• NSF Releases Report on Science and Engineering Employment

• Milwaukee School of Engineering wins 2021 NCEES Engineering Education Award

• Biden Administration Makes a Big Push to Increase Sales of Electric Vehicles
  

• A New Engineering Education Metaphor: A Garden, Not a Pipeline

• MIT Researchers use Graphene Foam to Efficiently Filter Uranium from Water

• ASEE Presents Preparing the Workforce for Industry 4.0
• Find Out What You Missed at ASEE’s Annual Conference
• Prism Magazine Seeks New Student Columnist

NSF RELEASES REPORT ON SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING EMPLOYMENT

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Milwaukee School of Engineering wins 2021 NCEES Engineering Education Award

NCEES is pleased to announce that the Milwaukee School of Engineering is the grand prize winner of the 2021 NCEES Engineering Education Award. The university received the award for a project completed by the Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management Department. The award jury met virtually on June 15, 2021, to select the $25,000 grand prize winner.

For the school’s project, Sustainable Improvements for Guatemalan Cardamom Spice Dryers, a team of primarily mechanical engineering students collaborated with professional engineers and other professionals to develop a low-cost metal attachment called a swirler, which is inserted into heat exchanger tubes in spice dryers. The swirler, at a one-time cost of two dollars, is made from sheet metal and a pair of tin snips and pliers. The solution will reduce deforestation and improve the overall quality of life in rural Guatemalan communities. The jury selected seven additional winners to receive awards of $10,000 each:

• California State University, Los Angeles
  Department of Civil Engineering
  Sustainable Recycled Water Recharge Program
• Christian Brothers University
  Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Mechanical Engineering
  GO BaBy Go—MROC
• George Mason University
  Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering
  Water Supply, Distribution, and Storage, San Pablo de Amali, Ecuador
• Lawrence Technological University
  Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering
  Oakland University Interdisciplinary Research Center 
• Seattle University
  Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
  Home for the Homeless Using Cross Laminated Waste Stream
• University of Nebraska–Lincoln
  Charles W. Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction
  Virginia Tech War Memorial Hall: Integrative Team Design
• University of Wisconsin–Madison
  Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
  Village Stormwater Mitigation

Profiles of the winning submissions will be posted as available at ncees.org/award.

BIDEN ADMINISTRATION MAKES A BIG PUSH TO INCREASE SALES OF ELECTRIC VEHICLES

President Biden unveiled an ambitious plan this month to help bring electric vehicles to the masses. His executive order mandates that zero-emission automobiles, including plug-in hybrids, comprise at least 50 percent of U.S. new-car sales by 2030. Given that sales of EVs in the country now total a meager 2 percent, that target isn’t as overly optimistic as it sounds. As NPR reports, globally, most major automakers already have announced similar or even larger goals for EV sales. And many other countries have also put into place new regulations aimed at ratcheting up the sales of EVs. Britain, for example, has banned the sale of all gasoline- or diesel-fueled cars by 2030. “These [U.S.] sales targets are certainly not unreasonable, and most likely achievable by 2030, given that automakers have already baked in large numbers of electric vehicles into their future product cycles,” Jessica Caldwell, an industry analyst at the car data site Edmunds, told NPR. Accordingly, the CEOs of the United States’ three biggest carmakers, as well as the head of the United Auto Workers union, joined Biden on the South Lawn of the White House for the signing. They were flanked by several parked EVs, including a Ford F150 Lightning, a Chevy Bolt, and a Jeep Wrangler. To put some impetus behind his EV sales plan, the president also signed an executive order that restores and slightly strengthens automobile mileage standards that were weakened by his predecessor. The rules apply to model year 2023 cars and would cut by a third the amount of carbon dioxide produced in the United States annually. And, as the New York Times reports, the White House also has on the drawing board even more stringent emissions rules for passenger cars and heavy-duty trucks that are aimed at further prodding the industry to pivot to EVs. The Biden administration wants to overhaul the U.S. auto industry so it’s better able to compete with China, which now manufactures 70 percent of the world’s EV batteries, the Times says.

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A NEW ENGINEERING EDUCATION METAPHOR: A GARDEN, NOT A PIPELINE

For nearly 40 years, engineering education has relied on a model based on a pipeline metaphor to make the profession more diverse, writes Laura Bottomley, an associate professor of electrical engineering and elementary education at North Carolina State University, in a paper presented at ASEE’s virtual CoNECD conference earlier this year. The model’s premise essentially says that efforts continually need to be made to better prepare K–12 girls and underrepresented minorities for careers in engineering and to get them excited about the profession, so they opt to journey through the pipeline to college and major in engineering. If not enough of them end up enrolling in engineering, or staying once they do, the assumption is the pipeline is leaky. So, repairs are made at critical junctions by setting up new programs to entice them in hopes of stopping the leaks. The focus is on the supply side, and students are seen as passive actors, Bottomley says. But after decades of Herculean efforts to make the model work, she adds, it’s clear it doesn’t. No progress has been made: Women continue to represent 20 percent of graduates and underrepresented minorities around 10 percent.

Bottomley suggests a new metaphor is needed: a garden. Her main point is that before you plant a garden, you prepare the soil. The analogy for engineering education: Instead of trying to change students, engineering educators need to change themselves. Just as a garden needs a diverse number of trees and plants to anchor it, engineering education needs a more diverse faculty. Bottomley argues that schools should publicly announce strategic plans for hiring more women and underrepresented minorities. She stresses that research proves that it is “not true” that there are not enough qualified job candidates to make that happen. Hiring procedures need to be redesigned to help reduce implicit bias, Bottomley says.

It’s not necessary to change all the student recruitment efforts underway in the K–12 space, but the emphasis placed on recruiting and retention needs to change, she says. For instance, retention should focus less on seminars for students that aim to teach them to succeed. Instead, more information and ideas should be given to faculty, including more workshops for faculty who teach introductory classes and more TA training. When students falter or indicate they want to drop out, it should not be assumed they’re not cut out to be engineers, because they may have other attributes that would make them good practitioners. All students should receive tutoring, not just women and minorities. All teaching materials should be linked to practical applications and simple everyday examples. Living and learning communities are a good idea. And the curriculum should be redesigned (again, to stress the use examples), and there should be more chances for student/faculty interactions.

Research proves all her recommendations work, Bottomley writes. She argues that more needs to be done to ensure that research-based teaching methods make it into the classroom and aren’t ignored. As she notes at the end of the paper, NC State has implemented many of these methods since 2009 and is seeing success, at least among women, including growing enrollments and retention and graduation rates on par with men.

Read more: https://peer.asee.org/a-new-change-model-for-recruitment-and-retention-of-underrepresented-groups-in-stem

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MIT RESEARCHERS USE GRAPHENE FOAM TO EFFICIENTLY FILTER URANIUM FROM WATER

Some of the most pernicious water pollutants are invisible to the naked eye and difficult to filter out. Uranium, for instance, can end up in water supplies from mines, nuclear waste sites, and natural subterranean deposits. Even tiny concentrations of the metal can make people very ill. A team led by Ju Li, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, has now developed a filter to efficiently remove uranium from drinking water using graphene foam. By applying a small electric charge to the foam, it can capture uranium in a solution, which precipitates out as a condensed solid crystal. The graphene foam filter can be used seven times before it loses its effectiveness. The challenge facing Li’s team was devising a filter that could exclusively extract uranium without producing toxins as a byproduct. Past experiments with carbon fibers were promising, but the results were weak and imprecise. But the researchers got around the problem using graphene foam. One of the team members had investigated the behavior of the foam for use in lithium-sulfur batteries and realized it was able to attract certain chemicals. Graphene is the 2-dimensional material comprising a single layer of carbon atoms that’s super strong and highly conductive. Graphene foam is made from layers of single sheets of graphene. The researchers are now thinking of developing an inexpensive home water filter that can be affixed to faucets, for use in areas where uranium contamination is most likely to occur.

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