https://www.quantum.gov/ Contact list: You can find more information about Dr. Tina Brower-Thomas on https://profiles.howard.edu/profile/39526/tina-louise-brower-thomas If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Dr. Tina Brower-Thomas (guest) is a research professor in the graduate school at Howard University. She's the Executive Director of CIQM (Center of Integrated Quantum Materials) at Howard and Education Director. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Mid-career development can be a daunting and challenging in an academic career. With much emphasis on junior faculty, and also senior faculty who take leadership roles, mid-career development is often overlooked. A mid-career burnout resulting in a career slump can occur to many of us. As hard as we try to avoid admitting or even talking about struggles and challenges we face as mid-career, the reality is - it is real and if you experience it - you are not alone. In this show, we interview Prof. Michelle Portman, Associate Professor of Technion Israel Institute of Technology, leading the MarCoast Ecosystems Integration Laboratory. She shares her academic journey particularly during her mid-career and provides some advice on how to face and overcome mid-career burnout. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) References for reviewers: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6240/1282/tab-pdf https://hbr.org/2019/03/facing-your-mid-career-crisis Contact list: You can find more information about Prof. Michelle Portman on https://portman.net.technion.ac.il If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Michelle Portman (guest) is an Associate Professor at Technion Israel Institute of Technology. https://portman.net.technion.ac.il Her column “You'll be OK” appeared in Science Working Life can be found here https://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6240/1282/tab-pdf Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
Episode Notes We all have heard the phrase “Publish or Perish”, but what does it really mean in our today's academic life? In this show, we interview Prof. Stephane Bordas, Professor of Computational Mechanics at University of Luxemburg, to talk about Quality vs Quantity related to scientific publishing. He has published more than 200 journal articles and has served as the editor of a few journals. He will share some insights on which Q comes first when it comes to publishing scientific documents. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) References for listeners: https://www.scribendi.com/academy/articles/publish_or_perish.en.html https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166149 http://homes.sice.indiana.edu/filiradi/Mypapers/1-s2.0-S1751157715200120-main.pdf Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Stephane Bordas (guest) is a Professor of Computational Mechanics at University of Luxemburg. https://wwwfr.uni.lu/recherche/fstm/doe/members/stephane_bordas. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we talk to Prof. Linda Schadler, the Dean of College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Vermont, on the myths and realities of academic administration. She shares with us her path of becoming an administrator and then a dean of an engineering college. She spells out some myths about academic administration and the realities and surprises she faces at this position. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Linda Schadler (guest) is a Dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Vermont. https://www.uvm.edu/cems/profiles/linda-s-schadler Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we interview two school kids, Kingston (a 7th grader) and Phenix (a 4th grader), from Durham, NC. They ask us some great questions about how college works and what a professors' life looks like, and the process to pursue a STEM career. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life
In this episode, we discuss Jennifer Granholm's visit to Howard University and the panel she had with Kim on it. Discussing topics ranging from promises to increase funding to Kim being quoted in a Washington Post article. Reference list: https://www.vuu.edu/Content/Uploads/vuu.edu/images/Pledge%20of%20Allegiance%20FINAL.pdf The Panel(Kim's Section is around 17 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33iP7BzZoC4&t=1040 https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/03/howard-university-stem-research/ Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
In this episode, we discuss the taboo topic of a professor’s salary and the importance of academic salary transparency. We also discuss how administrators can work with junior faculty and help them ease the salary negotiation process. Reference list: https://www.ccdaily.com/2021/04/a-look-at-faculty-presidents-salaries/ https://www.lifeofaprofessor.com/post/are-professors-rich The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2018-19 Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
In this episode, we discuss some major differences between European and American educational systems with Dr. Christos Athanasiou, a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Engineering at Brown university. As someone who has personally experienced studying in both European and American institutes, he will share some insights into these two different educational systems. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) https://educationdata.org/international-student-enrollment-statistics https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11347 https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/18/open-doors-data-show-continued-increase-numbers-americans-studying-abroad Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Dr. Christos Athanasiou (guest) is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Engineering at Brown University. He is the founder of M&M science mentorship program. Please check out his website if you are interested in having a mentor or you know someone who is looking for a dedicated mentor: https://www.ceathanasiou.com Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
Andrea Macdonald, founder of ideaXme interviews Jekan Thanga, PhD., Head of SpaceTREx laboratory, Principal Investigator of the NASA-funded ASTEROIDS laboratory and Assistant Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arizona. They discuss the latest developments at the laboratories. Moreover, ideaXme receives a news exclusive relating to SpaceTREx's proposal to build a "Noah's Ark" on the Moon. Jump to timestamp - 37 minutes to discover that news! The Lunar Ark: SpaceTREx in collaboration with the ASTEROIDS laboratory has proposed utilization of lunar lava tubes as a modern day "Lunar Ark." These subsurface lava tubes are only 4-5 days journey from Earth and are hypothesized to have been pristine for 3-4 billion years. These shelters could be the ideal location for preserving seeds, spores sperms, eggs, and DNA of Earth's rich biodiversity. They estimate needing to preserve 6.7 million species of plants, animals and fungi. SpaceTREx: The Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration (SpaceTREx) Laboratory at University of Arizona's Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department develop systems engineering design and control solutions for space, planetary and asteroid exploration, using small spacecraft, robots and sensor network devices. Research is focused on developing enabling technologies for extreme environment exploration, interplanetary CubeSat explorers and on-orbit servicing spanning spacecraft constellations, propulsion, power and communications. The laboratory and key personnel have a diverse range of expertise including CubeSat design, development, launch expertise, smart system design and control using bio-inspired and neural network control paradigms, space weather and extreme-environment robotics. News relating to the Lunar Ark: Jekan Thanga, Head of SpaceTREx: [37:10] In the next week or so at the Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference, we're going to be giving an update to the world about progress that we've been making on the Lunar Ark project. And I can give you an early indication of what that update will entail. We've branched out into two fronts, further exploring and advancing the Lunar Ark concept. One is, we've been looking at how we could start the Lunar Ark project in the near term. In the original idea we talk of preserving six point seven million species. It's going to take a lot of resources. It's going to require advancement in cryogenic. We think it's at least 30 years away. But can we get started now? Can we at least start to see important bio matter there as we speak? And so that's the second thrust that we're looking at. What would it take specifically to go out and explore these lava tubes in one mission and in that second mission? What would it take to take seed samples just like from Svalbard and deploy them into these laboratories? And so we've been doing some early feasibility studies on those fronts. And on a second thrust, we've been trying to we've been identifying the component technologies that are needed for this whole effort of, you know, the Lunar Arc. And one of that means transport of all this bio matter from Earth on at least a five day journey to the Moon under cryo conditions. And so you need some kind of cryo container that can do that for you. And so we've developed a prototype cryo container experiment. And so we'll be sharing details about that in this upcoming conference. And that, too, is another effort to further build up the building blocks necessary for the bigger project. Official Bio: Jekan Thanga heads the Space and Terrestrial Robotic Exploration (SpaceTREx) Laboratory at University of Arizona. He is the Principal Investigator of the NASA-funded ASTEROIDS (Asteroid Science, Technology and Exploration Research Organized by Inclusive eDucation) Laboratory which is in the process of being upgraded into a research center. Jekan Thanga has 20 years of experience working in the aerospace research sector and is a senior member of the AIAA. He has been an expert reviewer for government agencies including NASA and NSF and has been a Subject Matter Expert on space matters for DoD organizations. Jekan Thanga links: https://ame.engineering.arizona.edu/f... https://www.linkedin.com/in/jthanga http://spacetrex.arizona.edu http://spacetrex.arizona.edu/lunarark... ideaXme links: https://radioideaxme.com https://www.instagram.com/ideaxme/?hl... https://twitter.com/ideaxm?ref_src=tw... https://www.facebook.com/ideaXme/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/1867... https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... ideaXme is a global network - podcast on 12 platforms, 40 countries, mentor programme and creator series. Mission: To share knowledge of the future. Our passion: Rich Connectedness™!
In this episode, we discuss the importance of getting awards in academia and ways to get them with Dr. Debbie Kaminski, a professor emeritus in Mechanical Engineering. She will share with us the different types of awards faculty members can go after and why it is critical for the community as a whole to work together to promote each other’s work through nomination. References: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) https://advance.washington.edu/resources/docs/Mabrouk-EverythingYouWantedToKnow.pdf https://jcsw.hms.harvard.edu/files/joint-committee-status- women/files/presentation_for_jcsw_01112018.pdf https://ask.metafilter.com/341303/Ethics-re-asking-to-be-nominated-for-an-award Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Debbie Kaminski (guest) is a Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). She is also a sci-fi fiction writer. Please also check out her most recent books: https://www.amazon.com/Island-Too-Lovely-Deborah-Kaminski-ebook/dp/B0867Q5NTX/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=an+island+too+lovely&qid=1617154057&s=digital-text&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Damians-Workshop-Deborah-Kaminski-ebook/dp/B00SSJXBEW/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=damian%27s+workshop&qid=1617154196&s=digital-text&sr=1-1 Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
In this episode, we interview Angella, a high schooler, who wants to know more about what a professor does, how to find the passion in choosing his/her academic path, and what it takes to become one. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Angella Chen, Niskayuna High School, NY Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
Engineering practices are fundamental to overcoming obstacles facing society in the 21st Century. Existential threats like climate change, artificial intelligence, looming food and water insecurity Today I am speaking with Dr. Joyce Cooper who is a professor and researcher at the University of Washington’s Mechanical Engineering Department. Her work largely focuses on combining environmental assessment with product design and engineering. My co-host today is John Hamann, who is one of the Master’s students at UW working with Dr. Cooper. Listen to our podcast 21st Talks for weekly discussions with experts on the threats and changing forces facing our world in the 21st century and how we as individuals can better standup to live flourishing lives in the 21st century! Sign up for our NewsLetter at 21st-talks.com
Although more women than men participate in higher education in the U.S., the same is not true when it comes to women pursuing careers in science and engineering. Despite the increased emphasis on gender equality, statistical evidence shows that the STEM gap keeps increasing. In this episode, Prof. Robin Selinger, a Professor of Physics from Kent State University and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, offers a wealth of her insights and experiences that are beneficial to all STEM women and men in academia. The discussions include the challenges she has faced, mentors who were critical to her career and success, how we can make an even playing field for women in STEM academics, how leaders in the professional communities and universities can advocate for women colleagues who tend to not self-promote, and how to successfully recruit people color into STEM academics, and how affirmative action can be used as a double sword against women in STEM and how our male colleagues should be part of this conversation as STEM women moving forward in academia. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Contact list: You can find more information about Prof. Robin Selinger on https://www.kent.edu/physics/profile/robin-selinger. If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Robin Selinger (guest) is a Professor of Physics at Kent State University in Ohio. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
The h-index, or Hirsch index, measures the research impact and productivity of a particular scientist. Since its inception in 2005, it has become a standard way to somewhat objectively quantify an individual’s research impact. In this episode, you will learn what it is, what is expected of this H-index from researchers at different stages of their research careers, and ethical practices in increasing your H-index. We also raise concerns in the un-intended use of H-index for the academic world we are in today. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) References: https://www.journal-publishing.com/blog/good-h-index-required-academic-position/ https://phys.org/news/2020-07-albert-einstein-mediocre-h-index-bogus.html http://www.webometrics.info/en/hlargerthan100 https://www.aacc.org/cln/articles/2019/september/scientific-impact-and-the-h-index https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/102/46/16569.full.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index#Comparing_results_across_fields_and_career_levels https://www.slideshare.net/AnneWilHarzing/citation-metrics-across-disciplines-google-scholar-scopus-and-the-web-of-science Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
The early years of a faculty position can be an exciting and challenging experience. In this episode, we will provide 5 unspoken tips for early-career faculty. These tips are gathered from our own experiences, which can benefit those who are going through the early years of their academic life. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) References: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00216-017-0817-5 https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/976 https://whatisthemeaningofmylife.com/tag/academic-life/ https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7715&context=dissertations Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
Research is a major component of our academic enterprise. However, pandemic has significantly impacted the way we conduct research and lowered our overall research productivity, particularly in science and engineering disciplines. In this show, we interview Prof. Harold Park, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University, to talk about pandemic impact on research productivity. He served as an Interim Dean during the onset of campus shutdown due to the pandemic in 2020. We discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly that COVID has brought to the academics and the impact it has had on research productivity. Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) References cited: Myers, K.R., Tham, W.Y., Yin, Y. et al. Unequal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists. Nat Hum Behav 4, 880–883 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0921-y Johns Hopkins Junior faculty report https://covidinfo.jhu.edu/assets/uploads/sites/10/2020/08/junior_faculty_report.pdf Contact list: You can find more information about Prof. Harold Park on http://people.bu.edu/parkhs/. If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Harold Park (guest) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University. Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newel (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
“Start early, pick your friends wisely, [and] identify mentors.” Chris Perez is a fourth year graduate student in the NanoHeat Lab (PI Kenneth Goodson) in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University. Chris started his engineering journey many years ago, helping his dad fix things around the house, and when he realized he might want to pursue something like this as a career, he went to community college to take some classes to become an auto technician. While there, his professors saw all sorts of promise in him and encouraged him to go to UCLA for his bachelor's degree. Chris excelled at UCLA as well, and was encouraged by his undergraduate research PI to pursue graduate school. Chris eventually made his way to Stanford, where he now studies nanoscale heat transfer. In this episode, we talk about the importance of community, the value of good mentorship, and how it's super necessary to have some good self care practices in place as a PhD student. Get in touch with Chris: Email: cprez@stanford.edu Get in touch with Steph: Instagram Twitter Get in touch with the podcast: Email: rootstostempodcast@gmail.com Website: rootstostempodcast.com Listen and Subscribe: Spotify Apple Podcasts
We are 3 professors in engineering and sciences at different stages in our academic careers. This podcast is to discuss issues and challenges we all face as academics in STEM fields and to encourage and inspire one another as we explore This Academic Life. We hope this show will become a platform to facilitate a community where we can learn from each other and make an impact in STEM education and research. In this opening episode, we will introduce ourselves and about the show. Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
East Coast Radio — A staff member at the Durban University of Technology has tested positive for COVID-19 prompting the closure of a section in it's Mechanical Engineering Department.
(Information correct as of June 30, 2016 - Original release date)The fifth episode of Fantasyland - The podcast that covers everything you didn't know you wanted to know about fantasy sports.DFS: Pros and Lambos"Alright, if you really want to do this big time, you have to go through me first."— Charles Chon (Condia)Host: Peter Overzet - Contributor to RotoViz and Host of @TheFFComedyHrGuests:Dan Back (db730) - Director of Media and Host of RotoGrinders Daily Fantasy Fix Podcast and Sirius XM Fantasy RadioDrew Dinkmeyer (Dinkpiece) - Premium Writer for Daily Roto and Winner of the 2014 Week 15 DraftKings Millionaire MakerCharles Chon (Condia) - Chief Operating Officer of RotoWar and DFS tournament destroyerNick Dunham (1ucror) - Founder and Chief Executive Officer of RotoWar and DFS cash game superstarDustin Gouker - DFS and Sports Betting Writer for Legal Sports ReportPeko Hosoi - Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Founder of STE@M (Sports Technoogy and Education at MIT), and Author of the FanDuel AffidavitSponsors:FFDRAFTPREP - Home of the web's most intelligent, streamlined, and customizable fantasy football draft dashboard. Use the promo code FANTASYLAND to get 20 percent off your purchase.RotoViz.com - A sports analytics website with over 1,500 groundbreaking articles per year and 20 proprietary apps. Go to RotoViz.com/podcast for 30 percent off a yearlong NFL pass.About The Show:Executive Producer: Fantasy Douche - Editor-in-Chief of RotoVizProducer: Matthew Freedman - Editor-in-Chief of FantasyLabs and Producer of the RotoViz podcastsAssociate Producer: Patrick Kerrane - Writer for RotoVizIntern: Alan JackmanSubscribe: iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, and others — reviews are appreciatedTwitter: @FantasylandPodEmail: Fantasylandpod@gmail.com — contact us if you are interested in joining the Fantasyland podcast team———Thanks to the @RotoViz Radio Channel for syndicating this episode.
(Information correct as of April 21st 2016 - Original release date)The second episode of Fantasyland - The podcast that covers everything you didn't know you wanted to know about fantasy sports.Girls: Winning is what they do.Host: Peter Overzet Guest Producer: Kat GotsickGuests:Pam Miles - Professional Daily Fantasy Sports Player and Winner of the 2015 FanDuel Playboy NBA ChampionshipKimra Schleicher - High-Stakes Fantasy Football Player and 2011 Inductee into the Toyota Hall of Fame: Legends of Fantasy FootballPeko Hosoi - Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Founder of STE@M (Sports Technoogy and Education at MIT), and Author of the FanDuel AffidavitRenee Miller - Neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, DFS Writer for ESPN, PFF Fantasy, and RotoWorld, and Author of the book Cognitive Bias in Fantasy SportsHer Fantasy Football - Three Sisters, one website, one podcast, one SiriusXM Fantasy Sports Radio show, and lots of appearances together on various networks•Brandon Marianne Lee - CEO of Her FFB•Ashley Williams - President of Her FFB•Courtney Kirby - Vice President of Her FFBSponsors:RotoViz Patreon – Support the RotoViz Radio team on Patreon.Harrys – Join the 10 million who have tried Harry’s. Claim your special offer by going to HARRYS.COM/BLUEWIRE.ShipStation.com – Listeners can try ShipStation FREE for 60 days when you use offer code BLUE at ShipStation.comRotoViz.com - A sports analytics website with over 1,500 groundbreaking articles per year and 20 proprietary apps. Go to RotoViz.com/podcast for 10 percent off a yearlong NFL pass.About The Show:Executive Producer: Fantasy Douche - Editor-in-Chief of RotoVizProducer: Matthew Freedman - Writer for FantasyLabs and Producer of the RotoViz podcastsAssociate Producer: Patrick Kerrane - Writer for RotoVizSubscribe: iTunes, Stitcher, and Soundcloud — reviews are appreciatedTwitter: @FantasylandPodEmail: Fantasyland@gmail.com———Thanks to the @Rotoviz Radio Channel for syndicating our pilot mini-series.
Richard Emberley is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Cal Poly, specializing in Fire Protection Engineering. With years of experience working in Structural Engineering and around Fire Safety, Emberley combined both fields to teach graduate courses in Fire Protection Mechanical Engineering. He provides numerous stories about various projects he has worked on, information about the field, and some advice for current students at Cal Poly. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/polycast/support
Potholes.... they wreak havoc on Michigan roads but what about the science behind these holes. Jennifer Bastiaan is a pothole expert and joined the show to discuss the damage they inflict not only on your tires but to the alignment as well.
Potholes.... they wreak havoc on Michigan roads but what about the science behind these holes. Jennifer Bastiaan is a pothole expert and joined the show to discuss the damage they inflict not only on your tires but to the alignment as well.
For this episode, we are interviewing a very special guest, Professor Roshni Rainbow. Dr Rainbow is an assistant professor here at Queen’s in the Mechanical Engineering Department. She discussed her path to academia and her experiences as a woman in engineering.
This week Shelly Miller, PhD joins us to discuss some recent research and thoughts on weatherization, ventilation & respiration. We hear a lot that we need to tighten homes and ventilate them. What does that do with respect to occupant health? Today we will go over some results from work Dr. Miller has done. Dr. Miller is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Mechanical Engineering Department and faculty in the interdisciplinary undergraduate Environmental Engineering Program. At the University of Colorado Boulder Dr. Miller investigates indoor air quality, assesses exposures to air pollutants, and develops and evaluates air pollution control measures. Her research has included studying weatherization of homes and indoor air quality, understanding the role of ventilation systems in the transmission of infectious agents in buildings, engineering controls for reducing exposures to infectious diseases, studying ultraviolet germicidal coil cleaning technology, source apportionment of particulate matter and associated health effects, characterization of indoor air quality and the microbial communities in homes, and investigating urban air quality issues including industrial odor episodes. Dr. Miller has received funding for her research program from the US EPA, CDC, NIOSH, NSF, NIH, ASHRAE, HUD, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and various private foundations and industry sponsors.
This week Shelly Miller, PhD joins us to discuss some recent research and thoughts on weatherization, ventilation & respiration. We hear a lot that we need to tighten homes and ventilate them. What does that do with respect to occupant health? Today we will go over some results from work Dr. Miller has done. Dr. Miller is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Mechanical Engineering Department and faculty in the interdisciplinary undergraduate Environmental Engineering Program. At the University of Colorado Boulder Dr. Miller investigates indoor air quality, assesses exposures to air pollutants, and develops and evaluates air pollution control measures. Her research has included studying weatherization of homes and indoor air quality, understanding the role of ventilation systems in the transmission of infectious agents in buildings, engineering controls for reducing exposures to infectious diseases, studying ultraviolet germicidal coil cleaning technology, source apportionment of particulate matter and associated health effects, characterization of indoor air quality and the microbial communities in homes, and investigating urban air quality issues including industrial odor episodes. Dr. Miller has received funding for her research program from the US EPA, CDC, NIOSH, NSF, NIH, ASHRAE, HUD, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and various private foundations and industry sponsors.
Helen Czerski is a lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at University College London. As a physicist she studies the bubbles underneath breaking waves in the open ocean to understand their effects on weather and climate. Helen regularly presents BBC programmes on physics, the ocean and the atmosphere – recent series include Colour: The Spectrum of Science, Orbit, Operation Iceberg, Super Senses, Dara O’Briain’s Science Club, as well as programmes on bubbles, the sun and our weather. She is also a columnist for Focus magazine, shortlisted for PPA columnist of the year in 2014, and has written numerous articles for national newspapers. Helen's first book is Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week on IAQ Radio we continue our focus on the theme "research to practice" with Shelly Miller, PhD. Dr. Miller is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Mechanical Engineering Department and faculty in the interdisciplinary undergraduate Environmental Engineering Program. She is also the Conference Chair for the Healthy Buildings 2015 America Conference that will be held in Boulder, Colorado July 19-22, 2015. Healthy Buildings is a unique forum for built environment researchers and professionals to engage with innovative projects, products and services and to meet and collaborate with colleagues working on the pressing global challenge of making buildings healthy, energy efficient, and sustainable. At the University of Colorado Boulder Dr. Miller investigates indoor air quality, assesses exposures to air pollutants, and develops and evaluates air pollution control measures. Her current research projects include weatherization of homes and indoor air quality, understanding the role of ventilation systems in the transmission of infectious agents in buildings and intermodal transportation, engineering controls for reducing exposures to infectious diseases, studying ultraviolet germicidal coil cleaning technology, source apportionment of particulate matter and associated health effects, characterization of indoor air quality and the microbial communities in homes, and investigating urban air quality issues including industrial odor episodes. Dr. Miller has received funding for her research program from the US EPA, CDC, NIOSH, NSF, NIH, ASHRAE, HUD, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and various private foundations and industry sponsors. LEARN MORE about the mircobiome of water damaged buildings, Healthy Buildings 2015 and much more this week on IAQ Radio!
This week on IAQ Radio we continue our focus on the theme "research to practice" with Shelly Miller, PhD. Dr. Miller is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Mechanical Engineering Department and faculty in the interdisciplinary undergraduate Environmental Engineering Program. She is also the Conference Chair for the Healthy Buildings 2015 America Conference that will be held in Boulder, Colorado July 19-22, 2015. Healthy Buildings is a unique forum for built environment researchers and professionals to engage with innovative projects, products and services and to meet and collaborate with colleagues working on the pressing global challenge of making buildings healthy, energy efficient, and sustainable. At the University of Colorado Boulder Dr. Miller investigates indoor air quality, assesses exposures to air pollutants, and develops and evaluates air pollution control measures. Her current research projects include weatherization of homes and indoor air quality, understanding the role of ventilation systems in the transmission of infectious agents in buildings and intermodal transportation, engineering controls for reducing exposures to infectious diseases, studying ultraviolet germicidal coil cleaning technology, source apportionment of particulate matter and associated health effects, characterization of indoor air quality and the microbial communities in homes, and investigating urban air quality issues including industrial odor episodes. Dr. Miller has received funding for her research program from the US EPA, CDC, NIOSH, NSF, NIH, ASHRAE, HUD, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and various private foundations and industry sponsors. LEARN MORE about the mircobiome of water damaged buildings, Healthy Buildings 2015 and much more this week on IAQ Radio!
Dr. Josephine Yuen is the Ex Dir of E3S Center a collaboration of UCB, MIT, Stanford and UTEP. She is a Physical Chemist, Ph.D. from Cornell. She explains the e3s Center goals, Community College program, and focus on getting the research right.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible]. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30] the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest is Dr Josephine u n. She is the executive director of the [inaudible] center, a collaboration of UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, [00:01:00] and the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr [inaudible] is a physical chemist by training with a phd from Cornell University and she was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Argonne National Laboratory. She became a member of technical staff in bell laboratories and eventually held director level positions in product development, product management, manufacturing and supply line management. More recently, she was the CEO of try form x INC which develops and manufactures precision polymer [00:01:30] optics for the communications consumer products and medical industries. After spending 30 years in industry, she was a program director at the National Science Foundation. Today she talks with me about the [inaudible] center here at Berkeley, Josephine Ewen. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 1: Thank you.Speaker 3: What is the origin story of e three s? How did it all get started? Speaker 1: Well, let's first understand what e three s stands for. It's [00:02:00] an acronym and this acronym for a center does headquarted in UC Berkeley and it's the center for energy efficient electronics science. Our story really began at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation has several programs that fund centers intended to bring researchers from many institutions together to solve difficult problems [00:02:30] and one of those programs is the science and Technology Center program. Way Back and I believe most probably was 2008 there was a solicitation asking technical community and that is universities. Did you submit proposals for a new science and technology center? This type of solicitation comes out once every three years or so and so in two and nine professor [00:03:00] [inaudible] off the east department submitted a proposal that brings together researchers from various institutions, namely UC Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford to propose a new center, a new center that will do research necessary to come up with an alternative to the current day trend system. Speaker 1: No, you may want to ask, why do we need that? After all, transistors are everywhere and [00:03:30] it's in every aspects of our life. The reason we need an alternative is that we need an nutrient system or any kind of electronic components that would draw significantly less energy. Pol consumption in electronic devices have been dropping by virtue of the fact that through miniature isolation, the electronic industry has made great gains, not only in power consumption but in the cost of the device, [00:04:00] but unfortunately, miniaturization has hit a brick wall. It no longer is delivering the benefits it has delivered 10 plus years ago and you can see it by the very fact that the operating voltage of those devices in the past 10 plus years ago when the line was shrinks, you can see a big drop in the operating voltage, but in the last 10 years it's more or less flattened out and [00:04:30] even though the line was has shrunk further, we see that the operating voltage is around a vote, maybe slightly less than a vote now in the state of the art devices, but really we want to get to a device that can operate in the millivolt range and that is what the centers set out to do and we're doing the research necessary to get there. [inaudible] Speaker 3: I wanted to have [00:05:00] you talk about the themes of research at e three s and what made choosing themes and appealing method for your organization? Speaker 1: The center is researching different scientific concepts to achieve different device approaches. No one knows what is the best approach at this point. The current c Moss transistor is ubiquitous. There's no reason to believe is replacing will be [00:05:30] equally ubiquitous. The replacement may be a different solution for different application. That's why our research portfolio includes four themes. Not all four themes address the transistor. If you think of a integrated circuit, it's really a network of switches and the wires that connect us, which is three of the themes, address a different [00:06:00] type of switch while one theme address, how do you have more efficient wires or lower power consumption wires? Today's wars are copper wires, metal to wires, but we are doing research to have the communication between switches being done optically Speaker 3: and just for the record, what are the four themes? Speaker 1: The first theme is Nano Electronics. [00:06:30] The second theme is Nano mechanics. The third theme is nanophotonics and the fourth theme is Nano magnetics and you can see the first, second and fourth addresses. How do you get a different type of switch? While the third theme addresses the interconnection, namely the use of light for the interconnection amongst the switches [00:07:00] that we also call optical interconnect. Speaker 3: How interdisciplinary is the center? Do you have a sense of that in terms of the investigators and the researchers? Speaker 1: The center is highly into disciplinary disciplines involved. Our electrical engineering, chemistry material science and Physics Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:07:30] you are listening to spectrum of public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley public. Our guest is Josephine n. She is the executive director of the three s center. In the next segment she details the e three s community college outreach group. [inaudible]. An [00:08:00] interesting part of the e three s center is the program you've developed with community colleges. Do you want to explain how that program began and what its goals are? Speaker 1: A science and technology center is expected to educate besides do research and the education is not only have graduate students, so in I'll propose which NSF we decided to focus [00:08:30] on community college students. The reason we decided to do that is because in California we have the largest community college system in the country and many women and underrepresented minority start their post high school education. In community colleges. Our needs to increase its output of workers in this fuse [00:09:00] state utilizes science and technology disciplines and in order to do that we have to be able to encourage and groom participants from populations that are typically underrepresented in the technical world and this really based on that consideration that we say less focus on encouraging students, helping students from community colleges [00:09:30] develop a career in science and engineering. Speaker 3: What can you tell me about how the program is working and how people participate in it? From the community college side, Speaker 1: we have a program on campus called the transfer to excellence and this program while started by the East Rehab Center has now expanded to include other centers. This has been made possible because in addition to [00:10:00] the east area centers grind, the National Science Foundation also gave us an additional three years grant to expand the community college program and that has allowed the program to place students not only in the [inaudible] center but also to other centers on campus. Namely coins, the deals with Nana mechanics and also [inaudible] that deals with [00:10:30] synthetic bio fuse. The students from community college come on campus in the summer for nine weeks to do research, the first weakest bootcamp with the learn some of the basics to prepare them to go into the labs and then for the other eight weeks they work in the lab on individual projects and at the end, in the last week of the internship, they have to [00:11:00] present their work both in terms of giving talks and also in the form of posters in a poster session and that typically takes place at the beginning of August. And how large is that program? Last summer we hosted approximately 15 students. Speaker 3: Does that sort of what your target is for each summer? Speaker 1: Yes. Between 12 to 15 is off target [inaudible]. Speaker 3: And how do people [00:11:30] in community colleges get involved in it? How do they get selected or how do they apply? Speaker 1: In the fall we go through what we consider our recruitment face. We Post the information about the program on the website of our center. The staff of the center also goes out on campus to recruit. We host workshops to share information about a program and also to provide pointers to potential [00:12:00] applicants, how best to prepare the application. We also have webinars with, again, the purpose of encouraging and guiding potential applicants and how to apply and we also work with various community college or Nay stations to promote the program. For example, we ran a workshop in a Mesa conference. Is it statewide? [00:12:30] Yes. We're very proud to say that we have brought students from Mount Shasta down to south of San Diego from the bay area to the central valley Speaker 3: and I suppose the hope is that the students will then go to four year colleges get degrees. Are you tracking at all their progress in that effort? Speaker 1: Yes. Clearly the number one goal of this program [00:13:00] is to use research to deepen the interests of these students in science and engineering and you can ensure that they will get a good career in science engineering. Minimally a four year degree is necessary, so helping the students to transfer to a four year institution is number one goal. In addition, we want to excite them enough that they would even set this sites to go to graduate [00:13:30] school. The program provides one on one advising on the transfer process, particularly to UC Berkeley but also to four year institution in general and this advising is done by tap advices, which is the transfer alliance projects. There's part of UC Berkeley's campus, 87% of our 2012 class has transferred [00:14:00] to to what you see last fall. Most of them came to UC Berkeley, but others went to other ucs as well and I believe one of them actually transferred to Columbia Speaker 3: and for students that are in community colleges it might be listening. The best way to find out about it is to go on your website. Speaker 1: Yes. That's the best way to find out about the program and is also through our website which is www.ethrees-center.org [00:14:30] this website not only provides information but it just through this website you do your online application, Speaker 3: the community college students that are coming, what are their science requirements? Speaker 1: The program takes students the summer before they apply to transfer to a four year institution. By then we expect the students [00:15:00] to have completed two calculus courses and three signs or engineering courses including one laboratory course. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 5: From is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. We are talking with Josephine. You went [00:15:30] in the next segment she talks about the hope of research migrating from the lab to Congress. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: the center's focus now is on research. Is there at some point if you're successful with your research, a capability to implement and build something that would be a prototype of sorts. Speaker 1: [00:16:00] We are very much in the science face of our center. As a matter of fact, we are very much encouraged by our funder to really focus on understanding the science as opposed to just using empirical methods to achieve device demonstration. Part of the center's strategic plan costs for at the end of our sentence life, which we expect to be 10 years. We will be [00:16:30] able to have one technology, namely our science will be mature enough that we have a technology that can be commercialized. On the other hand, we are expected along the way to be able to really understand how realistic our approaches so we will be expected to have certain types of prototype demonstration in the second five years [00:17:00] of our center. Also each theme we expect that I'll research may have some near term applications and actually as a example in theme three which is the Nanophotonics we expect that I'll work in photo detectors can have near term applications. Speaker 3: So in a sense kind of spinning off some of the early successes within the center or do you have to move it out of the center to other [00:17:30] players? Speaker 1: They have different ways of transferring the knowledge that we gained through our research. The center has industry partners. This industry partners are leaders in the electronics industry. They have recognized the neat off the center and we should clearly we see them s one of the avenues to transfer technology that Nia term along the term [00:18:00] technologies that may come after center, but as you know, they also many other venues including potentially some of our students taking technologies and creating companies [inaudible] Speaker 3: so the industry partners also are able to feed back to you, give you some reflection on your research. Speaker 1: The feedback will enable the center to conduct this research to be practical and useful Speaker 3: [00:18:30] with the publications. Are there any restrictions on who you can publish with? Are you seeking out open source journals? Speaker 1: The Sentis research results are publish through peer review journals. Many of these journals, one could argue is not open source because you need a subscription to get to them. However, the journals allow the authors to post the papers on [00:19:00] their own website. I'll send to identifies on our website, our list of publications and through the authors own website, the public can gain access to those papers. Speaker 3: Are there other centers or other research groups that are doing very similar work that you pay close attention to? Speaker 1: Yes, there is a center in Notre Dame that [00:19:30] is partially funded by DARPA and another government agency. That center involves not only Notre Dame, Bifido is headquartered there, but it also has members from many of the academic institutions. The name of the center is leased. The center has similar goals as us. We are not the only people that recognized the problem the semiconductor industry is facing, [00:20:00] so there are many efforts and many researchers around the world working on different approaches to solving the problem. We are one of several centers. We believe we differentiate ourselves in part because we have really put a strong emphasis on establishing the science and understanding what has prevented an easy solution. Speaker 3: In your personal [00:20:30] story, you've spent some time on both sides of the granting process being with the NSF. What does it like seeing both sides of the process?Speaker 1: I was the SPI, our program officer at the National Science Foundation before coming to UC Berkeley at the Star Center. A programs officer's job is to figure out what area to fund. And in conjunction with review panels, recommend [00:21:00] which particular proposals you fund. And then after the award, the program office is job is to advise, guide, oversee the delivery of results and ensure that the grantee is in compliance with the program requirements. But when you are grantee, your job is to deliver on what you promise. So a lot of the focus is on results delivery [00:21:30] while a programs office job is to facilitate guide help, but not directly involved with the results delivery [inaudible] which do you prefer? My background prior to going to national science foundation was in private industry. So I have a very strong operating background. So to a certain extent, one can argue that given the number of years I've spent [00:22:00] operating or delivering results, that comes to me more naturally. Speaker 6: Josephine n, thank you very much for coming on spectrum. Speaker 1: Thank you for having me. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: for more details [00:22:30] on the [inaudible] center and their educational program, which covers pre college undergraduate, graduate and postdoc opportunities. Go to the e three s website, which is e three s-center.org spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university and we have created a simple link to help you get there. The link is tiny url.com/kalx [00:23:00] spectrum Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 5: We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two years. Two weeks. Speaker 6: Renee Rao and chase Jacabowski present the calendar this Monday, February 24th come check out the next edition of nerd night. East Bay featuring lectures such as explosions, [00:23:30] back drafts and sprinklers, how Hollywood gets fire science wrong by Joel Sipe. Then listen to Brian Dote from sweet Mary's coffee and he'll show us how a cherry becomes black gold in his lecture home coffee roasting on the with tools you probably already have and last Vincent tank way will teach us about hyper velocity launchers in his lecture. Hyper velocity launchers, how to launch a projectile at 10 meters per second. That's right. 10 meters per second. Once again, nerd night takes [00:24:00] place. February 24th at the new parkway cinema in Oakland. Doors Open at 7:00 PM on Monday, March 3rd Dr. Edward Stone of Caltech will be giving a talk about the voyager spacecraft missions into interstellar space launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The two voyager spacecrafts continue their journeys as they search for the Helio pause. Speaker 6: The heliopause is a boundary between the solar wind and the local interstellar medium. [00:24:30] Recently in August, 2012 voyager one seem to be finally entering into the heliopause. The spacecraft reported finding depleted low energy particles originating from inside the heliosphere as well as low energy cosmic rays from nearby regions of the Milky Way. These in subsequent observations of the heliopause are revealing new aspects of the complex interaction of our son with a local interstellar medium to hear a complete history and learn where the voyager is. Now. Join Dr. Stone on [00:25:00] March 3rd at 4:15 PM in [inaudible] room number one on my name, March 3rd at 7:30 PM hello fellow Dr Jacqueline. Ferritin will speak in the planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences. At the close of 2013 the Italian stars with planets orbiting them toppled more than 1000 the majority of these so-called exoplanets have not actually been seen, but rather inferred from their effect on their host stars through pain seeking technical methods and tremendous telescope [00:25:30] 10 handful of indirectly image and these giant planets have shown fascinating diversity in their sizes, temperatures, weather, and relationships to their parents. Speaker 6: Sends over the past several years, an entirely new and mysterious breed of planets has emerged. As genres have discovered a collection of orphans. Planets that are moving through the galaxy, seemingly unattached to a star in this talk fairly will highlight how we discovered these seemingly impossible objects and review how these strange, exotic planets may be key [00:26:00] players in our understanding of planet formation and evolution. Her talk will be held seven 30 on Monday night, March 3rd go to cal academy.org to reserve tickets. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Tracy Jakubowski and Renee Rao present our news, the deal. Cal reports a new project from UC Berkeley. Researchers may soon allow the power of ocean waves to join solar and wind power as a commercialized source of energy. [00:26:30] The project is led by Marcus Lehman, a visiting graduate student in the Mechanical Engineering Department and supervised by razor alum and assistant professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator of the research. Speaker 6: The project focuses on building a prototype of a sea floor carpet that can generate electricity by mimicking the properties of the muddy sea floor. Therefore, the group is designing a c floor carpet waive dampening system that will harness the energy of waves passing over it. Theoretically, the [00:27:00] energy generated by 10 meters of sea floor carpet will be roughly equivalent to the energy conducted by a stadium sized soccer field completely covered by solar panels. As more and more people move to live near coastlines, the researchers expect wave power to be a top contender as the next big renewable resource, especially because waves have very high energy density. The cost of building devices to harness wave power is high. LM said, the ocean is a difficult place to work and our devices have to be sturdy enough to combat [00:27:30] the oceans, corrosive and harsh environments, but there's an increasing need for clean and as socially acceptable forms of generating power. Speaker 6: We're working hard with scientists and engineers to make this happen and it's only a matter of time. A recent study published in the Open Access Journal microbiome examine the GI tract of premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit or NICU. The lead author of the study, Brandon Brooks, a graduate student in the plant and microbial biology department at UC Berkeley, collaborated [00:28:00] with researchers university of Pittsburgh to swab the most touched surfaces at the NICU, as well as collect samples from two premature babies. In a small pilot study, they discovered the microbial environment of the baby's GI tracks was strikingly similar to that of the NICU, which was particularly interesting given that the premature babies were treated with antibiotics and should have had a very limited diversity of micro organisms within their GI tract. Well, most of the micro organisms were opportunistic. A few contain genes that conferred resistance [00:28:30] to antibiotics and disinfectant that was used within the NICU. The study provided an important insight into how the pathogenic, as well as nonpathogenic organisms are able to move from even the most sterile of environments to our bodies. Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 7: the music heard during the show was written and produced by [00:29:00] Alex Simon Speaker 8: [inaudible].Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address, spectrum dev, QA, and lex@yahoo.com genus in two weeks time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Dr. Josephine Yuen is the Ex Dir of E3S Center a collaboration of UCB, MIT, Stanford and UTEP. She is a Physical Chemist, Ph.D. from Cornell. She explains the e3s Center goals, Community College program, and focus on getting the research right.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible]. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30] the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest is Dr Josephine u n. She is the executive director of the [inaudible] center, a collaboration of UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, [00:01:00] and the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr [inaudible] is a physical chemist by training with a phd from Cornell University and she was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Argonne National Laboratory. She became a member of technical staff in bell laboratories and eventually held director level positions in product development, product management, manufacturing and supply line management. More recently, she was the CEO of try form x INC which develops and manufactures precision polymer [00:01:30] optics for the communications consumer products and medical industries. After spending 30 years in industry, she was a program director at the National Science Foundation. Today she talks with me about the [inaudible] center here at Berkeley, Josephine Ewen. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 1: Thank you.Speaker 3: What is the origin story of e three s? How did it all get started? Speaker 1: Well, let's first understand what e three s stands for. It's [00:02:00] an acronym and this acronym for a center does headquarted in UC Berkeley and it's the center for energy efficient electronics science. Our story really began at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation has several programs that fund centers intended to bring researchers from many institutions together to solve difficult problems [00:02:30] and one of those programs is the science and Technology Center program. Way Back and I believe most probably was 2008 there was a solicitation asking technical community and that is universities. Did you submit proposals for a new science and technology center? This type of solicitation comes out once every three years or so and so in two and nine professor [00:03:00] [inaudible] off the east department submitted a proposal that brings together researchers from various institutions, namely UC Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford to propose a new center, a new center that will do research necessary to come up with an alternative to the current day trend system. Speaker 1: No, you may want to ask, why do we need that? After all, transistors are everywhere and [00:03:30] it's in every aspects of our life. The reason we need an alternative is that we need an nutrient system or any kind of electronic components that would draw significantly less energy. Pol consumption in electronic devices have been dropping by virtue of the fact that through miniature isolation, the electronic industry has made great gains, not only in power consumption but in the cost of the device, [00:04:00] but unfortunately, miniaturization has hit a brick wall. It no longer is delivering the benefits it has delivered 10 plus years ago and you can see it by the very fact that the operating voltage of those devices in the past 10 plus years ago when the line was shrinks, you can see a big drop in the operating voltage, but in the last 10 years it's more or less flattened out and [00:04:30] even though the line was has shrunk further, we see that the operating voltage is around a vote, maybe slightly less than a vote now in the state of the art devices, but really we want to get to a device that can operate in the millivolt range and that is what the centers set out to do and we're doing the research necessary to get there. [inaudible] Speaker 3: I wanted to have [00:05:00] you talk about the themes of research at e three s and what made choosing themes and appealing method for your organization? Speaker 1: The center is researching different scientific concepts to achieve different device approaches. No one knows what is the best approach at this point. The current c Moss transistor is ubiquitous. There's no reason to believe is replacing will be [00:05:30] equally ubiquitous. The replacement may be a different solution for different application. That's why our research portfolio includes four themes. Not all four themes address the transistor. If you think of a integrated circuit, it's really a network of switches and the wires that connect us, which is three of the themes, address a different [00:06:00] type of switch while one theme address, how do you have more efficient wires or lower power consumption wires? Today's wars are copper wires, metal to wires, but we are doing research to have the communication between switches being done optically Speaker 3: and just for the record, what are the four themes? Speaker 1: The first theme is Nano Electronics. [00:06:30] The second theme is Nano mechanics. The third theme is nanophotonics and the fourth theme is Nano magnetics and you can see the first, second and fourth addresses. How do you get a different type of switch? While the third theme addresses the interconnection, namely the use of light for the interconnection amongst the switches [00:07:00] that we also call optical interconnect. Speaker 3: How interdisciplinary is the center? Do you have a sense of that in terms of the investigators and the researchers? Speaker 1: The center is highly into disciplinary disciplines involved. Our electrical engineering, chemistry material science and Physics Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:07:30] you are listening to spectrum of public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley public. Our guest is Josephine n. She is the executive director of the three s center. In the next segment she details the e three s community college outreach group. [inaudible]. An [00:08:00] interesting part of the e three s center is the program you've developed with community colleges. Do you want to explain how that program began and what its goals are? Speaker 1: A science and technology center is expected to educate besides do research and the education is not only have graduate students, so in I'll propose which NSF we decided to focus [00:08:30] on community college students. The reason we decided to do that is because in California we have the largest community college system in the country and many women and underrepresented minority start their post high school education. In community colleges. Our needs to increase its output of workers in this fuse [00:09:00] state utilizes science and technology disciplines and in order to do that we have to be able to encourage and groom participants from populations that are typically underrepresented in the technical world and this really based on that consideration that we say less focus on encouraging students, helping students from community colleges [00:09:30] develop a career in science and engineering. Speaker 3: What can you tell me about how the program is working and how people participate in it? From the community college side, Speaker 1: we have a program on campus called the transfer to excellence and this program while started by the East Rehab Center has now expanded to include other centers. This has been made possible because in addition to [00:10:00] the east area centers grind, the National Science Foundation also gave us an additional three years grant to expand the community college program and that has allowed the program to place students not only in the [inaudible] center but also to other centers on campus. Namely coins, the deals with Nana mechanics and also [inaudible] that deals with [00:10:30] synthetic bio fuse. The students from community college come on campus in the summer for nine weeks to do research, the first weakest bootcamp with the learn some of the basics to prepare them to go into the labs and then for the other eight weeks they work in the lab on individual projects and at the end, in the last week of the internship, they have to [00:11:00] present their work both in terms of giving talks and also in the form of posters in a poster session and that typically takes place at the beginning of August. And how large is that program? Last summer we hosted approximately 15 students. Speaker 3: Does that sort of what your target is for each summer? Speaker 1: Yes. Between 12 to 15 is off target [inaudible]. Speaker 3: And how do people [00:11:30] in community colleges get involved in it? How do they get selected or how do they apply? Speaker 1: In the fall we go through what we consider our recruitment face. We Post the information about the program on the website of our center. The staff of the center also goes out on campus to recruit. We host workshops to share information about a program and also to provide pointers to potential [00:12:00] applicants, how best to prepare the application. We also have webinars with, again, the purpose of encouraging and guiding potential applicants and how to apply and we also work with various community college or Nay stations to promote the program. For example, we ran a workshop in a Mesa conference. Is it statewide? [00:12:30] Yes. We're very proud to say that we have brought students from Mount Shasta down to south of San Diego from the bay area to the central valley Speaker 3: and I suppose the hope is that the students will then go to four year colleges get degrees. Are you tracking at all their progress in that effort? Speaker 1: Yes. Clearly the number one goal of this program [00:13:00] is to use research to deepen the interests of these students in science and engineering and you can ensure that they will get a good career in science engineering. Minimally a four year degree is necessary, so helping the students to transfer to a four year institution is number one goal. In addition, we want to excite them enough that they would even set this sites to go to graduate [00:13:30] school. The program provides one on one advising on the transfer process, particularly to UC Berkeley but also to four year institution in general and this advising is done by tap advices, which is the transfer alliance projects. There's part of UC Berkeley's campus, 87% of our 2012 class has transferred [00:14:00] to to what you see last fall. Most of them came to UC Berkeley, but others went to other ucs as well and I believe one of them actually transferred to Columbia Speaker 3: and for students that are in community colleges it might be listening. The best way to find out about it is to go on your website. Speaker 1: Yes. That's the best way to find out about the program and is also through our website which is www.ethrees-center.org [00:14:30] this website not only provides information but it just through this website you do your online application, Speaker 3: the community college students that are coming, what are their science requirements? Speaker 1: The program takes students the summer before they apply to transfer to a four year institution. By then we expect the students [00:15:00] to have completed two calculus courses and three signs or engineering courses including one laboratory course. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 5: From is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. We are talking with Josephine. You went [00:15:30] in the next segment she talks about the hope of research migrating from the lab to Congress. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: the center's focus now is on research. Is there at some point if you're successful with your research, a capability to implement and build something that would be a prototype of sorts. Speaker 1: [00:16:00] We are very much in the science face of our center. As a matter of fact, we are very much encouraged by our funder to really focus on understanding the science as opposed to just using empirical methods to achieve device demonstration. Part of the center's strategic plan costs for at the end of our sentence life, which we expect to be 10 years. We will be [00:16:30] able to have one technology, namely our science will be mature enough that we have a technology that can be commercialized. On the other hand, we are expected along the way to be able to really understand how realistic our approaches so we will be expected to have certain types of prototype demonstration in the second five years [00:17:00] of our center. Also each theme we expect that I'll research may have some near term applications and actually as a example in theme three which is the Nanophotonics we expect that I'll work in photo detectors can have near term applications. Speaker 3: So in a sense kind of spinning off some of the early successes within the center or do you have to move it out of the center to other [00:17:30] players? Speaker 1: They have different ways of transferring the knowledge that we gained through our research. The center has industry partners. This industry partners are leaders in the electronics industry. They have recognized the neat off the center and we should clearly we see them s one of the avenues to transfer technology that Nia term along the term [00:18:00] technologies that may come after center, but as you know, they also many other venues including potentially some of our students taking technologies and creating companies [inaudible] Speaker 3: so the industry partners also are able to feed back to you, give you some reflection on your research. Speaker 1: The feedback will enable the center to conduct this research to be practical and useful Speaker 3: [00:18:30] with the publications. Are there any restrictions on who you can publish with? Are you seeking out open source journals? Speaker 1: The Sentis research results are publish through peer review journals. Many of these journals, one could argue is not open source because you need a subscription to get to them. However, the journals allow the authors to post the papers on [00:19:00] their own website. I'll send to identifies on our website, our list of publications and through the authors own website, the public can gain access to those papers. Speaker 3: Are there other centers or other research groups that are doing very similar work that you pay close attention to? Speaker 1: Yes, there is a center in Notre Dame that [00:19:30] is partially funded by DARPA and another government agency. That center involves not only Notre Dame, Bifido is headquartered there, but it also has members from many of the academic institutions. The name of the center is leased. The center has similar goals as us. We are not the only people that recognized the problem the semiconductor industry is facing, [00:20:00] so there are many efforts and many researchers around the world working on different approaches to solving the problem. We are one of several centers. We believe we differentiate ourselves in part because we have really put a strong emphasis on establishing the science and understanding what has prevented an easy solution. Speaker 3: In your personal [00:20:30] story, you've spent some time on both sides of the granting process being with the NSF. What does it like seeing both sides of the process?Speaker 1: I was the SPI, our program officer at the National Science Foundation before coming to UC Berkeley at the Star Center. A programs officer's job is to figure out what area to fund. And in conjunction with review panels, recommend [00:21:00] which particular proposals you fund. And then after the award, the program office is job is to advise, guide, oversee the delivery of results and ensure that the grantee is in compliance with the program requirements. But when you are grantee, your job is to deliver on what you promise. So a lot of the focus is on results delivery [00:21:30] while a programs office job is to facilitate guide help, but not directly involved with the results delivery [inaudible] which do you prefer? My background prior to going to national science foundation was in private industry. So I have a very strong operating background. So to a certain extent, one can argue that given the number of years I've spent [00:22:00] operating or delivering results, that comes to me more naturally. Speaker 6: Josephine n, thank you very much for coming on spectrum. Speaker 1: Thank you for having me. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: for more details [00:22:30] on the [inaudible] center and their educational program, which covers pre college undergraduate, graduate and postdoc opportunities. Go to the e three s website, which is e three s-center.org spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university and we have created a simple link to help you get there. The link is tiny url.com/kalx [00:23:00] spectrum Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 5: We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two years. Two weeks. Speaker 6: Renee Rao and chase Jacabowski present the calendar this Monday, February 24th come check out the next edition of nerd night. East Bay featuring lectures such as explosions, [00:23:30] back drafts and sprinklers, how Hollywood gets fire science wrong by Joel Sipe. Then listen to Brian Dote from sweet Mary's coffee and he'll show us how a cherry becomes black gold in his lecture home coffee roasting on the with tools you probably already have and last Vincent tank way will teach us about hyper velocity launchers in his lecture. Hyper velocity launchers, how to launch a projectile at 10 meters per second. That's right. 10 meters per second. Once again, nerd night takes [00:24:00] place. February 24th at the new parkway cinema in Oakland. Doors Open at 7:00 PM on Monday, March 3rd Dr. Edward Stone of Caltech will be giving a talk about the voyager spacecraft missions into interstellar space launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The two voyager spacecrafts continue their journeys as they search for the Helio pause. Speaker 6: The heliopause is a boundary between the solar wind and the local interstellar medium. [00:24:30] Recently in August, 2012 voyager one seem to be finally entering into the heliopause. The spacecraft reported finding depleted low energy particles originating from inside the heliosphere as well as low energy cosmic rays from nearby regions of the Milky Way. These in subsequent observations of the heliopause are revealing new aspects of the complex interaction of our son with a local interstellar medium to hear a complete history and learn where the voyager is. Now. Join Dr. Stone on [00:25:00] March 3rd at 4:15 PM in [inaudible] room number one on my name, March 3rd at 7:30 PM hello fellow Dr Jacqueline. Ferritin will speak in the planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences. At the close of 2013 the Italian stars with planets orbiting them toppled more than 1000 the majority of these so-called exoplanets have not actually been seen, but rather inferred from their effect on their host stars through pain seeking technical methods and tremendous telescope [00:25:30] 10 handful of indirectly image and these giant planets have shown fascinating diversity in their sizes, temperatures, weather, and relationships to their parents. Speaker 6: Sends over the past several years, an entirely new and mysterious breed of planets has emerged. As genres have discovered a collection of orphans. Planets that are moving through the galaxy, seemingly unattached to a star in this talk fairly will highlight how we discovered these seemingly impossible objects and review how these strange, exotic planets may be key [00:26:00] players in our understanding of planet formation and evolution. Her talk will be held seven 30 on Monday night, March 3rd go to cal academy.org to reserve tickets. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Tracy Jakubowski and Renee Rao present our news, the deal. Cal reports a new project from UC Berkeley. Researchers may soon allow the power of ocean waves to join solar and wind power as a commercialized source of energy. [00:26:30] The project is led by Marcus Lehman, a visiting graduate student in the Mechanical Engineering Department and supervised by razor alum and assistant professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator of the research. Speaker 6: The project focuses on building a prototype of a sea floor carpet that can generate electricity by mimicking the properties of the muddy sea floor. Therefore, the group is designing a c floor carpet waive dampening system that will harness the energy of waves passing over it. Theoretically, the [00:27:00] energy generated by 10 meters of sea floor carpet will be roughly equivalent to the energy conducted by a stadium sized soccer field completely covered by solar panels. As more and more people move to live near coastlines, the researchers expect wave power to be a top contender as the next big renewable resource, especially because waves have very high energy density. The cost of building devices to harness wave power is high. LM said, the ocean is a difficult place to work and our devices have to be sturdy enough to combat [00:27:30] the oceans, corrosive and harsh environments, but there's an increasing need for clean and as socially acceptable forms of generating power. Speaker 6: We're working hard with scientists and engineers to make this happen and it's only a matter of time. A recent study published in the Open Access Journal microbiome examine the GI tract of premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit or NICU. The lead author of the study, Brandon Brooks, a graduate student in the plant and microbial biology department at UC Berkeley, collaborated [00:28:00] with researchers university of Pittsburgh to swab the most touched surfaces at the NICU, as well as collect samples from two premature babies. In a small pilot study, they discovered the microbial environment of the baby's GI tracks was strikingly similar to that of the NICU, which was particularly interesting given that the premature babies were treated with antibiotics and should have had a very limited diversity of micro organisms within their GI tract. Well, most of the micro organisms were opportunistic. A few contain genes that conferred resistance [00:28:30] to antibiotics and disinfectant that was used within the NICU. The study provided an important insight into how the pathogenic, as well as nonpathogenic organisms are able to move from even the most sterile of environments to our bodies. Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 7: the music heard during the show was written and produced by [00:29:00] Alex Simon Speaker 8: [inaudible].Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address, spectrum dev, QA, and lex@yahoo.com genus in two weeks time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dr. Thomas Immel is Assistant Research Physicist at SSL at UC Berkeley. His expertise is interpretation of remote-sensing data and modeling of physical processes in the upper atmosphere & ionosphere. His work includes UV imaging observations from 4 NASA missions. ICON.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews [00:00:30] featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is part one of two interviews with Thomas Emmel and assistant research physicist at the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. In April, 2013 NASA selected the Ayana spheric connection explorer or icon to be the next Helio physics [00:01:00] explorer satellite mission. The icon mission is to be led by the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. Thomas Emal is the principal investigator of the icon mission icon will provide NASA's heliophysics division with a powerful new capability to determine the conditions in space modified by weather on earth and to understand the way space weather events grow to envelop regions of our planet with dense ionospheric plasma. In today's interview, Dr Emel talks [00:01:30] about Helio physics, the space sciences lab, and small cube sets, which are small satellites being built at universities. Here's that interview, Thomas Ml. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you. Brad, would you give us a short description of heliophysics? Sure. Here's your physics is sort of a new term and it's used at NASA to describe in shorthand the disciplines of solar and space physics. [00:02:00] Together. It's a little controversial because it means solar physics, obviously space physicists and people who studied the upper atmosphere have sort of felt the shift with changing it to solar physics. A lot of focus went to solar physics. I think icon is icon. Our mission that talking about today is shows a, another view of heliophysics or another focus. Can you describe starting at the earth's surface, the concentric layers of the atmosphere and out to [00:02:30] the ionosphere and beyond? Sure, and how do you define a layer of the atmosphere is sort of where you start. What's the answer? The answer is we defined layers of the atmosphere by their temperature profile or how the temperature changes with altitude. Speaker 4: It's as simple as that and so there are specific layers that on average have a temperature profile, one direction or the other. That means as you go up in altitude, does the temperature drop or increase as you leave the surface of the planet and go up and you're [00:03:00] in the troposphere and as you go higher in altitude, the temperature drops. And that has to do with just basic atmospheric physics. And also the fact that the surface of the planet is what absorbs most of the solar radiation. So it's hot and as you move away from that in an atmosphere that gets thinner without the Tude, the temperature drops. So you go all the way up to the top of the troposphere and you end up with the tropopause. So there's fears and pauses and once you cross the tropopause, you're in the stratosphere, [00:03:30] you know the next sphere and there you've know you've crossed it because temperature start to increase with altitude. Speaker 4: And they increased because of the fact that solar radiation is being actively absorbed in that region of space. That's not happening in the troposphere. The troposphere is transparent of visible light, but the stratosphere is starting to absorb solar radiation that is harmful to life, UV. And so the heating that occurs, the ozone that's in the stratosphere absorbs that [00:04:00] radiation and basically cause the cause of that place being much warmer. So when you're in the stratosphere though, you've already above about 90% of the atmosphere. It's all on a troposphere the stuff we breathe. So the stratosphere warms up all the way to the top. You hit the strata pause and then things turn around again. The chemistry that supports ozone does not work in the mesosphere and so you end up starting to drop in temperature again. So just like in the troposphere, the base of the mesosphere is the warm [00:04:30] straddle pause and it gets cold from that point. Speaker 4: And the coldest place in the vicinity of earth is the top of the menopause where those temperatures have been dropping all the way up to the boundary of space up to about 95 kilometers. At that point, you've reached just about the boundary of space and the temperatures turn around again and and warm all the way up into your in space and the, the atmosphere that's left up there, it's called the thermosphere because it's very hot and it's hot again because it's absorbing a different region [00:05:00] of solar radiation, extreme on fire ultraviolet. So again, protecting life on the earth as part of our atmosphere does that in a number of ways. So the thermosphere in that case is also where we find the ionosphere. The thermosphere is hot because the solar radiation is very energetic at that altitude. So energetic that ionizes the gas and that's where you find the ionosphere, you find a layer of plasma density, so ions and electrons [00:05:30] living together in the same place as plasma and that plasma becomes very dense, about 200 to 300 kilometers above the earth. Speaker 4: That's the dentist plasma between here in the sun. It's why you can hear at night radio tear ran from your ham radio set up if people still do that anymore because you're bouncing radio waves off of that and it's why you can hear, you know, I am stations over a long distance too in the daytime, but it's at night. That layer is all by itself hanging around and you can bounce [00:06:00] radio signals off of it. So then you keep going into space and the plasma density is actually dropped, but you are protected still. You don't enter into interplanetary space until you get out of the magnetosphere. And that's where Earth's magnetic field controls the motion of the plasma. And this is all the way out to 30,000 kilometers. And then you hit the bow shock and the end of the magnetosphere at the magneto pause. Everything has to end and you end up in the solar wind. Speaker 4: And that's interplanetary [00:06:30] space to interstellar space. And interplanetary space are two different things. We've never been to interstellar space. We're working on that. Voyager is on its way and there's a constant argument over whether or not it's out there. So the sun constitutes the helio sphere. It constructs the heliosphere by its energy and blowing out, and that's the sphere around our planetary system that we're part of. That's right. And that's where voyagers headed out of. Right, right out of the heliosphere. It's leaving and it's not coming back. [00:07:00] And I forget what star it's headed off to. So Helio physics is the study of plasmas and space plasmas and how they interact with bodies, uh, and interact with important things such as planetary atmospheres. Basically anywhere our star is an influence that can influence the processes that occur there. Speaker 3: Our guest today is Thomas Animal. In the next segment, Thomas Talks about heliophysics discoveries. [00:07:30] This is KALX Berkley. And what have been the big revelation trends Speaker 4: in heliophysics? Well, the first discovery and Helio physics was the fact that we had radiation belts. It was our first forays into space carried instrumentation. And the first few explorers, which we're still part of that line icon mission, is part of the explore line. But the first ones carried Geiger counters out of University of Iowa where Jim van Allen was in [00:08:00] charge of that department. And where they built those uh, experiments that discovered what we call the van Allen belts now. So that was the first discovery was that we had an environment around us in space that was hazardous and we didn't know where that radiation came from. It fill a Geiger counter just to see what was there. And when you found us a lot more radiation than they thought. The solar cycle has influences throughout the heliosphere. A solar storm for instance, can launch a coronal mass ejection. Speaker 4: They say these are the words [00:08:30] that are starting to show up in the common discussion of space, whether it was coronal mass ejections had come with a solar flare and we've timed these things. We see a coronal mass ejection, a very large one cause a massive magnetic storm at earth. And a good time later it flies by voyage here and it hits the heliopause and radio waves are admitted from the helio pause, the boundary of interstellar space and voyager picks them up. And those were some of the first studies of void. You're trying to figure out how close [00:09:00] it was to the heliopause. Where we are now in the past 10 years is what we understand more now than ever. That the forcing of plasma in near a space is controlled to a much larger degree than we ever suspected or dare to think or dare to discuss. Speaker 4: Really it's controlled by conditions in the lower atmosphere and that the atmospheric layers that we've talked about and talked to all the temperature variations that occur, there's processes that carry energy and momentum beyond past [00:09:30] all those pauses and layers straight from the surface to space. And it's actually biggest discovery in Helio physics in the last decade is that this coupling of the terrestrial atmosphere to spaces stronger than we thought. And what is your focus at the space sciences lab? Well, it has been in the upper atmosphere, in the atmosphere, looking at how solar wind energy propagates through the system. Solar Wind, [00:10:00] it impacts or it effects the MAG Nitas fear and the number of ways creates a shape, stretches it out. The magnetosphere is what processes also learned energy that produces the Aurora. The Aurora is energized by the solar wind. All that energy has to get through the magnetosphere and then down into our atmosphere in a number of ways. Speaker 4: So we're interested in how that energy propagates through the system and how it's eventually deposited in our atmosphere. And then also how our atmosphere and the [inaudible] sphere as you energize them and [00:10:30] make them more conductive through ionization by Aurora, how it feeds back through the system. So magnetosphere occurrence is a current system, electrical current that heats the atmosphere and how you turn that current on and off during a magnetic storm. The timing and how processes work together as sort of as an engineering problem is something I've been focused on for the past 10 years. That's changed over the years too. I've been sliding to lower latitudes where the plasma density is actually highest [00:11:00] and it's highest for two reasons. One because the sun is overhead more often at low latitudes and I NYSE in the atmosphere more actively or more strongly, but also because there's magnetic field tends to trap the plasma at low latitudes. Speaker 4: And when I say that the plasma is densest in the atmosphere between here in the sun, it's actually the low latitude ionosphere which has the dense plasma that interacts most strongly with the earth's atmosphere. Um, and we know now that the [00:11:30] energy and momentum that propagates up from the lower atmosphere that a lot of that energy is coming up from low latitudes as well. Cause that's where a lot of the energy goes in and tropical rainforest and in the tropical weather systems that curved from day to day with interesting periodicities. The reason you end up with large coupling from the little atmosphere to the upper atmosphere is because the atmosphere can be caused to move a wave like manner and we call it a tide, just like tides in the ocean. The atmosphere tends to have some [00:12:00] 12 hour, 24 hour period of city. Say you have a planet with the Brazilian rainforest on it and that fires up at two in the afternoon every day, day after day you start moving the atmosphere in a periodic manner and you end up growing these really, really large waves in the atmosphere that propagate up into space. Speaker 4: And so it's the combination of the tropical forcing and the tropical ion sphere, which is dense and captured by the magnetic field really creates this interesting environment and we're a great laboratory [00:12:30] for understanding atmosphere, space coupling. Speaker 3: Yeah. Listening to spectrum, I am k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Thomas Emma. In the next segment he talks about solar energy interacting with Earth's magnetosphere,Speaker 4: the Aurora [inaudible]. Can you just describe the Aurora for us? The Aurora is a feature of the planet [00:13:00] at high latitudes in the north and the south, the Aurora Borealis of North Aurora Australis down south. What it is, it is light coming from the energization of our atmosphere by space plasma. The Sun obviously has a lot of energy and solar atmosphere is constantly moving out and it's carrying a lot of energy with it. But so that energy arrives at earth as solar plasma blowing past the planet. So those are the energies we're talking about. The magnetosphere as sort of a, [00:13:30] it energizes all of the solar wind particles to higher energies and dumps them into our atmosphere. And the Aurora is what you see when you go out on your deck and Alaska and look up. It's the signature of that process occurring. And when the Aurora's very active, that means that process is very active and there's a lot of energy coming into our atmosphere from the solar wind. Speaker 4: What's great is a Nikon camera has great red response, so you can point your camera to the sky and you can put it to a two second exposure and it will see things [00:14:00] that you can't see with your eyes. Many people now have great auroral imagers in their mitts. They may not even know that they've got that capability. So the waves that are created around the equator in the low latitudes, in thinking about waves on the ocean, they're moving in a specific direction. Are these waves also moving in the specific direction? Are they sort of emanating everywhere? And that's a good question. So the really large scale waves in [00:14:30] the atmosphere, the first thing is to realize that once you've got a wave moving in the atmosphere, there's nothing really to stop it. The waves aren't going to crash on the shore somewhere. They're going to go up and they're going to grow with altitude, their waves, storms derive, and I am talking about the large scale continental scale waves that the wavelength is as large as a continent, at least horizontally, vertically. Speaker 4: There's about 2030 kilometers, but 2030 kilometers is a quarter or a third of the way to space. So they're still large even [00:15:00] though 2030 kilometers doesn't sound that far. In any case, those waves grow with altitude and by the time you get to the edge of space, a wave that might have had a half degree centigrade or Celsius variability to it in amplitude, by the time it gets to the boundary of space and crosses it, it can have an amplitude of 20 or 30 degrees Kelvin or our Celsius. It's the same thing. Uh, it's one way to measure the size of that wave. With that wave also comes a large wind component. The winds, the [00:15:30] motion of the atmosphere is going to go with it. It's this sloshing and the temperature comes from the compression and the expansion of the gas. As the wave moves around the planet, do they go in different directions? Speaker 4: Yeah, we talk about them. We see there's a number of technical terms for the waves. There's eastward and westward traveling waves and some of them are larger than others. This atmosphere supports a couple of waves eastward at a couple of ways, westward more than others. Some of these waves are excited [00:16:00] more naturally than others just because of the source of the excitation, the source of the excitation of the continents. If you look at a map of the earth where lightning occurs on earth, for instance, it's always over the continents because the solar energy is really just being deposited right there at the surface and the atmosphere starts to be put in a motion and the water vapor starts to condense. As the atmosphere rises and you get storms, a tropical rainforest and Africa, tropical rainforests in South America and also a third really large [00:16:30] region of tropical forcing to Southeast Asia. Speaker 4: Those three places on the earth firing off two in the afternoon in the South East Asia than two in the afternoon, Africa, then South American and do that over again every day. It's like a drum head problem, if you know what I mean. If you put a little sand on a drum and you start tapping it in one position, you can form a pattern. You would see where else you could tap it at the same time to reinforce that pattern. Now the rainy seasons of of those different places changes throughout the year. [00:17:00] That's one of the reasons we know it's from the lower atmosphere because we've observed conditions in space that changed with the rainy seasons and there's no reason to have rainy seasons in space. But we do and so we look immediately to where we do have a rainy season, which is in the troposphere. And so the recent developments and numerical model supports the idea that there's a strong connection between the tropic sun conditions and space. Speaker 4: Have you been involved in a lot of past satellite projects at the space science lab or a few [00:17:30] of them? I've been involved in too. Recently icon, which I'm leading and a small satellite re recently completed a flue called cinema that was a student led cubes hat, so a 10 by 10 by 30 centimeter satellite that we built at the lab designed and built. Before that I was analyzing data. I've been spending 10 years analyzing data from missions that we've supported or built and so combining data from a number of [00:18:00] different instruments that space sciences lab has built or satellites that space sciences lab has built. It's been something I've done at the lab, but this is my first time leading a mission. Speaker 5: This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Thomas Emma, a physicist at UC Berkeley's space sciences lab. Speaker 4: How has the [00:18:30] cube sat changed the way satellite measurements are made? Well, in some respects that remains to be seen. There's been a number of advances in the capabilities that cubes hats can carry in terms of pointing and power and the instruments have all had to shrink in size as well. But there's a number of capabilities that have grown over the years that allow us to do that. Cell phones have been a big driver and shrinking small processors and getting [00:19:00] into low power processors and communications gear as well. And what's been nice is working with the students here at Berkeley actually. They've had a lot of experience in designing and programming processors for the purposes that we need to fly in space. So there's a number of universities working in this area now and I think they're just getting better. Cinema has been a good experiment for us. Speaker 4: We have four of them in the works this year. There's two Korean cinema. It's going up. [00:19:30] Kate, you young, he university was our partner. There's a lot of interest in supporting keeps that launches at NASA and throughout different government agencies and so you know, we went on a national reconnaissance vehicle, but a, it didn't cost us much. It was fantastic that we had that opportunity and NASA has worked with NRO and other agencies to make this possible for universities to do these. There were a number of university keeps that's on that launch. So these cubes hats that NASA embraces, I guess [00:20:00] that's the only way to get up is NASA says, yeah, this is worth putting up there, or are there now independent ways to get to space? I think NASA is where we'd like to start and that's who we've gone to before. NSF is really the organization that was the first to support a cube type program per se. Speaker 4: And National Science Foundation doesn't have a launch service, but NASA does. So there was a close collaboration early on and some key individuals at NASA Kennedy have taken a remarkable interest [00:20:30] in fostering that program and develop basically what they call a educational launch. Alana was, uh, is the acronym that we went on. Alana. Alana supports a number of, keeps getting into space. You propose to Atlanta, NSF sends them $20,000 or that's it was for us and you get your slot and you get your orbit and you're on orbit for many years. So it's really a great opportunity. So right now it's really good to work with NASA on this, on the cinema [00:21:00] projects. There's quite a bit of student involvement in those. I understand. Can you talk about that? Right. So National Science Foundation supported Space Sciences Labs, cinema project, which is a cube set for high ions, magnetic fields, c I n electrons, it went on it. Speaker 4: It's a great acronym for a very tough thing, but it's a base whether mission, it's to measure the particle environment in space and the magnetic fields. So that was great. You know, we [00:21:30] miss dearly, Bob Lynne, who was the former head of space sciences lab for more than a decade and the principal investigator on one of our explorers Hesi and the principal investigator on cinema, he put that international team together between CUNY University where he was an adjunct professor. We worked with imperial college as well on that mission and they provided the smallest magnetometer have ever seen for a space instrument. It was a high quality, high precision magnetometer, way better than even your iPhone if you can imagine. Also [00:22:00] we had a detector group at LBL and a group providing an electronic part and aces from France. So it was an unbelievable confluence of people and scientific interests that built cinema. Speaker 4: The student aspect was, there were students, uh, from the start in mechanical engineering who really came up with the initial design of a cube sat and it was a couple of masters students, one of whom is still a space sciences lab, David Glaser. And it was great working with the Mechanical Engineering Department [00:22:30] because it was that department of which took the controls problem of how you spin a spacecraft based on inputs from space, the Sun Sensor, we had the magnetometer measurements that you're making. So that was a remarkable achievement. I thought on the mechanical engineering side and working with the electrical engineers, we had a number of cs IEC students as well and really had a good team. They're working on interfacing with the mechanical engineering students who were working on the attitude control or working [00:23:00] with the imperial college students and researchers who were providing magnetometer those a number of difficult tasks that we had some great students come through and everyone got their chance to save cinema. It was a seat of your pants operation. The thing flew and it's functional. We are going to fly the next one with some updates that's gonna work better, so we need more students. The wonderful problem with students is that they graduate to go onto great careers and other places and so we'd like to have those people back. They're not coming [00:23:30] back, so we need to get a new crop of ex students and mechanical engineers and we'll probably be flyering at soda again. Speaker 5: That concludes part one of our two part interview with Thomas Emmylou. Part two will air on 14 in that interview, Dr Hamill discusses icon mission process start to finish. The icon explorer mission website is icon dot s s l. Dot. berkeley.edu [00:24:00] now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee route Speaker 6: present the calendar this Tuesday, June 4th the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series. We'll be hosting a talk by two sides. Officers at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. You Know Greg Shamor and Kevin Wilson will speak about the potential of stem cell research to help in diseases such as diabetes, spinal cord injury, [00:24:30] heart night disease, and neurological disorders. They will also address the recent restrictions on research and where it is heading today. This June 4th event will be held that the Soma Street food park in San Francisco, the city's first permanent food truck pod. It will begin at 7:00 PM biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher of Rutgers. We'll speak with KQ eds, Michael Krasney about the science of love and attraction. On Tuesday, June 4th [00:25:00] at 7:30 PM at the North Theater in San Francisco, Fisher has written five books on the evolution and future of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery, and divorce, gender differences in the brain, the chemistry of romantic love and human personality types. Speaker 6: And why are we fall in love with one person rather than another? Tickets start at $20 and are available at cal academy. Dot. O. R. G. On Monday, June 10th Brian Day [00:25:30] deleted Lunar Science Institute director at NASA will give a talk about the latest lunar discoveries as litter robotics continue to advance. Our understanding of the moon continues to change. Well, the lunar surface has been previously viewed as a static desert environment. New evidence points to a far more dynamic moonscape than expected. Dr. David will discuss these new discoveries and elaborate on some of NASA's more recent and lunar exploration missions. The event will be held on Monday, June 10th at 7:30 PM in the California [00:26:00] Academy of Sciences. Planetarium. Tuesday we have tickets for the event. Visit the Academy website@calacademy.org the Computer History Museum at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view is hosting senior vice president and director of IBM Research John Kelly on June 11th at 7:00 PM Museum CEO John Holler, well moderate a conversation with Kelly on topics ranging from his background and the path that led him to IBM. [00:26:30] The history of research there, IBM's Watson and cognitive computing to the newest IBM lab in Nairobi, Kenya. IBM says that Africa is destined to become an important growth market. The company admission is free. register@computerhistory.org Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:27:00] spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Renee arou present. The news engineers at UC Berkeley have created a new hydro gel that can be manipulated by exposure to light alone. The team inspired by plant's ability to grow towards light sources [00:27:30] created their gel by combining synthetic elastic proteins with one cell thick sheets of graphite known as graphene. Graphene generates heat when exposed to light, which can cause synthetic proteins to release water. The two materials are combined to form of hydrogen with one side that is more porous than the other. This allows the material to mimic the way plant cells shrink and expand unevenly in response to light. This hydrogen also shrinks and evenly, albeit more precisely allowing to bend and move solely in response [00:28:00] to light. Create or speculate that the shape changing Gel could have applications in drug delivery and tissue engineering. Speaker 6: Mathematician Tang Jang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham published unimportant number theory proof and this week's issue of angels of mathematics. Yang proved a weak form of the twin prime conjecture and as the first to establish the existence of a finite bound four prime gaps. Prime numbers are natural numbers greater [00:28:30] than one that I have no positive divisors other than one and themselves. Interestingly, many come in pairs that have a difference of two for example, three and five 17 and 19 or 101 and 103 Jang showed that for some integer n that is at most 70 million. There are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by n. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: [00:29:00] spectrum is archive on iTunes university. Our special link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Dr. Thomas Immel is Assistant Research Physicist at SSL at UC Berkeley. His expertise is interpretation of remote-sensing data and modeling of physical processes in the upper atmosphere & ionosphere. His work includes UV imaging observations from 4 NASA missions. ICON.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews [00:00:30] featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is part one of two interviews with Thomas Emmel and assistant research physicist at the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. In April, 2013 NASA selected the Ayana spheric connection explorer or icon to be the next Helio physics [00:01:00] explorer satellite mission. The icon mission is to be led by the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. Thomas Emal is the principal investigator of the icon mission icon will provide NASA's heliophysics division with a powerful new capability to determine the conditions in space modified by weather on earth and to understand the way space weather events grow to envelop regions of our planet with dense ionospheric plasma. In today's interview, Dr Emel talks [00:01:30] about Helio physics, the space sciences lab, and small cube sets, which are small satellites being built at universities. Here's that interview, Thomas Ml. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you. Brad, would you give us a short description of heliophysics? Sure. Here's your physics is sort of a new term and it's used at NASA to describe in shorthand the disciplines of solar and space physics. [00:02:00] Together. It's a little controversial because it means solar physics, obviously space physicists and people who studied the upper atmosphere have sort of felt the shift with changing it to solar physics. A lot of focus went to solar physics. I think icon is icon. Our mission that talking about today is shows a, another view of heliophysics or another focus. Can you describe starting at the earth's surface, the concentric layers of the atmosphere and out to [00:02:30] the ionosphere and beyond? Sure, and how do you define a layer of the atmosphere is sort of where you start. What's the answer? The answer is we defined layers of the atmosphere by their temperature profile or how the temperature changes with altitude. Speaker 4: It's as simple as that and so there are specific layers that on average have a temperature profile, one direction or the other. That means as you go up in altitude, does the temperature drop or increase as you leave the surface of the planet and go up and you're [00:03:00] in the troposphere and as you go higher in altitude, the temperature drops. And that has to do with just basic atmospheric physics. And also the fact that the surface of the planet is what absorbs most of the solar radiation. So it's hot and as you move away from that in an atmosphere that gets thinner without the Tude, the temperature drops. So you go all the way up to the top of the troposphere and you end up with the tropopause. So there's fears and pauses and once you cross the tropopause, you're in the stratosphere, [00:03:30] you know the next sphere and there you've know you've crossed it because temperature start to increase with altitude. Speaker 4: And they increased because of the fact that solar radiation is being actively absorbed in that region of space. That's not happening in the troposphere. The troposphere is transparent of visible light, but the stratosphere is starting to absorb solar radiation that is harmful to life, UV. And so the heating that occurs, the ozone that's in the stratosphere absorbs that [00:04:00] radiation and basically cause the cause of that place being much warmer. So when you're in the stratosphere though, you've already above about 90% of the atmosphere. It's all on a troposphere the stuff we breathe. So the stratosphere warms up all the way to the top. You hit the strata pause and then things turn around again. The chemistry that supports ozone does not work in the mesosphere and so you end up starting to drop in temperature again. So just like in the troposphere, the base of the mesosphere is the warm [00:04:30] straddle pause and it gets cold from that point. Speaker 4: And the coldest place in the vicinity of earth is the top of the menopause where those temperatures have been dropping all the way up to the boundary of space up to about 95 kilometers. At that point, you've reached just about the boundary of space and the temperatures turn around again and and warm all the way up into your in space and the, the atmosphere that's left up there, it's called the thermosphere because it's very hot and it's hot again because it's absorbing a different region [00:05:00] of solar radiation, extreme on fire ultraviolet. So again, protecting life on the earth as part of our atmosphere does that in a number of ways. So the thermosphere in that case is also where we find the ionosphere. The thermosphere is hot because the solar radiation is very energetic at that altitude. So energetic that ionizes the gas and that's where you find the ionosphere, you find a layer of plasma density, so ions and electrons [00:05:30] living together in the same place as plasma and that plasma becomes very dense, about 200 to 300 kilometers above the earth. Speaker 4: That's the dentist plasma between here in the sun. It's why you can hear at night radio tear ran from your ham radio set up if people still do that anymore because you're bouncing radio waves off of that and it's why you can hear, you know, I am stations over a long distance too in the daytime, but it's at night. That layer is all by itself hanging around and you can bounce [00:06:00] radio signals off of it. So then you keep going into space and the plasma density is actually dropped, but you are protected still. You don't enter into interplanetary space until you get out of the magnetosphere. And that's where Earth's magnetic field controls the motion of the plasma. And this is all the way out to 30,000 kilometers. And then you hit the bow shock and the end of the magnetosphere at the magneto pause. Everything has to end and you end up in the solar wind. Speaker 4: And that's interplanetary [00:06:30] space to interstellar space. And interplanetary space are two different things. We've never been to interstellar space. We're working on that. Voyager is on its way and there's a constant argument over whether or not it's out there. So the sun constitutes the helio sphere. It constructs the heliosphere by its energy and blowing out, and that's the sphere around our planetary system that we're part of. That's right. And that's where voyagers headed out of. Right, right out of the heliosphere. It's leaving and it's not coming back. [00:07:00] And I forget what star it's headed off to. So Helio physics is the study of plasmas and space plasmas and how they interact with bodies, uh, and interact with important things such as planetary atmospheres. Basically anywhere our star is an influence that can influence the processes that occur there. Speaker 3: Our guest today is Thomas Animal. In the next segment, Thomas Talks about heliophysics discoveries. [00:07:30] This is KALX Berkley. And what have been the big revelation trends Speaker 4: in heliophysics? Well, the first discovery and Helio physics was the fact that we had radiation belts. It was our first forays into space carried instrumentation. And the first few explorers, which we're still part of that line icon mission, is part of the explore line. But the first ones carried Geiger counters out of University of Iowa where Jim van Allen was in [00:08:00] charge of that department. And where they built those uh, experiments that discovered what we call the van Allen belts now. So that was the first discovery was that we had an environment around us in space that was hazardous and we didn't know where that radiation came from. It fill a Geiger counter just to see what was there. And when you found us a lot more radiation than they thought. The solar cycle has influences throughout the heliosphere. A solar storm for instance, can launch a coronal mass ejection. Speaker 4: They say these are the words [00:08:30] that are starting to show up in the common discussion of space, whether it was coronal mass ejections had come with a solar flare and we've timed these things. We see a coronal mass ejection, a very large one cause a massive magnetic storm at earth. And a good time later it flies by voyage here and it hits the heliopause and radio waves are admitted from the helio pause, the boundary of interstellar space and voyager picks them up. And those were some of the first studies of void. You're trying to figure out how close [00:09:00] it was to the heliopause. Where we are now in the past 10 years is what we understand more now than ever. That the forcing of plasma in near a space is controlled to a much larger degree than we ever suspected or dare to think or dare to discuss. Speaker 4: Really it's controlled by conditions in the lower atmosphere and that the atmospheric layers that we've talked about and talked to all the temperature variations that occur, there's processes that carry energy and momentum beyond past [00:09:30] all those pauses and layers straight from the surface to space. And it's actually biggest discovery in Helio physics in the last decade is that this coupling of the terrestrial atmosphere to spaces stronger than we thought. And what is your focus at the space sciences lab? Well, it has been in the upper atmosphere, in the atmosphere, looking at how solar wind energy propagates through the system. Solar Wind, [00:10:00] it impacts or it effects the MAG Nitas fear and the number of ways creates a shape, stretches it out. The magnetosphere is what processes also learned energy that produces the Aurora. The Aurora is energized by the solar wind. All that energy has to get through the magnetosphere and then down into our atmosphere in a number of ways. Speaker 4: So we're interested in how that energy propagates through the system and how it's eventually deposited in our atmosphere. And then also how our atmosphere and the [inaudible] sphere as you energize them and [00:10:30] make them more conductive through ionization by Aurora, how it feeds back through the system. So magnetosphere occurrence is a current system, electrical current that heats the atmosphere and how you turn that current on and off during a magnetic storm. The timing and how processes work together as sort of as an engineering problem is something I've been focused on for the past 10 years. That's changed over the years too. I've been sliding to lower latitudes where the plasma density is actually highest [00:11:00] and it's highest for two reasons. One because the sun is overhead more often at low latitudes and I NYSE in the atmosphere more actively or more strongly, but also because there's magnetic field tends to trap the plasma at low latitudes. Speaker 4: And when I say that the plasma is densest in the atmosphere between here in the sun, it's actually the low latitude ionosphere which has the dense plasma that interacts most strongly with the earth's atmosphere. Um, and we know now that the [00:11:30] energy and momentum that propagates up from the lower atmosphere that a lot of that energy is coming up from low latitudes as well. Cause that's where a lot of the energy goes in and tropical rainforest and in the tropical weather systems that curved from day to day with interesting periodicities. The reason you end up with large coupling from the little atmosphere to the upper atmosphere is because the atmosphere can be caused to move a wave like manner and we call it a tide, just like tides in the ocean. The atmosphere tends to have some [00:12:00] 12 hour, 24 hour period of city. Say you have a planet with the Brazilian rainforest on it and that fires up at two in the afternoon every day, day after day you start moving the atmosphere in a periodic manner and you end up growing these really, really large waves in the atmosphere that propagate up into space. Speaker 4: And so it's the combination of the tropical forcing and the tropical ion sphere, which is dense and captured by the magnetic field really creates this interesting environment and we're a great laboratory [00:12:30] for understanding atmosphere, space coupling. Speaker 3: Yeah. Listening to spectrum, I am k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Thomas Emma. In the next segment he talks about solar energy interacting with Earth's magnetosphere,Speaker 4: the Aurora [inaudible]. Can you just describe the Aurora for us? The Aurora is a feature of the planet [00:13:00] at high latitudes in the north and the south, the Aurora Borealis of North Aurora Australis down south. What it is, it is light coming from the energization of our atmosphere by space plasma. The Sun obviously has a lot of energy and solar atmosphere is constantly moving out and it's carrying a lot of energy with it. But so that energy arrives at earth as solar plasma blowing past the planet. So those are the energies we're talking about. The magnetosphere as sort of a, [00:13:30] it energizes all of the solar wind particles to higher energies and dumps them into our atmosphere. And the Aurora is what you see when you go out on your deck and Alaska and look up. It's the signature of that process occurring. And when the Aurora's very active, that means that process is very active and there's a lot of energy coming into our atmosphere from the solar wind. Speaker 4: What's great is a Nikon camera has great red response, so you can point your camera to the sky and you can put it to a two second exposure and it will see things [00:14:00] that you can't see with your eyes. Many people now have great auroral imagers in their mitts. They may not even know that they've got that capability. So the waves that are created around the equator in the low latitudes, in thinking about waves on the ocean, they're moving in a specific direction. Are these waves also moving in the specific direction? Are they sort of emanating everywhere? And that's a good question. So the really large scale waves in [00:14:30] the atmosphere, the first thing is to realize that once you've got a wave moving in the atmosphere, there's nothing really to stop it. The waves aren't going to crash on the shore somewhere. They're going to go up and they're going to grow with altitude, their waves, storms derive, and I am talking about the large scale continental scale waves that the wavelength is as large as a continent, at least horizontally, vertically. Speaker 4: There's about 2030 kilometers, but 2030 kilometers is a quarter or a third of the way to space. So they're still large even [00:15:00] though 2030 kilometers doesn't sound that far. In any case, those waves grow with altitude and by the time you get to the edge of space, a wave that might have had a half degree centigrade or Celsius variability to it in amplitude, by the time it gets to the boundary of space and crosses it, it can have an amplitude of 20 or 30 degrees Kelvin or our Celsius. It's the same thing. Uh, it's one way to measure the size of that wave. With that wave also comes a large wind component. The winds, the [00:15:30] motion of the atmosphere is going to go with it. It's this sloshing and the temperature comes from the compression and the expansion of the gas. As the wave moves around the planet, do they go in different directions? Speaker 4: Yeah, we talk about them. We see there's a number of technical terms for the waves. There's eastward and westward traveling waves and some of them are larger than others. This atmosphere supports a couple of waves eastward at a couple of ways, westward more than others. Some of these waves are excited [00:16:00] more naturally than others just because of the source of the excitation, the source of the excitation of the continents. If you look at a map of the earth where lightning occurs on earth, for instance, it's always over the continents because the solar energy is really just being deposited right there at the surface and the atmosphere starts to be put in a motion and the water vapor starts to condense. As the atmosphere rises and you get storms, a tropical rainforest and Africa, tropical rainforests in South America and also a third really large [00:16:30] region of tropical forcing to Southeast Asia. Speaker 4: Those three places on the earth firing off two in the afternoon in the South East Asia than two in the afternoon, Africa, then South American and do that over again every day. It's like a drum head problem, if you know what I mean. If you put a little sand on a drum and you start tapping it in one position, you can form a pattern. You would see where else you could tap it at the same time to reinforce that pattern. Now the rainy seasons of of those different places changes throughout the year. [00:17:00] That's one of the reasons we know it's from the lower atmosphere because we've observed conditions in space that changed with the rainy seasons and there's no reason to have rainy seasons in space. But we do and so we look immediately to where we do have a rainy season, which is in the troposphere. And so the recent developments and numerical model supports the idea that there's a strong connection between the tropic sun conditions and space. Speaker 4: Have you been involved in a lot of past satellite projects at the space science lab or a few [00:17:30] of them? I've been involved in too. Recently icon, which I'm leading and a small satellite re recently completed a flue called cinema that was a student led cubes hat, so a 10 by 10 by 30 centimeter satellite that we built at the lab designed and built. Before that I was analyzing data. I've been spending 10 years analyzing data from missions that we've supported or built and so combining data from a number of [00:18:00] different instruments that space sciences lab has built or satellites that space sciences lab has built. It's been something I've done at the lab, but this is my first time leading a mission. Speaker 5: This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Thomas Emma, a physicist at UC Berkeley's space sciences lab. Speaker 4: How has the [00:18:30] cube sat changed the way satellite measurements are made? Well, in some respects that remains to be seen. There's been a number of advances in the capabilities that cubes hats can carry in terms of pointing and power and the instruments have all had to shrink in size as well. But there's a number of capabilities that have grown over the years that allow us to do that. Cell phones have been a big driver and shrinking small processors and getting [00:19:00] into low power processors and communications gear as well. And what's been nice is working with the students here at Berkeley actually. They've had a lot of experience in designing and programming processors for the purposes that we need to fly in space. So there's a number of universities working in this area now and I think they're just getting better. Cinema has been a good experiment for us. Speaker 4: We have four of them in the works this year. There's two Korean cinema. It's going up. [00:19:30] Kate, you young, he university was our partner. There's a lot of interest in supporting keeps that launches at NASA and throughout different government agencies and so you know, we went on a national reconnaissance vehicle, but a, it didn't cost us much. It was fantastic that we had that opportunity and NASA has worked with NRO and other agencies to make this possible for universities to do these. There were a number of university keeps that's on that launch. So these cubes hats that NASA embraces, I guess [00:20:00] that's the only way to get up is NASA says, yeah, this is worth putting up there, or are there now independent ways to get to space? I think NASA is where we'd like to start and that's who we've gone to before. NSF is really the organization that was the first to support a cube type program per se. Speaker 4: And National Science Foundation doesn't have a launch service, but NASA does. So there was a close collaboration early on and some key individuals at NASA Kennedy have taken a remarkable interest [00:20:30] in fostering that program and develop basically what they call a educational launch. Alana was, uh, is the acronym that we went on. Alana. Alana supports a number of, keeps getting into space. You propose to Atlanta, NSF sends them $20,000 or that's it was for us and you get your slot and you get your orbit and you're on orbit for many years. So it's really a great opportunity. So right now it's really good to work with NASA on this, on the cinema [00:21:00] projects. There's quite a bit of student involvement in those. I understand. Can you talk about that? Right. So National Science Foundation supported Space Sciences Labs, cinema project, which is a cube set for high ions, magnetic fields, c I n electrons, it went on it. Speaker 4: It's a great acronym for a very tough thing, but it's a base whether mission, it's to measure the particle environment in space and the magnetic fields. So that was great. You know, we [00:21:30] miss dearly, Bob Lynne, who was the former head of space sciences lab for more than a decade and the principal investigator on one of our explorers Hesi and the principal investigator on cinema, he put that international team together between CUNY University where he was an adjunct professor. We worked with imperial college as well on that mission and they provided the smallest magnetometer have ever seen for a space instrument. It was a high quality, high precision magnetometer, way better than even your iPhone if you can imagine. Also [00:22:00] we had a detector group at LBL and a group providing an electronic part and aces from France. So it was an unbelievable confluence of people and scientific interests that built cinema. Speaker 4: The student aspect was, there were students, uh, from the start in mechanical engineering who really came up with the initial design of a cube sat and it was a couple of masters students, one of whom is still a space sciences lab, David Glaser. And it was great working with the Mechanical Engineering Department [00:22:30] because it was that department of which took the controls problem of how you spin a spacecraft based on inputs from space, the Sun Sensor, we had the magnetometer measurements that you're making. So that was a remarkable achievement. I thought on the mechanical engineering side and working with the electrical engineers, we had a number of cs IEC students as well and really had a good team. They're working on interfacing with the mechanical engineering students who were working on the attitude control or working [00:23:00] with the imperial college students and researchers who were providing magnetometer those a number of difficult tasks that we had some great students come through and everyone got their chance to save cinema. It was a seat of your pants operation. The thing flew and it's functional. We are going to fly the next one with some updates that's gonna work better, so we need more students. The wonderful problem with students is that they graduate to go onto great careers and other places and so we'd like to have those people back. They're not coming [00:23:30] back, so we need to get a new crop of ex students and mechanical engineers and we'll probably be flyering at soda again. Speaker 5: That concludes part one of our two part interview with Thomas Emmylou. Part two will air on 14 in that interview, Dr Hamill discusses icon mission process start to finish. The icon explorer mission website is icon dot s s l. Dot. berkeley.edu [00:24:00] now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee route Speaker 6: present the calendar this Tuesday, June 4th the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series. We'll be hosting a talk by two sides. Officers at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. You Know Greg Shamor and Kevin Wilson will speak about the potential of stem cell research to help in diseases such as diabetes, spinal cord injury, [00:24:30] heart night disease, and neurological disorders. They will also address the recent restrictions on research and where it is heading today. This June 4th event will be held that the Soma Street food park in San Francisco, the city's first permanent food truck pod. It will begin at 7:00 PM biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher of Rutgers. We'll speak with KQ eds, Michael Krasney about the science of love and attraction. On Tuesday, June 4th [00:25:00] at 7:30 PM at the North Theater in San Francisco, Fisher has written five books on the evolution and future of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery, and divorce, gender differences in the brain, the chemistry of romantic love and human personality types. Speaker 6: And why are we fall in love with one person rather than another? Tickets start at $20 and are available at cal academy. Dot. O. R. G. On Monday, June 10th Brian Day [00:25:30] deleted Lunar Science Institute director at NASA will give a talk about the latest lunar discoveries as litter robotics continue to advance. Our understanding of the moon continues to change. Well, the lunar surface has been previously viewed as a static desert environment. New evidence points to a far more dynamic moonscape than expected. Dr. David will discuss these new discoveries and elaborate on some of NASA's more recent and lunar exploration missions. The event will be held on Monday, June 10th at 7:30 PM in the California [00:26:00] Academy of Sciences. Planetarium. Tuesday we have tickets for the event. Visit the Academy website@calacademy.org the Computer History Museum at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view is hosting senior vice president and director of IBM Research John Kelly on June 11th at 7:00 PM Museum CEO John Holler, well moderate a conversation with Kelly on topics ranging from his background and the path that led him to IBM. [00:26:30] The history of research there, IBM's Watson and cognitive computing to the newest IBM lab in Nairobi, Kenya. IBM says that Africa is destined to become an important growth market. The company admission is free. register@computerhistory.org Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:27:00] spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Renee arou present. The news engineers at UC Berkeley have created a new hydro gel that can be manipulated by exposure to light alone. The team inspired by plant's ability to grow towards light sources [00:27:30] created their gel by combining synthetic elastic proteins with one cell thick sheets of graphite known as graphene. Graphene generates heat when exposed to light, which can cause synthetic proteins to release water. The two materials are combined to form of hydrogen with one side that is more porous than the other. This allows the material to mimic the way plant cells shrink and expand unevenly in response to light. This hydrogen also shrinks and evenly, albeit more precisely allowing to bend and move solely in response [00:28:00] to light. Create or speculate that the shape changing Gel could have applications in drug delivery and tissue engineering. Speaker 6: Mathematician Tang Jang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham published unimportant number theory proof and this week's issue of angels of mathematics. Yang proved a weak form of the twin prime conjecture and as the first to establish the existence of a finite bound four prime gaps. Prime numbers are natural numbers greater [00:28:30] than one that I have no positive divisors other than one and themselves. Interestingly, many come in pairs that have a difference of two for example, three and five 17 and 19 or 101 and 103 Jang showed that for some integer n that is at most 70 million. There are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by n. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: [00:29:00] spectrum is archive on iTunes university. Our special link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Professor Meredith Metzger of Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Utah discusses how ocean waves can be used to generate electricity and how she engages students in learning complex subjects.
Professor Meredith Metzger of Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Utah discusses how ocean waves can be used to generate electricity and how she engages students in learning complex subjects.
Professor Meredith Metzger of Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Utah discusses how ocean waves can be used to generate electricity and how she engages students in learning complex subjects.
The Human Power Generation in Fitness Facilities research project will create a human power generation center at the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facilities to develop new technologies and methods for energy conservation and power generation.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 [00:00:30] minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with [inaudible], a fifth year mechanical engineering and Applied Mathematics major at UC Berkeley, who along with Kimberly Lau, launched the human power gym project. After conducting a feasibility study, they are attempting to design and prototype [00:01:00] an elliptical exercise machine for the UC Berkeley recreational sports facility that will generate electricity. Rather than consume it, the generated electricity will be put back into the electrical grid. The project began in the summer of 2009 Maha g talks about her enthusiasm for the project and the challenges to make it a reality. Maha and I are joined by Rick [inaudible] for the interview. This interview is prerecorded and edited. [00:01:30] Maha, could you please explain the project you're working on currently? Speaker 4: Okay, so I'm working on a project titled The Human Pirate Gym Project. It's part of the Berkeley Energy and Sustainability Laboratory in the mechanical engineering department. And the goal of our project is to harness human power from exercise machines currently in the recreational sports facility or the RSF at UC Berkeley. And we're hoping to retrofit and 28 elliptical machines to harness human power and send it back to the electric grid and also work an energy education [00:02:00] campaign to improve energy literacy among the members of the RSF and people who frequent the facility to give them a better idea of sustainability and energy. Speaker 3: How did that idea bubble up for you and the group you're working on this with? Speaker 4: So I'm working on this with a graduate student named Kimberly Lough in the Mechanical Engineering Department under professor at Gugino. We came across it separately. She came across the idea when she's working out in the RSF, seeing all these people burning calories and you know, exercising so much, they must be expending a lot of energy and there must [00:02:30] be a way to harness that. And then I came across the idea because I was reading up about, um, there's a project harnessing children's power to pump water up out of the wells. And in African villages they create like a, a carousel where kids can play on and when they spin around the carousel they're actually pumping water up into a tank. And so I thought, well if kids run around and harness all this energy, why can't we do something like this and the gyms across the u s Speaker 3: and much power do you Speaker 5: expect [00:03:00] to be able to generate from all this? Speaker 4: So unfortunately it's not a lot of power. Um, the RSF uses on the order of 1.5 million kilowatt hours a year and energy consumption and by other things like air conditioning or where's all that go? So actually it's not air conditioning cause we live in a bay area. We don't actually have air conditioning and the RSF cause it stays relatively cool. It's definitely for heating and air circulation and ventilation. And then a good chunk of it goes to lights and actually [00:03:30] powering treadmills, believe it or not. So if we haven't retrofitted 28 elliptical machines, it would harness about 10,000 kilowatt hours a year, which is enough to power a small house but only 1% of what the RSF needs to run its daily use. The treadmill is actually account for about 12% of the energy use at the RSF and not a lot of people know that. So part of our project, we're trying to encourage people to use elliptical machines or other self powered machines that use less power that but give comparable workouts [00:04:00] according to fitness trainers and the hopes that maybe they'll switch over to more ellipticals and the treadmills can be replaced in the RSF cause they actually acquire. I think running on a treadmill for about an hour requires as much energy as doing a load of laundry, washing and drying. Speaker 5: How did the project come together in terms of getting an off the ground funding, all those things. Speaker 4: So two years ago I am part of the UC leads program, which is, I forgot what it stands for, but it's some type of scholarship program at Berkeley that encourages summer research. [00:04:30] So I was funded by them to do a summer research project two years ago and I contacted fresher ag Gino with this idea saying, hey, I'm funded, can I work in your lab with Kimberley? She's really awesome. Wants to work in this project. So the UC leads program funded me for that summer and they've also funded me to continue researching in the fall and of that year, fall 2009 so we researched the feasibility of this and tried to come up with some energy estimates on how much energy we could harness, how much that would cost, what sort of things would need to be in place [00:05:00] to continue actually with the retrofits. And we actually published a paper in a conference and a spring of 2010 with the American Society of mechanical engineers. And after that we started applying for funds through the Green Initiative Fund, the Sigmas I m research honors society and the Chancellors Green, the chancellor's Green Fund cacs, I believe it's called the Chancellor's Advisory Committee for sustainability. And so with all those three funding resources, we have about a little over $17,000 [00:05:30] currently to actually go ahead and build these prototypes and get going with the retrofits at the gym. Speaker 4: Can you talk about your, a conference paper anymore. So what does it, what was it about? So our conference paper was published in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Conference on Energy Sustainability in May of 2010 and it just talked about our feasibility study on the RSF detailing how much power could be harnessed from the RSF, what [00:06:00] percentage of power consumption that accounted for. And it also detailed sort of how long it would take to payback such a system. And it also looked at the light life cycle assessment of the system and life cycle assessment basically means you take into account all the energy required to make the components that you'll be adding to the system and then take a look at how long it would take to payback the co two emissions related to that energy that was put in. So I think we estimated that unfortunately it's relates [00:06:30] to at savings of only a thousand dollars a year in energy consumption because energy is so cheap out here. But if we made CO2 emissions, the metric instead of dollars, the system would pay itself off in like two to three years of CO2 savings. If we assume that the energy generated at the RSF no longer needs to be generated by say PGNE and then taking into account how much CO2 is required for those few components that we have to add to each elliptical. So that was a much less bleak outlook. Speaker 5: [00:07:00] Did you draw on previous attempts to do the same thing? Speaker 4: So we redid a lot of research and a couple other gyms across the nation have retrofitted elliptical machines specifically to harness human power. And we talked to them and we talked to, there's a company called rewrap that actually does commercial retrofits and they approached the RSF also saying that they could do the retrofits before I came onto the project and we talked to those jams and I actually had a chance to visit one of them in [inaudible] at Oregon state. And [00:07:30] for some reason they didn't seem to be completely happy with the setup. For one reason or another, they didn't think it was producing as much energy as they thought. And so based on those interviews I had done with gyms across the nation, we decided to try and come up with our own retrofit. Also, cal poly has done a retrofit of their gym facility and are harnessing power from ellipticals in their own method. Speaker 4: And the gym users there are really, really excited about it and really enjoy it a lot more than people at Oregon State for instance. So that's kind of why we're trying to go [00:08:00] ahead with doing it ourselves. Um, based on interviews and research from other gyms, definitely. And are only the ellipticals being used to generate power. Currently they're the easiest to tap into because they have an onboard generator that will convert your human power movement into resistance, electrical resistance that you feel when you're working out. So it's really easy to tap into them, just remove the resistance mechanism and instead put in something like an inverter to convert the DC power [00:08:30] you're generating to AC power. That can be used and sent back to the grid. Speaker 5: When the cal poly success, was there any attempt to collaborate with them? Speaker 4: We did approach them and ask them for collaboration, but I believe they are, have, they have some sort of patents on their devices now and it's very proprietary and so they're not, they're various hesitant to work with us and so if we create our own solution we're hoping to be much more open about it and sort of spread it around to any universities who want to do this on their own. Jim, [00:09:00] because we've had such a hard time contacting other people for help that we want to make sure it's easier for others. Speaker 6: You are listening to spectrum on the KALX Berkeley, we are talking with Mar Haji, but the human power gym project of which she is a founding member. Speaker 5: What's been the most challenging aspect [00:09:30] of the project? Speaker 4: I think definitely recruiting people for the project because we've seen so many people come and go last year in our teams that has been really hard to get anything done. Um, we really need people who are skilled in electronics and mechanical engineering and unfortunately I don't have a very big electronics background myself and since I'm graduating in December, I have a lot of requirements that I need to meet and I can't give my all to the project as I could two years ago. So it's been really hard to find people who are as motivated or as determined about the [00:10:00] project to go ahead and finish it up and follow it through and hand it off and I, so that's been a big, big challenge I think. Speaker 5: Is that something that you want to do? Do you want to recruit people what he was attempting to do in that vein? Speaker 4: Yeah, we definitely want to recruit people because it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of minds to prototype one elliptical and then expand it to the entire gym. And like I said, since I'm graduating in December, I definitely want to hand off the project to other people to sort of conduct follow up [00:10:30] research. Like okay, if we put these ellipticals and generate power, do people actually learn from this? Do the energy literacy rates go up, do treadmills get useless. There's a whole host of followup research that could be done and hasn't been done yet and definitely has a potential of being published and presented around the nation I think. Speaker 5: So are you mostly interested in recruiting other engineers and how would they sign up? Speaker 4: So I'm interested in [inaudible] definitely recruiting um, upperclassmen engineers but also [00:11:00] people who have experience in signage and education. Cause I know, I don't know how best to reach people or get the knowledge disseminated about all the energy sustainability going on in the RSF. And that would definitely be helpful. And if anyone's interested they can just email RSF energy@gmail.com we'd be happy to have them on board. Speaker 5: All right. Any of your current efforts documented anywhere of Wiki or mainly list or anything like that? Speaker 4: So we have a webpage, hpg.berkeley.edu [00:11:30] needs to be updated for the past couple months. But generally a lot of our documents are there and we also have a [inaudible] website for all the members of the project. And that's how we communicate for papers that need to be read or budgets they need to be updated and that kind of thing. Speaker 5: Do you know if, uh, there are sort of commercial efforts in this too, like commercial? Uh, Speaker 4: so besides outside, outside universities, I guess so universities are really unique in that their gym [00:12:00] facilities are open for so many hours and frequent, so many users. So unfortunately Jim is like 24 hour fitness even though they're open 24 hours, don't see as much throughput of people or patrons that, um, university of do. So there hasn't been a huge push and they're at that direction. I believe there's a handful of them that use at least the re-roof technology. And there's a couple of gyms that are like, I think there's one gym in Hong Kong that's created some type of something called like a human dynamo where four people will bike on [00:12:30] the sort of combined system and move their hands at the same time and that will generate a whole lot of power for the gym. But aside from that, then not much that I know, it seems like a natural for a gym setting is to make it competitive somehow. I know both Oregon State and University of Oregon did retrofits and they sort of had a competition like who can create the most energy. Um, and we hope when we actually retrofit the gym to involve some sort of LCD panel that reads out which elliptical is [00:13:00] generating the most energy, you know, compare it across the gym and everyone can see, oh no like I gotta be 12 like my friends over there or something. Yeah. Speaker 4: What's been the most unexpected thing that's happened in the project? So finding an elliptical machine was really hard. We originally thought that it was this elliptical machine floating around and so to haul on the sixth floor that no one really had, no one really knew who it belonged to. So we thought we'd use that for our project. We had [00:13:30] took a while to track down who the professor was who had it laying around and he gladly donated it to our project. And then when we took it apart, we found out that its internal mechanism was completely different than those used at the gym. It was using less electrical resistance like modern, most ellipticals use in was using more mechanical resistance, um, something much more like a recumbent bicycle. So we were like, well if we prototype on this system it's really not going to be compatible with anything in the gym. Speaker 4: So then we had to contact the gym and try [00:14:00] and track down elliptical that way. And luckily they were after a couple of weeks or months, like everything fell together when we finally got it transported. And transporting those big things is also huge hassle from the RSF all the way down to attra very hall on North side on the social outreach part of it, the behavioral aspect of the project. What's been the challenge there to get that up and running? Um, so we conducted a survey of all the members of [00:14:30] the RSF and I believe something like five or 600 responded, which was great. And they, we post questions such as how much energy do you think x, Y and z machines use? Um, to get an idea of how energy literate people are about the machines at the RSF. And so we have a good base of where we think people could have their education, energy education improved. It's just a matter of figuring out the best way to actually do that. So as a mechanical engineering major, unfortunately I haven't [00:15:00] had to deal very much with energy education or engineering education and we could definitely use people on our project who know perhaps more like the psychology of a situation. Like definitely some sort of analysis on where people move in the RSF and where's the best place to place these things and how can we make them as interactive as possible to increase awareness, stuff like that. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: you are listening [00:15:30] to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Maharaji but the human powered gym project of which he is a founding member. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: are there any key things that you're learning in doing this that you might not have learned if you hadn't been involved in this project? Speaker 4: Definitely like in Berkeley engineering for the first three, three and a half years [00:16:00] of your educational career. It's very theoretical and this project has given me the advantage of doing something on the side that's much more hands on and applications of my learning at Berkeley. So that's been really awesome. And then working with other people on a project and just knowing how to work in a team is not something that people teach you in class either until you get to the higher level project-based classes and engineering. So that's been really great. And uh, working and collaborating with people, not only in the mechanical engineering department but the directors of the RSF to [00:16:30] TGF and other funding agencies and Co working together to get all that going is like intense. I can only imagine what professors have to go through to get grants written and proposals and then get the actually get that money and use it for their projects. That's been kind of like a mini Speaker 5: many experience with that. How much time do you estimate you spent working on a project? Speaker 4: Well, I've been working on it since summer of 2009 and I work anywhere [00:17:00] from five to 10 hours a week on it. I think pretty consistently with the exception of last summer and this summer because I've been away doing other internships and research projects. But every time I come back to Berkeley it's like, all right, got to get on. I gotta get going again. Speaker 5: And have your summer internships where you haven't been working on the Human Powergen bin and sort of related fields? Speaker 4: Yeah. Last summer I got the chance to go to Oregon State University and do, uh, an inner and study on the interaction [00:17:30] between wave energy devices in the environment, studying what types of organisms might colonize the environment. Cause I hadn't really, really been looked at. And then this summer I got the chance to go to MIT and study, um, fluid dynamics in the ocean engineering lab there. So starting to get a feel for the field and both on the west and the east coast and getting ideas of what professors doing what. So that's been really great. Yeah. Speaker 5: So for this project, you're probably not going to get completed by the time you graduate and if you're able to hand it off, [00:18:00] would you be involved in trying to get additional funding to make that transition happen? Speaker 4: I think at the moment we haven't used much of our funding because we've had a lot of setbacks and getting ellipticals and getting team members. So depending on the stance of the project in December, we would definitely, depending on if we've used a lot of our funds for prototyping or we're still waiting to get people on board to start prototyping, that would probably influence whether or not we apply for more funding. But I mean [00:18:30] more money's always great cause right now the funding we have budgeted, we'll only retrofit 14 of the 28 ellipticals. So if we are to consider doing all 28 we definitely need to look for more funding. I'm just sort of hesitant to do it right now because we don't actually have anything prototyped at the moment and no real product to show before we apply for more funding. Speaker 5: What is it that you like about engineering? What drew you to engineering? Speaker 4: So actually one thought I wanted to be a film major for a really long time [00:19:00] and then I went to a summer program just for like fun. I was like, okay, I'll get out of the house for a month, uh, in mechanical engineering. And they had us like take apart part printer, take apart a blender and like build these little like out of the box robots. You're just like screw a few things in the other and put a battery. And I think just the whole idea of like building things and taking things apart sort of amazed me. And I was always like really good at puzzles and math and so it was like, oh this is like way more fun than making movies. [00:19:30] So that's sort of what drawn me to it. Speaker 5: Has Your work on this project given you a better sense of how what you want to do going forward? Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely. It has encouraged me to look more into alternative forms of energy. That's definitely what I want to do in the future. Unfortunately, it's made me disheartened about human power cause going into the project I thought, Oh yeah, we can just retrofit all the ellipticals and then power the entire gym. We use so much power on a daily basis that that's not [00:20:00] feasible so definitely opens your eyes onto how much power we consume every day and I think this project has been a great stepping stone into the world of alternative energy and I hope to study something like ocean energy and ocean energy extraction for graduate studies in school. Speaker 5: Thanks very much Maha for coming on the show and sharing your experience with us. Speaker 4: No problem. This was awesome. Thanks Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:20:30] [inaudible] Speaker 5: irregular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Speaker 7: I am joined for this by Rick Karnofsky every Thursday night at 6:00 PM the California Academy of Sciences. In San Francisco's Golden Gate Park host nightlife at 21 and over event featuring [00:21:00] music, cocktails and learning and mission is $12 or $10 for members. In addition to the regular exhibits and planetarium shows, the cal academy offers theme related special events. The theme for October 13th Nightlife is designed from nature. The biomimicry institute will show off real products inspired by natural forums such as green shield, a low chemical water repellent fabric finish inspired by the microscopic texture of leaves and Formaldehyde free plywood inspired by the adhesive chemistry of intertidal muscles. [00:21:30] Current design soons will show how they incorporate biomimicry into their projects. Also enjoy stilt walking and juggling inspired by Cirque decile a his latest nature theme show totem and catch a screening of the biomimicry documentary. Second Nature. The theme for October 20th Nightlife is the science of voting, a lively roundtable moderated by the bay citizens political writer, Gary Xi, and featuring political aficionados, Alex Clemens from SF usual suspects and [00:22:00] San Francisco state universities, political science professor and outspoken tweeter. Speaker 7: Jason McDaniel. We'll discuss topics such as rank choice voting and how it affects the strategies of San Francisco's May oral candidates, University of San Francisco, professor of American politics, Corey Cook will discuss the science of voting for more information on nightlife and other events at the California Academy of Sciences. Visit their website@www.cal academy.org the October Science at Kow lecture will be given by Dr Peggy Helwig [00:22:30] and is entitled tectonic timebombs earthquakes near and far. She will talk about the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, New Zealand, Japan, and Virginia as well as the earthquake hazard from faults in our own backyard. Dr Helwig is the operations manager of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. The lecture is at 11:00 AM on Saturday, October 15th in the genetics and plant biology. Building room 100 [00:23:00] for more details, visit the website science@caldotberkeley.edu Lawrence Berkeley national lab is having a free open house on Saturday, October 15th you could attend from either 10:00 AM to 1230 or from 1230 until 3:00 PM the theme of the show is Cirque de Sciences and the open house will feature exhibits, tours of the advanced light source and guest house performances, hands on science, investigations for children [00:23:30] and lectures on Supernovas, biofuels computing, ancient sounds, plasma beams, indoor air pollution and scientific visualization. There'll be food available for purchase. For more information and to register for this event, visit Speaker 3: www.lbl.gov/open house. The Biosafety Alliance presents a global citizens report on the state of genetically modified organisms. False promises, [00:24:00] failed technologies. These reports highlight scientific research and empirical evidence from around the globe demonstrating how genetically modified seeds and crops have failed to deliver the advertised promises. The Speakers will be Dr Yvan Donnas, Shiva philosopher, environmental activist and ECO feminist. Debbie Barker International Program Director Center for food safety. Miguel LTA Ari, associate professor of agroecology at UC Berkeley. [00:24:30] This event will happen October 13th, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center four zero one Venice Avenue, San Francisco. The event is free and donations are accepted. If you would like to RSVP, go to the website, global state of gmos.eventbrite.com there will also be a press conference [00:25:00] for the reports at the San Francisco City Hall at noon October 13th featuring Dr Vandana, Shiva elected officials and other Speakers Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 3: Now three news stories that caught our attention. Genetically engineered canola growing outside of established cultivation [00:25:30] regions across North Dakota. A study published by the online journal plus one reports the genetically engineered canola endowed with herbicide resistance have been found growing outside of established cultivation regions along road sides across North Dakota. These escaped plants were found statewide and account for 45% of the total roadside plants sampled. Furthermore, populations were found to persist [00:26:00] from year to year and reached thousands of individuals. The authors found that the escaped plants could hybridize with each other to create novel combinations of transgenic traits, and the authors argue that their result more than 10 years after the initial release of genetically engineered canola raises questions of whether adequate oversight and monitoring protocols are in place in the u s to track the environmental impact of biotech products. Berkeley's [00:26:30] own cell Perlmutter is sharing the Nobel Prize in physics with Adam G. Reese of the John Hopkins University and Brian Schmidt of Australian national universities, Mt. Strom Lowe and siding spring observatories pro mudder led the Supernova Speaker 7: cosmology project that in 1998 became one of the two scientific efforts that are credited with discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe and Schmidt led the competing supernova search team. Pearl mudder is UC Berkeley's 22nd Nobel Medal [00:27:00] winner and the ninth winner of the Physics Prize. The discovery of the accelerating expansion has formed theories of the distant future of an ever expanding universe and has alleged the speculation of dark energy that theoretically makes up almost three quarters of the matter and energy of the universe, but it has proven elusive to observe. Perlmutter has recently been working with NASA and the u s department of Energy to build and launch the first space-based observatory designed specifically to understand the nature of dark energy. Speaker 3: [00:27:30] This news item is also a job opening NASA to seek applicants for next astronaut candidate class. In early November, NASA will seek applicants for its next class of astronaut candidates who will support long-duration missions to the International Space Station and future deep space exploration activities. For more information, visit the website, astronauts.nasa.gov a bachelor's degree in engineering, science, or math [00:28:00] and three years of relevant professional experience are required in order to be considered. Typically, successful applicants have significant qualifications in engineering or science or extensive experience flying high performance jet aircraft. After applicant interviews and evaluations, NASA expects to announce the final selections in 2013 and training to begin that August. Additional information about the astronaut candidate program [00:28:30] is available by calling the astronaut selection office at area code (281) 483-5907 Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 6: The music played during the show is written and performed by David lost honor from his album titled Folk and Acoustic Speaker 2: [00:29:00] [inaudible]. Speaker 6: Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to SVA meal. Our email address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The Human Power Generation in Fitness Facilities research project will create a human power generation center at the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facilities to develop new technologies and methods for energy conservation and power generation.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 [00:00:30] minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with [inaudible], a fifth year mechanical engineering and Applied Mathematics major at UC Berkeley, who along with Kimberly Lau, launched the human power gym project. After conducting a feasibility study, they are attempting to design and prototype [00:01:00] an elliptical exercise machine for the UC Berkeley recreational sports facility that will generate electricity. Rather than consume it, the generated electricity will be put back into the electrical grid. The project began in the summer of 2009 Maha g talks about her enthusiasm for the project and the challenges to make it a reality. Maha and I are joined by Rick [inaudible] for the interview. This interview is prerecorded and edited. [00:01:30] Maha, could you please explain the project you're working on currently? Speaker 4: Okay, so I'm working on a project titled The Human Pirate Gym Project. It's part of the Berkeley Energy and Sustainability Laboratory in the mechanical engineering department. And the goal of our project is to harness human power from exercise machines currently in the recreational sports facility or the RSF at UC Berkeley. And we're hoping to retrofit and 28 elliptical machines to harness human power and send it back to the electric grid and also work an energy education [00:02:00] campaign to improve energy literacy among the members of the RSF and people who frequent the facility to give them a better idea of sustainability and energy. Speaker 3: How did that idea bubble up for you and the group you're working on this with? Speaker 4: So I'm working on this with a graduate student named Kimberly Lough in the Mechanical Engineering Department under professor at Gugino. We came across it separately. She came across the idea when she's working out in the RSF, seeing all these people burning calories and you know, exercising so much, they must be expending a lot of energy and there must [00:02:30] be a way to harness that. And then I came across the idea because I was reading up about, um, there's a project harnessing children's power to pump water up out of the wells. And in African villages they create like a, a carousel where kids can play on and when they spin around the carousel they're actually pumping water up into a tank. And so I thought, well if kids run around and harness all this energy, why can't we do something like this and the gyms across the u s Speaker 3: and much power do you Speaker 5: expect [00:03:00] to be able to generate from all this? Speaker 4: So unfortunately it's not a lot of power. Um, the RSF uses on the order of 1.5 million kilowatt hours a year and energy consumption and by other things like air conditioning or where's all that go? So actually it's not air conditioning cause we live in a bay area. We don't actually have air conditioning and the RSF cause it stays relatively cool. It's definitely for heating and air circulation and ventilation. And then a good chunk of it goes to lights and actually [00:03:30] powering treadmills, believe it or not. So if we haven't retrofitted 28 elliptical machines, it would harness about 10,000 kilowatt hours a year, which is enough to power a small house but only 1% of what the RSF needs to run its daily use. The treadmill is actually account for about 12% of the energy use at the RSF and not a lot of people know that. So part of our project, we're trying to encourage people to use elliptical machines or other self powered machines that use less power that but give comparable workouts [00:04:00] according to fitness trainers and the hopes that maybe they'll switch over to more ellipticals and the treadmills can be replaced in the RSF cause they actually acquire. I think running on a treadmill for about an hour requires as much energy as doing a load of laundry, washing and drying. Speaker 5: How did the project come together in terms of getting an off the ground funding, all those things. Speaker 4: So two years ago I am part of the UC leads program, which is, I forgot what it stands for, but it's some type of scholarship program at Berkeley that encourages summer research. [00:04:30] So I was funded by them to do a summer research project two years ago and I contacted fresher ag Gino with this idea saying, hey, I'm funded, can I work in your lab with Kimberley? She's really awesome. Wants to work in this project. So the UC leads program funded me for that summer and they've also funded me to continue researching in the fall and of that year, fall 2009 so we researched the feasibility of this and tried to come up with some energy estimates on how much energy we could harness, how much that would cost, what sort of things would need to be in place [00:05:00] to continue actually with the retrofits. And we actually published a paper in a conference and a spring of 2010 with the American Society of mechanical engineers. And after that we started applying for funds through the Green Initiative Fund, the Sigmas I m research honors society and the Chancellors Green, the chancellor's Green Fund cacs, I believe it's called the Chancellor's Advisory Committee for sustainability. And so with all those three funding resources, we have about a little over $17,000 [00:05:30] currently to actually go ahead and build these prototypes and get going with the retrofits at the gym. Speaker 4: Can you talk about your, a conference paper anymore. So what does it, what was it about? So our conference paper was published in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Conference on Energy Sustainability in May of 2010 and it just talked about our feasibility study on the RSF detailing how much power could be harnessed from the RSF, what [00:06:00] percentage of power consumption that accounted for. And it also detailed sort of how long it would take to payback such a system. And it also looked at the light life cycle assessment of the system and life cycle assessment basically means you take into account all the energy required to make the components that you'll be adding to the system and then take a look at how long it would take to payback the co two emissions related to that energy that was put in. So I think we estimated that unfortunately it's relates [00:06:30] to at savings of only a thousand dollars a year in energy consumption because energy is so cheap out here. But if we made CO2 emissions, the metric instead of dollars, the system would pay itself off in like two to three years of CO2 savings. If we assume that the energy generated at the RSF no longer needs to be generated by say PGNE and then taking into account how much CO2 is required for those few components that we have to add to each elliptical. So that was a much less bleak outlook. Speaker 5: [00:07:00] Did you draw on previous attempts to do the same thing? Speaker 4: So we redid a lot of research and a couple other gyms across the nation have retrofitted elliptical machines specifically to harness human power. And we talked to them and we talked to, there's a company called rewrap that actually does commercial retrofits and they approached the RSF also saying that they could do the retrofits before I came onto the project and we talked to those jams and I actually had a chance to visit one of them in [inaudible] at Oregon state. And [00:07:30] for some reason they didn't seem to be completely happy with the setup. For one reason or another, they didn't think it was producing as much energy as they thought. And so based on those interviews I had done with gyms across the nation, we decided to try and come up with our own retrofit. Also, cal poly has done a retrofit of their gym facility and are harnessing power from ellipticals in their own method. Speaker 4: And the gym users there are really, really excited about it and really enjoy it a lot more than people at Oregon State for instance. So that's kind of why we're trying to go [00:08:00] ahead with doing it ourselves. Um, based on interviews and research from other gyms, definitely. And are only the ellipticals being used to generate power. Currently they're the easiest to tap into because they have an onboard generator that will convert your human power movement into resistance, electrical resistance that you feel when you're working out. So it's really easy to tap into them, just remove the resistance mechanism and instead put in something like an inverter to convert the DC power [00:08:30] you're generating to AC power. That can be used and sent back to the grid. Speaker 5: When the cal poly success, was there any attempt to collaborate with them? Speaker 4: We did approach them and ask them for collaboration, but I believe they are, have, they have some sort of patents on their devices now and it's very proprietary and so they're not, they're various hesitant to work with us and so if we create our own solution we're hoping to be much more open about it and sort of spread it around to any universities who want to do this on their own. Jim, [00:09:00] because we've had such a hard time contacting other people for help that we want to make sure it's easier for others. Speaker 6: You are listening to spectrum on the KALX Berkeley, we are talking with Mar Haji, but the human power gym project of which she is a founding member. Speaker 5: What's been the most challenging aspect [00:09:30] of the project? Speaker 4: I think definitely recruiting people for the project because we've seen so many people come and go last year in our teams that has been really hard to get anything done. Um, we really need people who are skilled in electronics and mechanical engineering and unfortunately I don't have a very big electronics background myself and since I'm graduating in December, I have a lot of requirements that I need to meet and I can't give my all to the project as I could two years ago. So it's been really hard to find people who are as motivated or as determined about the [00:10:00] project to go ahead and finish it up and follow it through and hand it off and I, so that's been a big, big challenge I think. Speaker 5: Is that something that you want to do? Do you want to recruit people what he was attempting to do in that vein? Speaker 4: Yeah, we definitely want to recruit people because it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of minds to prototype one elliptical and then expand it to the entire gym. And like I said, since I'm graduating in December, I definitely want to hand off the project to other people to sort of conduct follow up [00:10:30] research. Like okay, if we put these ellipticals and generate power, do people actually learn from this? Do the energy literacy rates go up, do treadmills get useless. There's a whole host of followup research that could be done and hasn't been done yet and definitely has a potential of being published and presented around the nation I think. Speaker 5: So are you mostly interested in recruiting other engineers and how would they sign up? Speaker 4: So I'm interested in [inaudible] definitely recruiting um, upperclassmen engineers but also [00:11:00] people who have experience in signage and education. Cause I know, I don't know how best to reach people or get the knowledge disseminated about all the energy sustainability going on in the RSF. And that would definitely be helpful. And if anyone's interested they can just email RSF energy@gmail.com we'd be happy to have them on board. Speaker 5: All right. Any of your current efforts documented anywhere of Wiki or mainly list or anything like that? Speaker 4: So we have a webpage, hpg.berkeley.edu [00:11:30] needs to be updated for the past couple months. But generally a lot of our documents are there and we also have a [inaudible] website for all the members of the project. And that's how we communicate for papers that need to be read or budgets they need to be updated and that kind of thing. Speaker 5: Do you know if, uh, there are sort of commercial efforts in this too, like commercial? Uh, Speaker 4: so besides outside, outside universities, I guess so universities are really unique in that their gym [00:12:00] facilities are open for so many hours and frequent, so many users. So unfortunately Jim is like 24 hour fitness even though they're open 24 hours, don't see as much throughput of people or patrons that, um, university of do. So there hasn't been a huge push and they're at that direction. I believe there's a handful of them that use at least the re-roof technology. And there's a couple of gyms that are like, I think there's one gym in Hong Kong that's created some type of something called like a human dynamo where four people will bike on [00:12:30] the sort of combined system and move their hands at the same time and that will generate a whole lot of power for the gym. But aside from that, then not much that I know, it seems like a natural for a gym setting is to make it competitive somehow. I know both Oregon State and University of Oregon did retrofits and they sort of had a competition like who can create the most energy. Um, and we hope when we actually retrofit the gym to involve some sort of LCD panel that reads out which elliptical is [00:13:00] generating the most energy, you know, compare it across the gym and everyone can see, oh no like I gotta be 12 like my friends over there or something. Yeah. Speaker 4: What's been the most unexpected thing that's happened in the project? So finding an elliptical machine was really hard. We originally thought that it was this elliptical machine floating around and so to haul on the sixth floor that no one really had, no one really knew who it belonged to. So we thought we'd use that for our project. We had [00:13:30] took a while to track down who the professor was who had it laying around and he gladly donated it to our project. And then when we took it apart, we found out that its internal mechanism was completely different than those used at the gym. It was using less electrical resistance like modern, most ellipticals use in was using more mechanical resistance, um, something much more like a recumbent bicycle. So we were like, well if we prototype on this system it's really not going to be compatible with anything in the gym. Speaker 4: So then we had to contact the gym and try [00:14:00] and track down elliptical that way. And luckily they were after a couple of weeks or months, like everything fell together when we finally got it transported. And transporting those big things is also huge hassle from the RSF all the way down to attra very hall on North side on the social outreach part of it, the behavioral aspect of the project. What's been the challenge there to get that up and running? Um, so we conducted a survey of all the members of [00:14:30] the RSF and I believe something like five or 600 responded, which was great. And they, we post questions such as how much energy do you think x, Y and z machines use? Um, to get an idea of how energy literate people are about the machines at the RSF. And so we have a good base of where we think people could have their education, energy education improved. It's just a matter of figuring out the best way to actually do that. So as a mechanical engineering major, unfortunately I haven't [00:15:00] had to deal very much with energy education or engineering education and we could definitely use people on our project who know perhaps more like the psychology of a situation. Like definitely some sort of analysis on where people move in the RSF and where's the best place to place these things and how can we make them as interactive as possible to increase awareness, stuff like that. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: you are listening [00:15:30] to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Maharaji but the human powered gym project of which he is a founding member. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: are there any key things that you're learning in doing this that you might not have learned if you hadn't been involved in this project? Speaker 4: Definitely like in Berkeley engineering for the first three, three and a half years [00:16:00] of your educational career. It's very theoretical and this project has given me the advantage of doing something on the side that's much more hands on and applications of my learning at Berkeley. So that's been really awesome. And then working with other people on a project and just knowing how to work in a team is not something that people teach you in class either until you get to the higher level project-based classes and engineering. So that's been really great. And uh, working and collaborating with people, not only in the mechanical engineering department but the directors of the RSF to [00:16:30] TGF and other funding agencies and Co working together to get all that going is like intense. I can only imagine what professors have to go through to get grants written and proposals and then get the actually get that money and use it for their projects. That's been kind of like a mini Speaker 5: many experience with that. How much time do you estimate you spent working on a project? Speaker 4: Well, I've been working on it since summer of 2009 and I work anywhere [00:17:00] from five to 10 hours a week on it. I think pretty consistently with the exception of last summer and this summer because I've been away doing other internships and research projects. But every time I come back to Berkeley it's like, all right, got to get on. I gotta get going again. Speaker 5: And have your summer internships where you haven't been working on the Human Powergen bin and sort of related fields? Speaker 4: Yeah. Last summer I got the chance to go to Oregon State University and do, uh, an inner and study on the interaction [00:17:30] between wave energy devices in the environment, studying what types of organisms might colonize the environment. Cause I hadn't really, really been looked at. And then this summer I got the chance to go to MIT and study, um, fluid dynamics in the ocean engineering lab there. So starting to get a feel for the field and both on the west and the east coast and getting ideas of what professors doing what. So that's been really great. Yeah. Speaker 5: So for this project, you're probably not going to get completed by the time you graduate and if you're able to hand it off, [00:18:00] would you be involved in trying to get additional funding to make that transition happen? Speaker 4: I think at the moment we haven't used much of our funding because we've had a lot of setbacks and getting ellipticals and getting team members. So depending on the stance of the project in December, we would definitely, depending on if we've used a lot of our funds for prototyping or we're still waiting to get people on board to start prototyping, that would probably influence whether or not we apply for more funding. But I mean [00:18:30] more money's always great cause right now the funding we have budgeted, we'll only retrofit 14 of the 28 ellipticals. So if we are to consider doing all 28 we definitely need to look for more funding. I'm just sort of hesitant to do it right now because we don't actually have anything prototyped at the moment and no real product to show before we apply for more funding. Speaker 5: What is it that you like about engineering? What drew you to engineering? Speaker 4: So actually one thought I wanted to be a film major for a really long time [00:19:00] and then I went to a summer program just for like fun. I was like, okay, I'll get out of the house for a month, uh, in mechanical engineering. And they had us like take apart part printer, take apart a blender and like build these little like out of the box robots. You're just like screw a few things in the other and put a battery. And I think just the whole idea of like building things and taking things apart sort of amazed me. And I was always like really good at puzzles and math and so it was like, oh this is like way more fun than making movies. [00:19:30] So that's sort of what drawn me to it. Speaker 5: Has Your work on this project given you a better sense of how what you want to do going forward? Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely. It has encouraged me to look more into alternative forms of energy. That's definitely what I want to do in the future. Unfortunately, it's made me disheartened about human power cause going into the project I thought, Oh yeah, we can just retrofit all the ellipticals and then power the entire gym. We use so much power on a daily basis that that's not [00:20:00] feasible so definitely opens your eyes onto how much power we consume every day and I think this project has been a great stepping stone into the world of alternative energy and I hope to study something like ocean energy and ocean energy extraction for graduate studies in school. Speaker 5: Thanks very much Maha for coming on the show and sharing your experience with us. Speaker 4: No problem. This was awesome. Thanks Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:20:30] [inaudible] Speaker 5: irregular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Speaker 7: I am joined for this by Rick Karnofsky every Thursday night at 6:00 PM the California Academy of Sciences. In San Francisco's Golden Gate Park host nightlife at 21 and over event featuring [00:21:00] music, cocktails and learning and mission is $12 or $10 for members. In addition to the regular exhibits and planetarium shows, the cal academy offers theme related special events. The theme for October 13th Nightlife is designed from nature. The biomimicry institute will show off real products inspired by natural forums such as green shield, a low chemical water repellent fabric finish inspired by the microscopic texture of leaves and Formaldehyde free plywood inspired by the adhesive chemistry of intertidal muscles. [00:21:30] Current design soons will show how they incorporate biomimicry into their projects. Also enjoy stilt walking and juggling inspired by Cirque decile a his latest nature theme show totem and catch a screening of the biomimicry documentary. Second Nature. The theme for October 20th Nightlife is the science of voting, a lively roundtable moderated by the bay citizens political writer, Gary Xi, and featuring political aficionados, Alex Clemens from SF usual suspects and [00:22:00] San Francisco state universities, political science professor and outspoken tweeter. Speaker 7: Jason McDaniel. We'll discuss topics such as rank choice voting and how it affects the strategies of San Francisco's May oral candidates, University of San Francisco, professor of American politics, Corey Cook will discuss the science of voting for more information on nightlife and other events at the California Academy of Sciences. Visit their website@www.cal academy.org the October Science at Kow lecture will be given by Dr Peggy Helwig [00:22:30] and is entitled tectonic timebombs earthquakes near and far. She will talk about the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, New Zealand, Japan, and Virginia as well as the earthquake hazard from faults in our own backyard. Dr Helwig is the operations manager of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. The lecture is at 11:00 AM on Saturday, October 15th in the genetics and plant biology. Building room 100 [00:23:00] for more details, visit the website science@caldotberkeley.edu Lawrence Berkeley national lab is having a free open house on Saturday, October 15th you could attend from either 10:00 AM to 1230 or from 1230 until 3:00 PM the theme of the show is Cirque de Sciences and the open house will feature exhibits, tours of the advanced light source and guest house performances, hands on science, investigations for children [00:23:30] and lectures on Supernovas, biofuels computing, ancient sounds, plasma beams, indoor air pollution and scientific visualization. There'll be food available for purchase. For more information and to register for this event, visit Speaker 3: www.lbl.gov/open house. The Biosafety Alliance presents a global citizens report on the state of genetically modified organisms. False promises, [00:24:00] failed technologies. These reports highlight scientific research and empirical evidence from around the globe demonstrating how genetically modified seeds and crops have failed to deliver the advertised promises. The Speakers will be Dr Yvan Donnas, Shiva philosopher, environmental activist and ECO feminist. Debbie Barker International Program Director Center for food safety. Miguel LTA Ari, associate professor of agroecology at UC Berkeley. [00:24:30] This event will happen October 13th, 2011 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center four zero one Venice Avenue, San Francisco. The event is free and donations are accepted. If you would like to RSVP, go to the website, global state of gmos.eventbrite.com there will also be a press conference [00:25:00] for the reports at the San Francisco City Hall at noon October 13th featuring Dr Vandana, Shiva elected officials and other Speakers Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 3: Now three news stories that caught our attention. Genetically engineered canola growing outside of established cultivation [00:25:30] regions across North Dakota. A study published by the online journal plus one reports the genetically engineered canola endowed with herbicide resistance have been found growing outside of established cultivation regions along road sides across North Dakota. These escaped plants were found statewide and account for 45% of the total roadside plants sampled. Furthermore, populations were found to persist [00:26:00] from year to year and reached thousands of individuals. The authors found that the escaped plants could hybridize with each other to create novel combinations of transgenic traits, and the authors argue that their result more than 10 years after the initial release of genetically engineered canola raises questions of whether adequate oversight and monitoring protocols are in place in the u s to track the environmental impact of biotech products. Berkeley's [00:26:30] own cell Perlmutter is sharing the Nobel Prize in physics with Adam G. Reese of the John Hopkins University and Brian Schmidt of Australian national universities, Mt. Strom Lowe and siding spring observatories pro mudder led the Supernova Speaker 7: cosmology project that in 1998 became one of the two scientific efforts that are credited with discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe and Schmidt led the competing supernova search team. Pearl mudder is UC Berkeley's 22nd Nobel Medal [00:27:00] winner and the ninth winner of the Physics Prize. The discovery of the accelerating expansion has formed theories of the distant future of an ever expanding universe and has alleged the speculation of dark energy that theoretically makes up almost three quarters of the matter and energy of the universe, but it has proven elusive to observe. Perlmutter has recently been working with NASA and the u s department of Energy to build and launch the first space-based observatory designed specifically to understand the nature of dark energy. Speaker 3: [00:27:30] This news item is also a job opening NASA to seek applicants for next astronaut candidate class. In early November, NASA will seek applicants for its next class of astronaut candidates who will support long-duration missions to the International Space Station and future deep space exploration activities. For more information, visit the website, astronauts.nasa.gov a bachelor's degree in engineering, science, or math [00:28:00] and three years of relevant professional experience are required in order to be considered. Typically, successful applicants have significant qualifications in engineering or science or extensive experience flying high performance jet aircraft. After applicant interviews and evaluations, NASA expects to announce the final selections in 2013 and training to begin that August. Additional information about the astronaut candidate program [00:28:30] is available by calling the astronaut selection office at area code (281) 483-5907 Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 6: The music played during the show is written and performed by David lost honor from his album titled Folk and Acoustic Speaker 2: [00:29:00] [inaudible]. Speaker 6: Thank you for listening to spectrum. We're happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to SVA meal. Our email address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Paul Birkmeyer, EECS at UC Berkeley, talks about his work in the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab designing and building robots. The Lab seeks to harness features of locomotion, actuation, mechanics, and control strategies to improve millirobot capabilities.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum Speaker 2: the science and technology show [00:00:30] on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists, a calendar of local events and news. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is with Paul Burke Meyer, a phd candidate in the electrical engineering and computer science department known as Ekes. He is working with Professor Ron fearing in his biomimetic millis systems lab building six legged crawling and climbing robots. [00:01:00] The goal of the biomimetic Miller systems lab is to harness features of animal manipulations, locomotion, sensing actuation, mechanics, dynamics and control strategies to radically improve Miller robot capabilities. Miller robots are small robots. For instance, the robot Paul Burke Meyer has built named dash is 10 centimeters long, five centimeters wide and weighs 15 grams. This interview [00:01:30] is prerecorded and edited. Welcome to spectrum Paul Burke. Myer, thanks for coming. Speaker 3: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Where are you situated at cal? What's your current status there? I am pursuing my phd here. I'm entering into my fifth year actually. Uh, and I'm studying Ekes specifically electrical engineering and I'm working on robotics in the w department. So Speaker 2: are you in a specific group with any x or is [00:02:00] it just a general study thing? No, it's gotta be something more specific for a Ph d Speaker 3: it is. So, uh, I've been working with Professor Ron fearing since I arrived and he runs the biomimetic Milly systems lab. And within that he has a few different projects, but specifically I'm working on a sort of six legged crawling and climbing robots. Describe for us the robots you're building that my goal for my phd when I first came and still true is to make [00:02:30] a robot that can dynamically climb up a any sort of surface that it's presented with. So the contribution I'm trying to make is how do you make a robot that's minimally actuated? So class uses only a single actuator right now, single motor to drive all the legs. How do you create something that is passively stable? So the structure itself makes it stable when it's climbing. So you don't actually have to spend extra computation and have extra motors on there to keep you from either [00:03:00] falling off the wall or turning and things like that. Speaker 3: Um, how can you climb dynamically, not this sort of slow plodding climbing. How can you climb dynamically, rapidly up a surface and do it stable and do it with very little effort. And what does the foot look like that allows you to make a robot like that. So what does your foot need to do in order to be able to engage and disengage rapidly and without any actuation? So that's [00:03:30] sort of what my phd will say in the end, hopefully. And maybe a year and a half or two years. How did you go about building that kind of a robot? Speaker 3: So the design was long and hard. Um, so when I first came to the biomimetic Mullin systems lab, they were already using what they're calling the smart composite manufacturing process, if you want to describe it. Yeah. So the original process was taking [00:04:00] two pieces of carbon fiber and cutting mirrored slits in both. You cut a bunch of slits on the one piece and you mere it across to the other, and then you take a piece of thin Palmer thin plastic sheet and then you take those two mirrored pieces and put them together and make a sandwich structure. And so you have carbon fiber with one pattern polymer, and then the other piece of carbon fiber with the same pattern that now aligns with the other one, it [00:04:30] bends. Now it's flexible at those polymer hinges at those where those slits were originally. So if each slit is a joint, it doesn't cost you anything to cut more joints out. Speaker 3: Whereas if you're making sort of traditional machined robot out of say aluminum and ball-bearings and things, each new joint does a new bearing, which has some costs, has extra weight. So you can add many, many joints. For example, Dash I think has 75 or more joints in [00:05:00] the robot. Um, many of them are fixed, so they're used just to fold up the final structure and then you glue them in place. Each hip has six moving joints. So each hip has six moving joints. They're six hips. So Justin, the hips alone, they're already 36 moving joints. Um, whereas if you were to do this with ball-bearings, you quickly get something very big and very heavy. So this actually started off as a prototyping process. [00:05:30] Before they would use the carbon fiber process to make their robots. At the time they were making very small robotic flies and you have to assemble these flies under microscopes and it's very tedious. Speaker 3: And if you, if you mess up, so in your design process, you didn't account for something or something doesn't quite align. You've lost a couple of days just working under a microscope, your back hurts, your eyes are tired and it's very frustrating. They realize, hey, this is just a geometric [00:06:00] pattern. So if we make it very small, little fold up the exact same way as if we make it very big, the pattern is the same, the folds are the same. So they take cardboard and make the pattern just bigger and then assemble it by hand without a microscope within a few hours. And exactly, they can tell it's gonna move in the way I want. So this started off as a prototyping process designed by, uh, Aaron Hoover, who's now a professor at Olin and he just graduated. So I actually took this process and started to make [00:06:30] robot designs and realized, Hey, these are actually very functional. Speaker 3: They don't have to be prototypes necessarily. They're actually functional robots at the end. And uh, the cardboard was used, it's cheap cuts very quickly on a laser and you can go through designs very quickly. So instead of having one design that takes two days to build, you can build one in an hour or two. And so you can sort of explore that design space very quickly. So coming into the lab, they were using this manufacturing process where you design everything flat and you cut it out with the laser and you have to fold [00:07:00] it up into something that is functional and moves in the way that you want. And at the time, and still true, we don't have any good way of mapping what a 2d pattern is in the laser cutter, what that map looks like. And what you'll get out when you fold it up into three dimensions. Speaker 3: Keeping in mind that these joints can't spin 360 degrees like a ball bearing. They're limited to at most 180 [00:07:30] degrees before they hit the link on the other side. So you have to in your in your head or on paper draw these structures. Say I started with hips, how can I get a nice leg motion out? And so I designed the hips and then like extrapolated that to six hips and sort of as you go you have to sort of mentally unfold these hips and figure out what that pattern looks like and then you put six hips and then you have to make sure that it can all fit on a flat piece and that when you unfolded [00:08:00] they don't have pieces that are unfolded on top of each other. As you go. Say you'll make a pattern and the first one you make, you fold it up and you realize that some part has to go through another part because the way you designed it actually you didn't realize this part was going to fold into the other cause you have to go back and redesign it. Speaker 3: A lot of trial and error, a lot of trial and error and it took more than 50, maybe, maybe less than a hundred different design iterations for the dash that is [00:08:30] published now from where I started. And even then there were some designs I did with just a single hip just to see what a good hip design was. And it took a lot of time just to get familiar with this folding and unfolding process and laying out parts in two dimensions. And that took me six months just to get familiar with that when I first came. So, so dash is made out of this paper composite. Um, but I've made Balsa wood versions, [00:09:00] I've made fiberglass versions. I actually have not made carbon fiber just because our laser that we use to cut carbon fiber, the bed is not quite big enough so you can't cut pieces quite big enough to make dash. But now we have actually a new laser that I, I will probably pursue carbon fiber if only for the novelty. Um, so it was a, it was a long process. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum [00:09:30] line a l x Berkeley. You're talking with Paul Burke Meyer about designing and building small six legged crawling and climbing robots. Speaker 2: The robot that you've built and published a paper about is called Dash. What does that stand for? Dash stands for the dynamic autonomous sprawled hexapod. Once you'd spent a lot of time with Dash, you then wanted [00:10:00] to create an x generation. What was it out of dash that you wanted to explore with clash? Speaker 3: So the things I liked about dash were the fact that it was still fairly small, 10 centimeters long, only 15 grams and very powerful. So if I kept it attached to a wall so it couldn't fall backwards off the wall, it had a lot of power. Could accelerate to full speed within a few hundred milliseconds. I mean it was very, very powerful. So that was nice. But its failure [00:10:30] was in the fact that in order to run it has these two plates basically that move up and down and forward and back relative to each other to drive the legs. That's basically the body is the transmission and it's true, the transmission is moving up and down. And so that's actually the problem is that it's pushing itself off the wall and it does this. So that was the, the main thing I wanted to address, but I liked the way the legs moved. Speaker 3: They call it alternating tripod gait where you have three legs in contact of any one time, so you have this [00:11:00] sort of tripod of support. So I knew what I had generally that worked and I knew sort of what didn't work. And so with clash it was how do I get rid of this up and down motion? And I'd spent enough years doing this smart composite manufacturing that the transition from dash to an entirely new design was only a couple iterations before I got something that actually climbed rather than multiple 50 or so iterations. So that was a lot smoother. The hips are essentially the same, but though the way that they're driven is a little bit different. [00:11:30] And now instead of moving up and down, it's sort of moving side to side and forward and back. So it's not pushing itself off the wall. Speaker 2: Can you describe the control systems you use for your robots? So the, the Speaker 3: interesting thing with the robots that we're making in our lab is that we're trying to reduce the amount of controls necessary as much as possible. Traditional robots, heavy computational power, um, so that they can control each limb and very precisely so in, in, or wants, they don't fall over. [00:12:00] Basically the biggest problem is not falling over for, for legged robots and maintaining stability at least traditionally. So what we're trying to do is to minimize the amount of overhead you have to have, just to be functional. So we've worked with biologists here at Berkeley. They've sort of found these really interesting properties and cockroaches where if they're running over smooth terrain, if you measure their, uh, leg muscle activity, it follows some very repeatable pattern [00:12:30] over smooth terrain, meaning that they're, they're activating the legs the same and then they give them this very rough, varied terrain with bumps, maybe two or three times the height of the cockroach. Speaker 3: They're very significant and they measure the leg activity and it looks almost exactly the same as when it's running on flat terrain. So what that that said to them was the roach is basically saying run and it doesn't care what the terrain is. They've decided that there's this [00:13:00] mechanical complexity and compliance. So the legs basically act as shock absorbers. They're just running and the legs sort of compensate for any roughness in the terrain. What we're trying to do is basically have a robot that does that where you just tell the robot to run and it doesn't care what it hits or what it's running over. It just basically runs and the legs are soft enough and bend enough to sort of compensate forever variation. There isn't the terrain. So the first design of dash that actually [00:13:30] put a motor in the motor actually came from a radio shack toy and I just took the electronics from that toy because it was remote controlled. Speaker 3: Since then, the electronics have been swapped for custom electronics. A couple other students in our lab have designed really small lightweight electronics with an accelerometer and a gyroscope, even a port for uh, integrating a cell phone camera and there students who are using that cell phone camera to sort of [00:14:00] guide the robot from my end. I'm basically doing the robot design and I put these electronics on and I have two commands, three really run. And I tell it how fast and turn left or turn right. And that's it. The nice thing is you don't have to do anything more than that because it, it, it runs well and it can go over a different terrain. It can climb obstacles and dash climb obstacles as tall as itself and it doesn't really care. And so that was what that lets you do is get really [00:14:30] small CPS, really small computers that basically you put on these robots and they take very little power. But now for control, all of all they have to say is go or turn when they can use the rest of their computational time to say, read information from the camera and decide which way do I want to go? What's my objective? So from a stability controls point, it's couldn't be easier. Um, and now we're using these whatever extra [00:15:00] CPU cycles in our small board to do sort of more complicated behavior, but that's sort of another person's project. Speaker 2: What sort of applications do you see this robot having? I know that you would want to use it as a vehicle, right? To have payloads on it. Right? And it also then goes into these strange places or if it can climb walls that's astounding. Right. On its own. Right. And then how do you then utilize it? Speaker 3: The original goal was to have a robot that you could deploy [00:15:30] in search and rescue operations. So, um, say in an earthquake where you have claps buildings or claps minds, um, you can send in very small robots, uh, through the cracks, through the crevices down to find survivors. And you can have thousands of these really cheap and small robots and you don't care if 99% of the robots fail to find anyone or fail to even make it down as long as some small fraction finds a survivor, then you have, [00:16:00] technically you've succeeded. So the goal is to make lots of these small, inexpensive robots that can climb through the cracks, have sensors on them that can detect if someone's alive and then little radios to communicate with each other and communicate with the outside world to say, this is where someone is. Even if it's with some high probability that there's someone here, you know, it's worth spending your time digging in this exact location rather than having to uncover the entire building. Speaker 2: I would imagine there are lots of uses in that realm of, of sensing [00:16:30] environments just in general, whether it's a collapse, building, a search and rescue, but you're just a hazardous place to monitor. And to have these things patrolling. So there's the, the whole idea is numbers and inexpensive, right? Manufacturer, Speaker 3: right. So, so there are also proposals for environmental sensing. So deploying these robots, especially these nice mobile robots and say agricultural areas where you want to track how a crop dusters pesticides [00:17:00] travel across the countryside. You could have robots that sort of move and they can respond to say changing winds so that it can sort of get into the line of you know, the the path of these plumes of pesticides and sort of track how they're progressing across the country if they're affecting, you know, downwind communities. Also we have visions of putting these on bridges to do, checking for signs of stress on bridges and or say the nuclear power plants [00:17:30] in Japan. You could deploy these and have them run around and find you know, leaks or just have a nice mesh sort of deployed sensor network and sort of get readings from lots of different spaces and sort of try to understand how the radiation is moving. Oh Speaker 4: you are listening to spectrum line k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Paul Burke Meyer about designing and building small six legged crawling [00:18:00] and climbing robots. Speaker 2: So Paul, how did you become interested in engineering? Speaker 3: For me it was pretty clear from the beginning. So when I was younger, um, I was really interested in, well like most people in engineering right now. I built a lot of things out of Legos and connects and things and was really interested in electronics. I actually had [00:18:30] an elderly neighbor next door to me who I would go over and visit and uh, he would give me all of his popular mechanics magazines and popular science magazines when he was done reading them. And I think that was really the hook that got me because I was reading these magazines, seeing all these cool things and thinking like, how can I end up in this magazine? What can I do to be in this magazine because these are all really, really neat things. I think that was the, the original hook. Then, uh, it sort of blossomed [00:19:00] in high school. Speaker 3: We had, uh, an advanced physics class. It was the first time it was offered and it was really sort of undefined. The curriculum wasn't really well formed and uh, as a result we had some freedom that you might not normally have in a high school course to do different projects that we wanted. Uh, the teacher at the time approached me maybe two thirds of the way into the year and said, hey, I have this, uh, this little programming board that they use at MIT for basic robotics things and I just have one of them and [00:19:30] you're doing well in the class. You want to see if you can maybe make a something and we can try to define a project for you using this board. The project ended up being making a robot that could drive through a maze and pop a balloon at the end. And he actually let me pick a partner to work with me. And I actually chose my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife. Um, and so we worked on this project for a long time and had a lot of fun. We made the whole, like the car system programmed the robot [00:20:00] and it was a spectacular failure, but it really was a lot of fun. And I think that was sort of what really cemented engineering for me. Speaker 2: So you mentioned in, in talking about getting started in robotics and engineering, the the aspect of having a lot of fun with it and are you able to maintain that sense of fun and play in your work? For me Speaker 3: this is, it's all fun. It's, I feel like I'm making toys all day [00:20:30] and I don't have to work at it to keep it fun because I love making these things and I think it's really exciting to come up with new structures and sort of understand why things aren't working, what you can do to change them. So for me it's, I mean adjust the, the project itself is so I think, I think it can be fun for other people when you have a like I can make this project fun for other people by actually making something that works and [00:21:00] sharing it with people and having this cool little robot that they can play with that can run up walls and things like that. But I think, I think it's true for lots of people in their careers. I think if you find the one you like, it's fun no matter what you do as long as, as long as you get to do it. So Speaker 2: well thanks very much Paul for coming in and talking. Speaker 3: Came with us was great. You're welcome. There was a lot of fun. Speaker 4: The [00:21:30] video of dash on Youtube, search for dash resilient, high speed 16 gram x and pedal robot regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. [inaudible]. Speaker 2: The Science at Cau lecture series for July will be presented by professor Romanian Kezar Rooney [00:22:00] and will be entitled Exoskeleton Systems for medical applications. Dr Casa Rooney is a professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Robotics and human engineering laboratory is one of the world's leading experts in robotic human augmentation. The date of the lecture is Saturday, July 16th at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 which is on the northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. [00:22:30] The East Bay Science cafe is held the first Wednesday of every month that the cafe of Valparaiso at La Pena Cultural Center, 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM the cost of admittance is the purchase of a beverage or food item of your choice. Wednesday, July 6th our crystal Cha graduate student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of integrative biology at UC Berkeley will present. [00:23:00] Her topic is titled Spiders, Crustaceans, and sells omi. A story of how animals use cells to put themselves together. Speaker 2: UC Berkeley. Professor Gordon. Frankie will present a discussion on native bee populations in the bay area at the Peralta community garden. This event is free and open to the public. It will be held Saturday, July 9th at noon in the Peralta community garden. The garden address is 1400 Peralta [00:23:30] AV in Berkeley. Since today's show is at the beginning of the month, let me remind you of the free admittance days for some of the local institutions that normally charge admission. The exploratorium in San Francisco is the first Wednesday of each month. The UC botanical garden in Strawberry Canyon. Berkeley is the first Thursday of each month. The Tech Museum in San Jose is the second Sunday of each month. The Cal Academy of Science in San Francisco is the third Wednesday of each month. [00:24:00] Now several news stories from the UC Berkeley News Center. The story about a new public website providing access to extensive climate change research being conducted at California universities and research centers. Speaker 2: The website. cal-adapt.org has a variety of features tailored for different types of users, including members of the general public, concerned about their neighborhood or region decision-makers such as city planners and resource managers [00:24:30] and experts who want to examine data. The information on the website comes from peer reviewed climate change research funded by the California Energy Commission's public interest energy research program. The site displays the research data in a variety of climate change related scenarios and in map format modeling various projections such as changes in snowpack, wildfire, danger and temperature throughout the end of the century. The cal dash adapt website was developed by the [00:25:00] geospatial innovation facility at UC Berkeley's College of natural resources. Speaker 2: The journal Science gives out a monthly prize called spore. Spore stands for science prize for online resources in education. The June award was given to the molecular work bench software developed by the Concord consortium. The molecular workbench is a free open source software tool that helps learners overcome challenges and understanding the science of atoms [00:25:30] and molecules. This software simulates atomic scale phenomenon, permits users to interact with them. It can model electrons, atoms, and molecules, which makes it exceptable across physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. Students from grades five through college can use the software to experiment with atomic scale systems. The software includes an author ing tool that enables educators to create complete learning activities with simulations, [00:26:00] text, images, graphs, navigation links and embedded assessments. Hundreds of these activities have been created and tested in classrooms. Educators are free to download and use completed activities or simulations or create their own. Speaker 2: The website is mw.concorde.org/modeler/in an earlier show, we carried a story [00:26:30] about research into toxic flame retardant chemicals in clothing and furniture which pose health hazards for babies and young children. A companion study on the efficacy of the flame retardants was released in June in a peer study presented at the 10th annual symposium on fire safety science at the University of Maryland on June 21st scientists found that California's furniture flammability standard technical bulletin one one seven does not provide measurable fire safety [00:27:00] benefits. The standard has led to the unnecessary use of flame retardant chemicals at high levels and baby products and furniture, widespread human and animal exposure, and the potential to harm human health and the environment. While there are no proven fire safety benefits to technical bulletin one one seven the chemicals used to meet it leak from furniture into house dust, which is ingested by people in pets. Speaker 2: Humans studies have shown associations [00:27:30] between increased flame retardant body levels and reduced IQ in children reduced fertility and to Krinn and thyroid disruption changes in male hormone levels, adverse birth outcomes and impaired development. Flame retardants have been found in the bodies of nearly all north Americans tested with the highest human levels in young children and Californians. Dogs have retardant [00:28:00] levels up to 10 times higher than humans and cats because of their grooming behavior have levels up to 100 times higher. The California standard established by technical bulletin one one seven has become a de facto national standard legislation to allow an alternative fabric flammability standard that would provide equal or greater fire safety without the use of chemical flame retardants failed last month with strong opposition [00:28:30] from lobbyists for Kim Torah, Alber Marley and Israeli chemicals limited. For more information and the complete study, go to the website, green science policy.org Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 4: The abuse occurred during the show is by Listonic Donna David from his album folk and acoustic made [00:29:00] available by a creative Commons attribution only licensed 3.0 editing assistance was provided by Judith White Marceline and Gretchen Sanders. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have any comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks [00:29:30] at the same time. Speaker 5: [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Paul Birkmeyer, EECS at UC Berkeley, talks about his work in the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab designing and building robots. The Lab seeks to harness features of locomotion, actuation, mechanics, and control strategies to improve millirobot capabilities.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum Speaker 2: the science and technology show [00:00:30] on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists, a calendar of local events and news. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is with Paul Burke Meyer, a phd candidate in the electrical engineering and computer science department known as Ekes. He is working with Professor Ron fearing in his biomimetic millis systems lab building six legged crawling and climbing robots. [00:01:00] The goal of the biomimetic Miller systems lab is to harness features of animal manipulations, locomotion, sensing actuation, mechanics, dynamics and control strategies to radically improve Miller robot capabilities. Miller robots are small robots. For instance, the robot Paul Burke Meyer has built named dash is 10 centimeters long, five centimeters wide and weighs 15 grams. This interview [00:01:30] is prerecorded and edited. Welcome to spectrum Paul Burke. Myer, thanks for coming. Speaker 3: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Where are you situated at cal? What's your current status there? I am pursuing my phd here. I'm entering into my fifth year actually. Uh, and I'm studying Ekes specifically electrical engineering and I'm working on robotics in the w department. So Speaker 2: are you in a specific group with any x or is [00:02:00] it just a general study thing? No, it's gotta be something more specific for a Ph d Speaker 3: it is. So, uh, I've been working with Professor Ron fearing since I arrived and he runs the biomimetic Milly systems lab. And within that he has a few different projects, but specifically I'm working on a sort of six legged crawling and climbing robots. Describe for us the robots you're building that my goal for my phd when I first came and still true is to make [00:02:30] a robot that can dynamically climb up a any sort of surface that it's presented with. So the contribution I'm trying to make is how do you make a robot that's minimally actuated? So class uses only a single actuator right now, single motor to drive all the legs. How do you create something that is passively stable? So the structure itself makes it stable when it's climbing. So you don't actually have to spend extra computation and have extra motors on there to keep you from either [00:03:00] falling off the wall or turning and things like that. Speaker 3: Um, how can you climb dynamically, not this sort of slow plodding climbing. How can you climb dynamically, rapidly up a surface and do it stable and do it with very little effort. And what does the foot look like that allows you to make a robot like that. So what does your foot need to do in order to be able to engage and disengage rapidly and without any actuation? So that's [00:03:30] sort of what my phd will say in the end, hopefully. And maybe a year and a half or two years. How did you go about building that kind of a robot? Speaker 3: So the design was long and hard. Um, so when I first came to the biomimetic Mullin systems lab, they were already using what they're calling the smart composite manufacturing process, if you want to describe it. Yeah. So the original process was taking [00:04:00] two pieces of carbon fiber and cutting mirrored slits in both. You cut a bunch of slits on the one piece and you mere it across to the other, and then you take a piece of thin Palmer thin plastic sheet and then you take those two mirrored pieces and put them together and make a sandwich structure. And so you have carbon fiber with one pattern polymer, and then the other piece of carbon fiber with the same pattern that now aligns with the other one, it [00:04:30] bends. Now it's flexible at those polymer hinges at those where those slits were originally. So if each slit is a joint, it doesn't cost you anything to cut more joints out. Speaker 3: Whereas if you're making sort of traditional machined robot out of say aluminum and ball-bearings and things, each new joint does a new bearing, which has some costs, has extra weight. So you can add many, many joints. For example, Dash I think has 75 or more joints in [00:05:00] the robot. Um, many of them are fixed, so they're used just to fold up the final structure and then you glue them in place. Each hip has six moving joints. So each hip has six moving joints. They're six hips. So Justin, the hips alone, they're already 36 moving joints. Um, whereas if you were to do this with ball-bearings, you quickly get something very big and very heavy. So this actually started off as a prototyping process. [00:05:30] Before they would use the carbon fiber process to make their robots. At the time they were making very small robotic flies and you have to assemble these flies under microscopes and it's very tedious. Speaker 3: And if you, if you mess up, so in your design process, you didn't account for something or something doesn't quite align. You've lost a couple of days just working under a microscope, your back hurts, your eyes are tired and it's very frustrating. They realize, hey, this is just a geometric [00:06:00] pattern. So if we make it very small, little fold up the exact same way as if we make it very big, the pattern is the same, the folds are the same. So they take cardboard and make the pattern just bigger and then assemble it by hand without a microscope within a few hours. And exactly, they can tell it's gonna move in the way I want. So this started off as a prototyping process designed by, uh, Aaron Hoover, who's now a professor at Olin and he just graduated. So I actually took this process and started to make [00:06:30] robot designs and realized, Hey, these are actually very functional. Speaker 3: They don't have to be prototypes necessarily. They're actually functional robots at the end. And uh, the cardboard was used, it's cheap cuts very quickly on a laser and you can go through designs very quickly. So instead of having one design that takes two days to build, you can build one in an hour or two. And so you can sort of explore that design space very quickly. So coming into the lab, they were using this manufacturing process where you design everything flat and you cut it out with the laser and you have to fold [00:07:00] it up into something that is functional and moves in the way that you want. And at the time, and still true, we don't have any good way of mapping what a 2d pattern is in the laser cutter, what that map looks like. And what you'll get out when you fold it up into three dimensions. Speaker 3: Keeping in mind that these joints can't spin 360 degrees like a ball bearing. They're limited to at most 180 [00:07:30] degrees before they hit the link on the other side. So you have to in your in your head or on paper draw these structures. Say I started with hips, how can I get a nice leg motion out? And so I designed the hips and then like extrapolated that to six hips and sort of as you go you have to sort of mentally unfold these hips and figure out what that pattern looks like and then you put six hips and then you have to make sure that it can all fit on a flat piece and that when you unfolded [00:08:00] they don't have pieces that are unfolded on top of each other. As you go. Say you'll make a pattern and the first one you make, you fold it up and you realize that some part has to go through another part because the way you designed it actually you didn't realize this part was going to fold into the other cause you have to go back and redesign it. Speaker 3: A lot of trial and error, a lot of trial and error and it took more than 50, maybe, maybe less than a hundred different design iterations for the dash that is [00:08:30] published now from where I started. And even then there were some designs I did with just a single hip just to see what a good hip design was. And it took a lot of time just to get familiar with this folding and unfolding process and laying out parts in two dimensions. And that took me six months just to get familiar with that when I first came. So, so dash is made out of this paper composite. Um, but I've made Balsa wood versions, [00:09:00] I've made fiberglass versions. I actually have not made carbon fiber just because our laser that we use to cut carbon fiber, the bed is not quite big enough so you can't cut pieces quite big enough to make dash. But now we have actually a new laser that I, I will probably pursue carbon fiber if only for the novelty. Um, so it was a, it was a long process. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum [00:09:30] line a l x Berkeley. You're talking with Paul Burke Meyer about designing and building small six legged crawling and climbing robots. Speaker 2: The robot that you've built and published a paper about is called Dash. What does that stand for? Dash stands for the dynamic autonomous sprawled hexapod. Once you'd spent a lot of time with Dash, you then wanted [00:10:00] to create an x generation. What was it out of dash that you wanted to explore with clash? Speaker 3: So the things I liked about dash were the fact that it was still fairly small, 10 centimeters long, only 15 grams and very powerful. So if I kept it attached to a wall so it couldn't fall backwards off the wall, it had a lot of power. Could accelerate to full speed within a few hundred milliseconds. I mean it was very, very powerful. So that was nice. But its failure [00:10:30] was in the fact that in order to run it has these two plates basically that move up and down and forward and back relative to each other to drive the legs. That's basically the body is the transmission and it's true, the transmission is moving up and down. And so that's actually the problem is that it's pushing itself off the wall and it does this. So that was the, the main thing I wanted to address, but I liked the way the legs moved. Speaker 3: They call it alternating tripod gait where you have three legs in contact of any one time, so you have this [00:11:00] sort of tripod of support. So I knew what I had generally that worked and I knew sort of what didn't work. And so with clash it was how do I get rid of this up and down motion? And I'd spent enough years doing this smart composite manufacturing that the transition from dash to an entirely new design was only a couple iterations before I got something that actually climbed rather than multiple 50 or so iterations. So that was a lot smoother. The hips are essentially the same, but though the way that they're driven is a little bit different. [00:11:30] And now instead of moving up and down, it's sort of moving side to side and forward and back. So it's not pushing itself off the wall. Speaker 2: Can you describe the control systems you use for your robots? So the, the Speaker 3: interesting thing with the robots that we're making in our lab is that we're trying to reduce the amount of controls necessary as much as possible. Traditional robots, heavy computational power, um, so that they can control each limb and very precisely so in, in, or wants, they don't fall over. [00:12:00] Basically the biggest problem is not falling over for, for legged robots and maintaining stability at least traditionally. So what we're trying to do is to minimize the amount of overhead you have to have, just to be functional. So we've worked with biologists here at Berkeley. They've sort of found these really interesting properties and cockroaches where if they're running over smooth terrain, if you measure their, uh, leg muscle activity, it follows some very repeatable pattern [00:12:30] over smooth terrain, meaning that they're, they're activating the legs the same and then they give them this very rough, varied terrain with bumps, maybe two or three times the height of the cockroach. Speaker 3: They're very significant and they measure the leg activity and it looks almost exactly the same as when it's running on flat terrain. So what that that said to them was the roach is basically saying run and it doesn't care what the terrain is. They've decided that there's this [00:13:00] mechanical complexity and compliance. So the legs basically act as shock absorbers. They're just running and the legs sort of compensate for any roughness in the terrain. What we're trying to do is basically have a robot that does that where you just tell the robot to run and it doesn't care what it hits or what it's running over. It just basically runs and the legs are soft enough and bend enough to sort of compensate forever variation. There isn't the terrain. So the first design of dash that actually [00:13:30] put a motor in the motor actually came from a radio shack toy and I just took the electronics from that toy because it was remote controlled. Speaker 3: Since then, the electronics have been swapped for custom electronics. A couple other students in our lab have designed really small lightweight electronics with an accelerometer and a gyroscope, even a port for uh, integrating a cell phone camera and there students who are using that cell phone camera to sort of [00:14:00] guide the robot from my end. I'm basically doing the robot design and I put these electronics on and I have two commands, three really run. And I tell it how fast and turn left or turn right. And that's it. The nice thing is you don't have to do anything more than that because it, it, it runs well and it can go over a different terrain. It can climb obstacles and dash climb obstacles as tall as itself and it doesn't really care. And so that was what that lets you do is get really [00:14:30] small CPS, really small computers that basically you put on these robots and they take very little power. But now for control, all of all they have to say is go or turn when they can use the rest of their computational time to say, read information from the camera and decide which way do I want to go? What's my objective? So from a stability controls point, it's couldn't be easier. Um, and now we're using these whatever extra [00:15:00] CPU cycles in our small board to do sort of more complicated behavior, but that's sort of another person's project. Speaker 2: What sort of applications do you see this robot having? I know that you would want to use it as a vehicle, right? To have payloads on it. Right? And it also then goes into these strange places or if it can climb walls that's astounding. Right. On its own. Right. And then how do you then utilize it? Speaker 3: The original goal was to have a robot that you could deploy [00:15:30] in search and rescue operations. So, um, say in an earthquake where you have claps buildings or claps minds, um, you can send in very small robots, uh, through the cracks, through the crevices down to find survivors. And you can have thousands of these really cheap and small robots and you don't care if 99% of the robots fail to find anyone or fail to even make it down as long as some small fraction finds a survivor, then you have, [00:16:00] technically you've succeeded. So the goal is to make lots of these small, inexpensive robots that can climb through the cracks, have sensors on them that can detect if someone's alive and then little radios to communicate with each other and communicate with the outside world to say, this is where someone is. Even if it's with some high probability that there's someone here, you know, it's worth spending your time digging in this exact location rather than having to uncover the entire building. Speaker 2: I would imagine there are lots of uses in that realm of, of sensing [00:16:30] environments just in general, whether it's a collapse, building, a search and rescue, but you're just a hazardous place to monitor. And to have these things patrolling. So there's the, the whole idea is numbers and inexpensive, right? Manufacturer, Speaker 3: right. So, so there are also proposals for environmental sensing. So deploying these robots, especially these nice mobile robots and say agricultural areas where you want to track how a crop dusters pesticides [00:17:00] travel across the countryside. You could have robots that sort of move and they can respond to say changing winds so that it can sort of get into the line of you know, the the path of these plumes of pesticides and sort of track how they're progressing across the country if they're affecting, you know, downwind communities. Also we have visions of putting these on bridges to do, checking for signs of stress on bridges and or say the nuclear power plants [00:17:30] in Japan. You could deploy these and have them run around and find you know, leaks or just have a nice mesh sort of deployed sensor network and sort of get readings from lots of different spaces and sort of try to understand how the radiation is moving. Oh Speaker 4: you are listening to spectrum line k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Paul Burke Meyer about designing and building small six legged crawling [00:18:00] and climbing robots. Speaker 2: So Paul, how did you become interested in engineering? Speaker 3: For me it was pretty clear from the beginning. So when I was younger, um, I was really interested in, well like most people in engineering right now. I built a lot of things out of Legos and connects and things and was really interested in electronics. I actually had [00:18:30] an elderly neighbor next door to me who I would go over and visit and uh, he would give me all of his popular mechanics magazines and popular science magazines when he was done reading them. And I think that was really the hook that got me because I was reading these magazines, seeing all these cool things and thinking like, how can I end up in this magazine? What can I do to be in this magazine because these are all really, really neat things. I think that was the, the original hook. Then, uh, it sort of blossomed [00:19:00] in high school. Speaker 3: We had, uh, an advanced physics class. It was the first time it was offered and it was really sort of undefined. The curriculum wasn't really well formed and uh, as a result we had some freedom that you might not normally have in a high school course to do different projects that we wanted. Uh, the teacher at the time approached me maybe two thirds of the way into the year and said, hey, I have this, uh, this little programming board that they use at MIT for basic robotics things and I just have one of them and [00:19:30] you're doing well in the class. You want to see if you can maybe make a something and we can try to define a project for you using this board. The project ended up being making a robot that could drive through a maze and pop a balloon at the end. And he actually let me pick a partner to work with me. And I actually chose my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife. Um, and so we worked on this project for a long time and had a lot of fun. We made the whole, like the car system programmed the robot [00:20:00] and it was a spectacular failure, but it really was a lot of fun. And I think that was sort of what really cemented engineering for me. Speaker 2: So you mentioned in, in talking about getting started in robotics and engineering, the the aspect of having a lot of fun with it and are you able to maintain that sense of fun and play in your work? For me Speaker 3: this is, it's all fun. It's, I feel like I'm making toys all day [00:20:30] and I don't have to work at it to keep it fun because I love making these things and I think it's really exciting to come up with new structures and sort of understand why things aren't working, what you can do to change them. So for me it's, I mean adjust the, the project itself is so I think, I think it can be fun for other people when you have a like I can make this project fun for other people by actually making something that works and [00:21:00] sharing it with people and having this cool little robot that they can play with that can run up walls and things like that. But I think, I think it's true for lots of people in their careers. I think if you find the one you like, it's fun no matter what you do as long as, as long as you get to do it. So Speaker 2: well thanks very much Paul for coming in and talking. Speaker 3: Came with us was great. You're welcome. There was a lot of fun. Speaker 4: The [00:21:30] video of dash on Youtube, search for dash resilient, high speed 16 gram x and pedal robot regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. [inaudible]. Speaker 2: The Science at Cau lecture series for July will be presented by professor Romanian Kezar Rooney [00:22:00] and will be entitled Exoskeleton Systems for medical applications. Dr Casa Rooney is a professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Robotics and human engineering laboratory is one of the world's leading experts in robotic human augmentation. The date of the lecture is Saturday, July 16th at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 which is on the northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. [00:22:30] The East Bay Science cafe is held the first Wednesday of every month that the cafe of Valparaiso at La Pena Cultural Center, 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM the cost of admittance is the purchase of a beverage or food item of your choice. Wednesday, July 6th our crystal Cha graduate student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of integrative biology at UC Berkeley will present. [00:23:00] Her topic is titled Spiders, Crustaceans, and sells omi. A story of how animals use cells to put themselves together. Speaker 2: UC Berkeley. Professor Gordon. Frankie will present a discussion on native bee populations in the bay area at the Peralta community garden. This event is free and open to the public. It will be held Saturday, July 9th at noon in the Peralta community garden. The garden address is 1400 Peralta [00:23:30] AV in Berkeley. Since today's show is at the beginning of the month, let me remind you of the free admittance days for some of the local institutions that normally charge admission. The exploratorium in San Francisco is the first Wednesday of each month. The UC botanical garden in Strawberry Canyon. Berkeley is the first Thursday of each month. The Tech Museum in San Jose is the second Sunday of each month. The Cal Academy of Science in San Francisco is the third Wednesday of each month. [00:24:00] Now several news stories from the UC Berkeley News Center. The story about a new public website providing access to extensive climate change research being conducted at California universities and research centers. Speaker 2: The website. cal-adapt.org has a variety of features tailored for different types of users, including members of the general public, concerned about their neighborhood or region decision-makers such as city planners and resource managers [00:24:30] and experts who want to examine data. The information on the website comes from peer reviewed climate change research funded by the California Energy Commission's public interest energy research program. The site displays the research data in a variety of climate change related scenarios and in map format modeling various projections such as changes in snowpack, wildfire, danger and temperature throughout the end of the century. The cal dash adapt website was developed by the [00:25:00] geospatial innovation facility at UC Berkeley's College of natural resources. Speaker 2: The journal Science gives out a monthly prize called spore. Spore stands for science prize for online resources in education. The June award was given to the molecular work bench software developed by the Concord consortium. The molecular workbench is a free open source software tool that helps learners overcome challenges and understanding the science of atoms [00:25:30] and molecules. This software simulates atomic scale phenomenon, permits users to interact with them. It can model electrons, atoms, and molecules, which makes it exceptable across physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. Students from grades five through college can use the software to experiment with atomic scale systems. The software includes an author ing tool that enables educators to create complete learning activities with simulations, [00:26:00] text, images, graphs, navigation links and embedded assessments. Hundreds of these activities have been created and tested in classrooms. Educators are free to download and use completed activities or simulations or create their own. Speaker 2: The website is mw.concorde.org/modeler/in an earlier show, we carried a story [00:26:30] about research into toxic flame retardant chemicals in clothing and furniture which pose health hazards for babies and young children. A companion study on the efficacy of the flame retardants was released in June in a peer study presented at the 10th annual symposium on fire safety science at the University of Maryland on June 21st scientists found that California's furniture flammability standard technical bulletin one one seven does not provide measurable fire safety [00:27:00] benefits. The standard has led to the unnecessary use of flame retardant chemicals at high levels and baby products and furniture, widespread human and animal exposure, and the potential to harm human health and the environment. While there are no proven fire safety benefits to technical bulletin one one seven the chemicals used to meet it leak from furniture into house dust, which is ingested by people in pets. Speaker 2: Humans studies have shown associations [00:27:30] between increased flame retardant body levels and reduced IQ in children reduced fertility and to Krinn and thyroid disruption changes in male hormone levels, adverse birth outcomes and impaired development. Flame retardants have been found in the bodies of nearly all north Americans tested with the highest human levels in young children and Californians. Dogs have retardant [00:28:00] levels up to 10 times higher than humans and cats because of their grooming behavior have levels up to 100 times higher. The California standard established by technical bulletin one one seven has become a de facto national standard legislation to allow an alternative fabric flammability standard that would provide equal or greater fire safety without the use of chemical flame retardants failed last month with strong opposition [00:28:30] from lobbyists for Kim Torah, Alber Marley and Israeli chemicals limited. For more information and the complete study, go to the website, green science policy.org Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 4: The abuse occurred during the show is by Listonic Donna David from his album folk and acoustic made [00:29:00] available by a creative Commons attribution only licensed 3.0 editing assistance was provided by Judith White Marceline and Gretchen Sanders. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have any comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks [00:29:30] at the same time. Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Building Science! Why do buildings fail? What is being done to solve the problems? How do we stop IAQ problems before they start? This week on IAQ Radio we have Bob Wendt a research architect specializing in building science investigations of residential buildings. Bob retired from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Buildings Technology Center in January 2008. He is currently an independent consultant and an adjunct professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Tuskegee University. Bob's current activities include research into the impact of mold and contaminants on residential building materials that have been subjected to flooding or other water damage. This work has been in support of the Department of Homeland Security's Disaster- Resilient Homes project. Join IAQ Radio and this weeks special guest to discuss how we can build better buildings.
Building Science! Why do buildings fail? What is being done to solve the problems? How do we stop IAQ problems before they start? This week on IAQ Radio we have Bob Wendt a research architect specializing in building science investigations of residential buildings. Bob retired from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Buildings Technology Center in January 2008. He is currently an independent consultant and an adjunct professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Tuskegee University. Bob's current activities include research into the impact of mold and contaminants on residential building materials that have been subjected to flooding or other water damage. This work has been in support of the Department of Homeland Security's Disaster- Resilient Homes project. Join IAQ Radio and this weeks special guest to discuss how we can build better buildings.