University of Notre Dame

For the 2010-2011 academic year, I had a one-year appointment as a postdoctoral instructor and researcher in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department at Notre Dame. The duties and responsibilities of this position included conducting research and implementing teaching methods in chemical engineering education, including course instruction and recitation support for courses, investigation of student motivation, and data analysis related to student abilities and opinions in chemical engineering.

This is a marked change from my work in years prior; I worked nearly exclusively on teaching, putting me that much closer to my overall goal!

For the Spring and Summer of 2011, I was promoted to Interim Course Coordinator for the First-Year Program in the College of Engineering.

Graduate Student Instruction

Spring 2008: CBE20258, Computer Methods for Chemical Engineers. As the instructor for this course, I redesigned the content to include a substantial unit on statistics, including hypothesis testing and confidence intervals, which later fed into the already-typical unit on regression. I conducted the main lectures, wrote the homework sets, quizzes, exams, and all their solutions, and I graded the exams. I held regular office hours and maintained a course website on Concourse. I also managed three teaching assistants, who held office hours or worked as graders. This was quite the learning experience! In hindsight, I worried too much about organization and content, and for that, I wasn't as effective of an instructor as I'd have liked to be. I mismanaged the course when attendance rates dropped, by implementing in-class quizzes, when really I should have realized that I needed to provide learning incentives to attend class, not grading ones. I made these "rookie mistakes," but I've learned from them, as I hope my work in other classes will confirm.

Postdoctoral Appointment

In the summer of 2010, I worked with Jay Brockman and Kerry Meyers in the College of Engineering to develop a new module for the First-Year Engineering course: programming using LabVIEW. This marks the first semester LabVIEW will be taught to the freshmen. Our focus is primarily on Lego NXT, a robotic system that uses the same "programming language" as LabVIEW to read data using sensors and provide numeric, textual, and physical outputs (such as movement and sound). I personally authored the content for three weeks' worth of lectures and laboratory sections, as well as co-authored another four weeks of material with Dr. Meyers. I also contributed a lecture on computing and chemical engineering later in the fall semester for Dr. Brockman.

For the fall of 2010, I instructed two different courses, and in the spring of 2011, I tackled four courses.

EG10111/11111: Introduction to Engineering Systems I

In the fall, I was the lecturer for the second section of this course (over 200 students) and conducted the learning center (lab) component for section 7 (about 30 students), for the first seven weeks of the semester, the duration of our programming/robotics unit. My responsibilities included developing homework assignments, online quizzes, learning center documents, and lecture slides, as well as helping to lead a group of three faculty, three graduate instructors, and fourteen undergraduate assistants through this unit. Copies of my work and the development process therein are available upon request. I held office hours and also contributed to an engineering outreach project involving 350 local schoolchildren.

CBE20255/22255: Fundamentals of Chemical Engineering

Also in fall 2010, I was the instructor of record for four sections of CBE22255, the recitation section affiliated with our material and energy balance course, and contributed to course content in the main lecture, conducted by Dr. Jeff Kantor. My primary responsibilities included conducting all tutorial sessions, implementing the electronic portfolio project, managing four graduate assistants, and helping to develop assignments and exams (plus solutions), as well as holding regular office hours.

CBE 20258 - Computer Methods for Chemical Engineers

For spring 2011, I served as the instructor for CBE 20258, Computer Methods for Chemical Engineers. The course content was revised to focus more on application and project-based material, though many standard numerical techniques were still integrated into the projects. I believe that embedding these algorithms into more authentic projects and problems made many of them easier to learn and use.

The course was roughly divided into three units:

Finance and Statistics. We preview some of the economics traditionally covered in the senior year through capstone design, but at the same time focus on doing these arithmetic computations using MATLAB. The idea of uncertainty and probability in long-term finance forecasts will lend itself to material on statistics. The purpose of this unit is to keep the mathematics basic while students build on their MATLAB and other computational abilities.

Statics and Dynamics. This unit includes more traditional material like root-finding methods, but also moves numerical differential equations earlier in the semester so that they can be used in the final unit - and hopefully retained beyond this semester (usually differential equations are at the end of the course, and little is retained for use in junior-level courses).

Optimization: The material covered in this unit includes random sampling and optimization methods, but the focus is on a large-scale design project in which students create simulations that use models already established in material and energy balances.

I explored these ideas through a number of mechanisms, including daily homework assignments consisting of one problem each, in-class challenges, long-term projects, and formal written examinations. My aim is to develop students' ability to conduct computer methods as well as communicate their purposes and plans.

CBE 30338 - Chemical Process Control

I co-instructed this course on control and informatics with Dr. Jeff Kantor. For the first half of the semester, I helped lay the groundwork for traditional process control, and then took notes through Dr. Kantor's explanations of model predictive control and quadratic programming, which were concepts in which I had little experience. One of our primary goals was to bring this traditional chemical engineering course into the 21st century with more of a focus on information usage.

CBE 46497 - Directed Readings

I was thrilled to be the primary instructor for an independent study that investigates the way engineering ethics are taught in college. The understanding of professional and ethical responsibilities is one of the thirteen student outcomes examined by ABET, the accreditation council for engineering programs in US universities. How - when, where, and how often - is this understanding communicated in the engineering curriculum? Do students explicitly recognize the implications and importance of ethical behavior? This course culminated in a large term paper.

EG 10112/11112 - Introduction to Engineering Systems II

Building on my experiences in the First-Year Engineering Teaching Apprenticeship Program in 2009 and as a lecturer for EG 10111 in 2010, I led two sections of the learning center/laboratory component of Introduction to Engineering Systems II. As course director, I was responsible for the management of our online space for the course, including lecture notes, homework sets and solutions, and online quizzes. I lead several meetings each week with the respective lecturers, learning center instructors, and teaching assistants, to make sure that the course ran as smoothly as possible. This was a very valuable experience in which I learned a lot about the administrative aspects of the college as well as this course!

For the summer of 2011, I worked to make the transition to the new course director as smooth as possible. I have organized all past lectures, homework sets, and other documents, and work to improve aspects of the course for the 2011-2012 academic year.