Darryll Pines, Ph.D. - US grants

Proposal #: CMS-0004361
PI: Darryll Pines
Institution: University of Maryland

ABSTRACT:
A workshop focused on health monitoring of long span bridges is to be held in conjunction with the 2001 joint 8th annual Smart Structures and Materials Conference and the 6th annual Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) for Health Monitoring and Diagnostics Conference. Workshop topics include discussion of large/long-span bridge systems including financial, environmental, design, construction, and jurisdiction issues and current operational and maintenance practices. Research and development needs to be discussed include new and emerging technologies in NDE, smart materials and structures, intelligent transportation systems and health monitoring. Focused discussions will be held on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge Technology Demonstration Project. In particular, the workshop will permit formation of a cross-disciplinary expert panel to address critical issues associated with this opportunity for the development, integration and operation of civil infrastructure systems health monitoring in conjunction with this major transportation test-bed.

The mechanical state of structures need to be monitored for a variety of reasons, including health diagnostics and health prognostics. The task of identifying the location and nature of damage initiation and growth is made difficult by limitations of (i) sensor technologies and (ii) sensor densities; that can be achieved in realistic structures. Current technologies for mechanical sensors mostly focus on measuring deformations or stains, and are thus useful for deformation-based failure prediction models. In this study we propose to develop a novel class of MEMS-based, self-sufficient sensors that will make direct in-situ measurements of instantaneous local strain, stress, stiffness and energy density in the host structure. Specifically, we have proposed to: (a) provide proof-of-concept of the basic principles for a novel and completely new stiffness/energy sensor; (b) demonstrate a MEMS implementation of the underlying principles; and (c) demonstrate its application for damage/degradation modeling by mounting it externally to structural coupons. It is anticipated that this study will demonstrate and deliver the first working version of a fully autonomous sensor that will provide real-time, in-situ measurements of the changes in a structure's local stiffness and strain energy density. In conjunction with the damage models to be developed during this study, this sensor will provide the first real opportunity to perform real-time health prognostics in complex structures, experiencing complex dynamic loading throughout their life-cycle.

Sensing Systems is an emerging topic of national and international interest in a variety of fields from living systems, e.g. biological, to non-living, e.g. engineered systems, to energy systems and infrastructures. Convergence of sensor technologies, communications, and computing has the potential to overcome barriers of time, scale, materials and environment. The scope of this program development in sensor technology encompasses the needs, the current and emerging technologies, and efficacious partnerships required to develop and implement future sensing systems.

The main objective of this proposal is to create national forums for the development of R&D programs in smart structures and sensor technologies. Through a series of strategically crafted forum activities industry in sensors and devices and users community can be pulled together behind NSF's program aimed at advancing the emerging technologies expanding the commercial products and markets, and broadening the applications of advanced sensors and smart structures. These forums include a series of strategic programs in panel discussions, special interest topics, seminars, workshops, exhibitions, demonstrations, and projects that will be primarily held in conjunction with major conferences that address 'state-of-the-art' research, education and development projects in the areas of smart structures and sensor technologies. Such conferences include the Smart Structures and Materials with SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering), ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) and ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) annual meetings, AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Adaptive Structures Forum, Modal Analysis, etc. As anticipated, the state-of-the-art technology and the state of the practices in these emerging disciplines will also be rapidly advancing. Thus, this three-year effort will update the research community about these technological advances.

These forums will also focus on educational needs, curriculum modifications, laboratory developments and innovative pedagogy at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the area of sensor technology and smart structures.

The UMCP ADVANCE IT project has four primary goals that are aimed at creating an academic environment that supports professional growth and values the contributions of women STEM faculty. These goals include: enhancing faculty development opportunities that provide opportunities for national visibility and recognition; creating a sense of agency for women STEM faculty; promoting faculty relationships and networks; and encouragement of achievement of professional goals and contributions of women STEM faculty. To this end, the UMCP ADVANCE project proposes several activities that are expected to transform the academic environment at the institution. The project also proposes an emphasis on the underrepresentation of women of color at the institution.

Intellectual Merit. The UMCP ADVANCE IT project is unique in that it uses a basis of professional growth for women faculty to promote institutional change, particularly in the STEM disciplines. Specifically, this project not only advances STEM women faculty, but also works toward changing cultures, addresses work life balance and utilizes evaluation and social science to transform the institution.

Broader Impact. The UMCP ADVANCE IT project addresses the professional growth concerns of STEM women faculty with particular attention to women of color. To that end, this project has the potential to serve as a model for other institutions that endeavor to address similar challenges. Dissemination of research findings and project activity accomplishments are expected to occur through the traditional means of peer reviewed journal articles, a project website and national presentations and outreach efforts.

Project Description:
This effort involves the creation and implementation of an I-Corps Regional Node in DC/MD/VA (DMV) region through a partnership involving the University of Maryland College Park (UMD), the George Washington University (GWU), and Virginia Tech (VT). The proximity of the DMV node to the Washington, DC area's vibrant entrepreneurial R&D ecosystem is providing a valuable set of resources to the national I-Corps network. The node is leveraging the respective strengths of the three institutions to help guide the transition of scientific discoveries into technologies and products that benefit society. It is implementing two initiatives that are specifically designed to increase the success rate of participating teams: (1) establishing a formal DMV I-Corps Mentor Network designed to attract, train, and retain top-notch mentors and (2) offering a post I-Corps Support program to help teams with a series of follow-on activities (e.g., continued customer development, minimum viable product prototyping, technology transfer and licensing, fundraising, legal services, and hiring executive talent). The node is implementing an Online Nodal Network (ONN) that ties together and augments existing tools (e.g., LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Docs, Quora, LaunchPad Central); addressing the needs that are particularly valuable to the nature of I-Corps teams. The ONN aggregates rich content and makes it more readily accessible to the I-Corps user community. It further enables the mentor network to pool and share their expertise with multiple I-Corps teams. In addition, the node is studying the effect of I-Corps training on: (1) any adjustments in orientation toward firm creation, (2) the proportion of teams that reach initial profitability, (3) the time required to reach initial profitability, and (4) the resources expended (time, money) in the start-up process.

Broader Significance:
In addition to providing training to NSF team cohorts, the DMV node is managing a Regional DMV I-Corps program that is designed to train an additional 150 teams over a three-year period. Thirty-five of the top two hundred U.S. universities in R&D expenditures are within a 4-hour drive of the DMV node. The node is focusing on attracting teams from these top regional academic institutions, as well as from the many federal and state research labs that are unique to the DMV region (e.g., NASA, NIH, ARPA-E). The node is also engaging underrepresented minority participation and HBCUs through cooperation with the Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Inc. (GEM) consortium. It is implementing a GEM-endorsed initiative to increase the awareness of research commercialization opportunities. Small grants are being directed to promising HBCUs' teams in order to provide innovation training. The node is additionally leveraging the DMV's mentor network to support the HBCU teams.

This engineering education research project supports a workshop to explore how to apply the design and system thinking approaches engineers use to understand and improve educational systems. The goal of the workshop will be to explore how to develop meaningful synergies between education and engineering, as well as explore pathways to develop future leaders, policy makers, and administrators with competencies that span both disciplines. During the workshop an interdisciplinary group of 20 participants will develop a definition of the education system, define core competencies for understanding education at the enterprise level, and explore career pathways for future practitioners.

The broader significance and importance of this project will be to explore how new academic, research and practice communities can be created that support the large and diverse education ecosystem. The creation of these communities has the potential to build bridges across professions in which there is currently little overlap, and potentially impact the quality of education offered all US citizens. This project overlaps with NSF's strategic goals of transforming the frontiers through preparation of an engineering workforce with new capabilities and expertise. Additionally NSF's goal of innovating for society is enabled by creating results and research that are useful for society by informing educational policy and practices.

While scholars have often focused on the role of K-12 schools and four-year colleges and universities in the production of future Black engineers, far less is known about the impact of community colleges in regard to their ability to support this underrepresented population. Understanding the role of community colleges is particularly important, given the large numbers of Black students that enroll in these schools prior to transitioning to four-year engineering programs. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that a substantial number of Black engineering students who start their postsecondary careers at community colleges may in fact be first-generation Americans from sub-Saharan African countries. This study will illuminate factors that are cited by diverse Black engineering prospective and current transfer students from Maryland community colleges as critical to their ability to persist in their majors. The research team will lead a three-year study of cohorts of Black American and Black African undergraduates who plan to or have already transferred from a Maryland community college to the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. Over the duration of the project, the team will not only query the study participants about what has led to their ability to continue in their majors, but will also reveal differences between the academic paths of students born and educated in the U.S., compared to those who were educated in another country. In the context of the recent announcement of the Building Together campaign, which afforded the University of Maryland the largest gift in the history of the campus and which includes specific support for engineering transfer students, this project is especially relevant for the Clark School and community colleges in the state. Furthermore, the project leverages the already strong history that the state of Maryland has with regard to developing support programs and policies for prospective transfer students. Through this study, the University and state of Maryland will be poised to become national leaders in identifying factors that lead to the production of diverse engineering transfer students.

This research study builds upon the growing number of studies in engineering education and higher education literature that highlight the centrality of the community college experience to STEM students. The project also leverages recent works in education and social science scholarship that reveal the importance of documenting within-group differences among students broadly classified as Black or African American. Collectively, these works reveal noteworthy differences in the K-12 and college/university experiences of students who represent various areas of the African diaspora. Foregrounded by these studies, the research team in this project will examine factors cited by diverse Black collegians as crucial to their success before, during, and after transfer from a Maryland two-year college to the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. The team will employ a longitudinal design that will enable them to study three cohorts of students at multiple points along the engineering pipeline. Using primarily qualitative methods that include focus groups and interviews, researchers will analyze transcripts using systematic and inductive coding methods to identify prominent themes that consistently appear throughout the study. In order to explicate the academic experiences of two distinct Black populations - Blacks born and educated in the U.S. and Blacks born and educated in sub-Saharan African contexts - the team will develop separate interview and focus group protocols that reflect potential areas of convergence and divergence between the two populations. Broad dissemination of project results will be accomplished through a website, brochure, and one or more webinars, as well as engagement with key stakeholders representing diverse regions of the country.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The College Board currently serves 7 million students, 23,000 high schools, and 3,600 colleges through the AP and SAT annually. However, no standardized educational program exists for pre-college students to earn widely accepted, transferable, engineering course credits. In addition, there are no nationally offered professional development programs to train and certify highly qualified, secondary teachers to support an undergraduate-level engineering course at the pre-college level. An Engineering for US All (E4USA), one-year high school course has the potential to 'democratize' the learning and practice of engineering by engaging high school students and their teachers to think and practice engineering principles and design practices, like an engineer. E4USA would be equivalent to placement credit for an introductory college course, such as: 1) core engineering; or 2) an elective; or 3) a substitute required course in the general education sequence. The impact might well go beyond an E4USA credit, through the credentialing of a broad range of STEM trained teachers to instruct and assess engineering principles and design-based experiences, and therefore become cornerstones supporting the introduction of engineering principles and design as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The E4USA framework will focus on three "big ideas:" 1) Engineering and Society; 2) Engineering Processes; and 3) Essential Engineering Content, Skills and Tools. Credit would be earned by students through two integrated pathways: 1) a standard's based curriculum covering the Principles of Engineering; and 2) a submission of a design project. The national pilot will be lead by the University of Maryland College Park and include Arizona State University, Morgan State University, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech, a dissemination collaboration with NASA, and a sampling of some 70 high schools across the United States.

Engineering for US All (E4USA) would help to 'demystify' and 'democratize' engineering, and empower science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers to gain the self-efficacy, self-confidence and skills to teach and assess their students engineering-based competencies. No standardized programs currently exist at a national level to train and certify high school teachers to support a one-year high school course based on engineering principles and a design-based experience. Our proposed national pilot would enable the standardized and centralization of data collection from across the United States, thus tracking STEM teachers and their students' trajectories of learning engineering concepts through competency-based evaluations and design project submissions. A national, data repository will be created and updated at the University of Maryland to track the training of the teachers, and their students. The research will explore if: 1) a broader diversity of students will consider engineering as an academic and career option; 2) professional development (PD) can enable teachers to apply engineering concepts across STEM disciplines to train students to tackle and solve problems; and 3) the piloting of the PD models can be used to certify highly qualified teachers. Projected outcomes will include: 1) a hybrid (e.g., in-person and online) PD model that prepares STEM teachers to gain the confidence, instructional skills and assessment competencies to support E4USA; 2) guidelines for the use of a Learning Management Systems and on-line analytical tools to collect data from a diverse sampling of teachers, students, institutions, and high schools; 3) E4USA course materials and resources; and 4) E4USA models that can be aligned to state and local high school graduation requirements.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The aim of the Engineering for US All (e4usa): A National Pilot Program for High School Engineering Course and Database project is to demystify and democratize engineering through a program targeting high school students and teachers that will by nature benefit society and advance the desire for a more diverse future engineering workforce. The program expands the pool of teachers capable of teaching engineering and the number of students considering further education and/or a career in engineering. The knowledge taught by empowered teachers will provide a broader understanding of engineering intended to excite an interest in pursuing additional engineering education. Specific efforts to collaborate with a diverse group of schools (urban, suburban, rural, private, public, parochial, single gender, etc.) will ensure that this program reaches those who have previously been unable to offer engineering and/or traditionally underrepresented in engineering. Partnerships with post-secondary institutions will also create and facilitate pathways for students to explore possible engineering careers. Scaling and sustaining e4usa will allow the project to address the desired societal outcome of a more educated citizenry and increased numbers and diversity of students joining the future engineering workforce. Continued support for e4usa will establish the program as major contributor in the field of engineering and technological literacy, while bringing engineering truly to all.

Engineering for US All (e4usa): A National Pilot Program for High School Engineering Course and Database’s primary goal is to demystify and democratize the learning and practice of engineering by engaging high school students and teachers in a project-based engineering curriculum. e4usa will increase engineering literacy for all and expand opportunities for those traditionally underserved and underrepresented in engineering to pursue careers as engineers. Current NSF funding has led to the creation of the e4usa curriculum, teacher professional learning (e.g., professional development workshops and community of practice), and additional supporting resources (e.g., MyDesign®). This first of its kind program presents the engineering field using four big ideas: 1) discover engineering, 2) engineering in society, 3) engineering professional skills, and 4) engineering design. This Design and Development grant is intended to support efforts to scale, study, and sustain e4usa over the next three years. School settings will be broadened by expanding the reach of e4usa to 50 teachers and approximately 5,000 students nationwide. Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) capturing participating student and teacher data will continue and expand to include five in-depth case studies. Knowledge gained will inform central components of e4usa intended to improve developed resources, expand partnerships, garner insights into the impacts of e4usa, and increase pathways for credit and placement These insights, in conjunction with the creation of an oversight and advocacy agency, will provide the foundation for e4usa becoming a self-sustaining, independent entity supported by key partners like TeachEngineering.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.