Recent Results
- A summary article on Engineering Students for
the 21st Century was published in AEE.
Through support of the National Science Foundation’s Department Level Reform program, Engineering Students for the 21st Century (ES21C) has implemented a ten-course sequence ... - My student Suchitra Ramani-Reiten just
presented at the Infrared and Millimeter Wave Conference.
The work looked at full characterization of metamaterial surfaces...
Current Projects
Mobile Active Gaming Environment (MAGE)
MAGE is my idea to take the aspects of massively mutliplayer on-line role playing games (MMORPGs) and take them off-line into the real world. The basic idea is to equip players with hardware and software that allows interaction between the players in the same way interactions are simulated in virtual environments. The photo at right is one of the custom hardware boards developed to bring about this vision.
Status: MAGE is under development.
More Information: More information and links can be found at the MAGE site.
Simple Team Experience Assessment Measure (STEAM)
STEAM is a on-line tool that allows anyone to build, administer, and analyze customized team performance evaluations. Four different tools are available and there is an option to automatically give the team anonymized feedback on their performance. A team contract system is in the beta-test stage.
Status: Operational.
More Information: The software is available for free, or we will host an evaluation for you at no cost. See the Simple Team Experience Assessment Measure (STEAM) for more details.
Ultrafast THz Research
By formal training I am a ultrafast laser person, and have specialized in THz time domain spectroscopy and other ultrafast optics. I have a considerable number of research publications in this area and continue my interest in terahertz.
Status: I have reduced my involvement in THz to focus more on engineering education, but still have several small projects ongoing.
More Information: While my lab site has not been updated in many years, the UTOL site contains links to publications and other work.
Mathematics in Engineering Design
Thanks to a 20+ institution CCLI grant from the National Science Foundation, I and several colleagues helped to develop a course helps students learn how to apply mathematics to engineering science and design courses. The course teaches the role of mathematics by having students apply mathematics in four week design projects. Both analytic and computational (MATLAB) techniques are used for data analysis and graphical representation.
Status: With both myself and the past instructor off campus this semester, another faculty member has taken over the course.
More Information: The overall project is described on a Wright State University site, while our site has details of the course we've taught.
YouTube® Videos
Several years ago I started posting short video lectures for my class on the campus video server. Since OSU restricted access from off-campus, several students asked me to post the videos on YouTube. I have quite a few videos now .
Status: Up and running, and I am working on a new series on electromagnetics.
More Information: You can watch my videos on my YouTube channel.
Matlab Programs
I am a huge fan of Matlab and it is generally the first place I turn when I have any technical computing to do. Over the years I have created quite a large library of programs for my own use covering everything from course design, to statistics, to photonics, to image capture.
Status: I don't have time now to spend writing Matlab code, but still dabble occasionally.
More Information: You can download some of the more general pieces of code from the Matlab page on this site which will come up at some future point when I find time.
Past Projects
Program Director, Engineering Education and Centers,
National Science Foundation
From June 2010 - December 2012 I served as program director for the engineering education research program at the National Science Foundation. It was a great opportunity and I had a lot of fun developing in new directions and trying to address important problems through engineering policy.
Status: Left for Bucknell at end of 2012.
More Information: You can learn more about the National Science Foundation at NSF's web site. Since it is daunting to navigate, here is a link to my division in the Engineering Directorate. My two programs are REE and RIGEE.
Engineering Students for the 21st Century (ES21C)
ES21C was a five year long NSF-funded department level reform project that attempted to change how engineering was taught in OSU's electrical and computer engineering program. Looking back the vision of the project- changing the focus of education from learning content to student development was prescient, and working on this project really helped my own professional development and personal growth. There were noticeable successes and perhaps more noticeable failure. I spent a long five years engaged almost full-time, and am still working on wrapping this project up.
Status: Funding concluded and activities have been transitioned into ECE's ABET committee. I brought the lessons learned from this project to NSF when I served as a program director.
More Information: Much information and links to publications can be found on the ES21C website as well as on the sites of the courses that were affected in ES21C.
Design Commons
The Design Commons is a design facility open to all OSU students who wish to do electronic design. Over a three year period a large room was rennovated, and I oversaw bringing up facilities to support designing, fabricating, and testing electronic devices including moving from through-hole to surface mount soldering, 3D printing, and using a complete suite of tools for embedded microcontrollers.
A large part of this effort was how to avoid the Tragedy of the Commons and as part of the solution we moved to an innovate web catalog for both components and tools as well as trying an affinity group model for learning design skills.
Status: The Commons is operational, but I am not overseeing the facility while I am at NSF.
More Information: More information can be found on the Design Commons web site, as well as the on-line catalog.
The Light Applications in Science and Engineering Research Collaborative
Undergraduate Laboratory for Teaching (LASER CULT)
I teach the undergraduate photonics courses at OSU, and as part of revising and updating these courses won an NSF CCLI grant to build a hands-on photonics lab. Students build zoom lenses, spectrophotometers, optical tweezers, and diode-pumped solid state lasers. The course relies heavily on on-line quizzes, active learning, and team-based learning.
Status: I am not teaching these courses while I serve at NSF.
More information: The LASER CULT site has details, and more information can be found in an article I wrote for IEEE Transactions on Education.
Design of Engineering Systems
A big part of my eventual role in ES21C was developing and implementing a systems-focused design course. This course evolved from the first of ECE's two capstone design courses and implemented several innovations in capstone courses that were drawn from research on design learning using a socio-constructivist approach.
Status: The course is continuing with only minor changes during the time I am away at NSF.
More Information: The course website is accessible to OSU students and faculty, but the course structure and the theoretical basis of the design course is discussed in a paper published in the International Journal of Engineering Education.
OSU Clean Room
When I
begun as a new faculty member, one of my first service tasks was to
oversee construction of a small, class 1000 clean room for use by our
research group. It is noteworthy that our clean room is still
operational while a much larger clean room designed for use by the whole
university is non-functional and mis-spent nearly $10M.
Status: Clean room is operational,
but I am a user not a manager.
More Information: More information on
the clean room can be found on the
website I designed some time ago.
Fundamentals
of Nanotechnology
Along
with faculty from the University of Oklahoma and Tulsa University I was
the lead on designing a state-wide course open to students at any
institution in Oklahoma-
Fundamentals of Nanotechnology: From Synthesis to Self-Assembly.
This course was mainly asynchronous, using video lecture and web site
for transmitting content, with four on-site labs held on four different
Saturdays throughout the semester: a lab on synthesizing
nanoparticles, a lab on characterizing nanoparticles, a lab putting the
particles in a film and characterizing that, at a mini-conference for
students to present results.
Status: Since NSF EPSCoR funding ran
out several years ago the course has not been taught; attempts to
get NUE funding were unsuccessful.
More Information: The
course web site is still up.
Mathematics in Engineering Design
Thanks to a 20+ institution CCLI grant from the National Science Foundation, I and several colleagues helped to develop a course helps students learn how to apply mathematics to engineering science and design courses. The course teaches the role of mathematics by having students apply mathematics in four week design projects. Both analytic and computational (MATLAB) techniques are used for data analysis and graphical representation.
Status: With both myself and the past instructor off campus this semester, another faculty member has taken over the course.
More Information: The overall project is described on a Wright State University site, while our site has details of the course we've taught.
Introduction to Engineering
For many years I (with a
lot of help from my grad students) taught up to four sections of
ENGR1111, the Introduction to Engineering
course at OSU. We had a lot
of fun and did some cool stuff that was a little off-the-wall. It
was very primitive, but our
Life of Joe game for teaching students about choices in college life
is still up!
Status: I haven't taught ENGR1111 for
many years...
More Information: The
course web site is still up.
Terahertz Workshop
For about five years I gave
a three hour THz workshop at the
Conference on Lasers and ElectroOptics. The workshop was
introductory and provided a broad survey of the technology at the time
(2004-2008). .
Status: I turned this over to my
former graduate student, Matt Reiten when it got a little tiresome
More Information: You can watch the
entire presentation here.
Build
Your Own THz Spectrometer
Several years ago I became
interested in better advertising the work I had done to design our THz
Spectroscopy system for the larger research community to take advantage
of. Since nearly all the parts were commercially available, we
created a web site to let others know how our system was built and
started to work with ThorLabs, the parts supplier, to make the system
commercially available.
Status: Due to personnel issues and over-commitment of time on my
part we never succeeded in commercialization.
More Information: The
spectrometer site is still up, and contains nearly complete
instructions on building a working THz Time Domain Spectroscopy system..
Electromagnetics
Courses
I taught
the introductory junior level
electromagnetics course for several years, and also helped design a
microwave engineering course and redesign the introductory EM course
with the help of NSF funding through the CCLI program. My greatest
success in teaching electromagnetics was by teaching it as an applied
mathematics course.
Status: Not currently teaching any EM
courses, but would like to do so again.
More Information: Information on the
microwave engineering in which students design and build components for
a synthetic aperture radar system can be found
High
Frequency Design course website. The introductory EM course
website is
here
and described in
this IEEE Transaction on Education.
The
CABAL
One of my first attempts at
curriculum reform was to get a small group of faculty to get together
and discuss actions we might take to change the status quo. It was
really a rather lame and somewhat tongue in cheek attempt that likely
arose out of my own frustrations with implementing meaningful change.
Status: Lasted about a year a fizzled out.
More Information: The
CABAL website, which was designed for article sharing and networking
is still up but likely hasn't been visited in years. The
pseudo-Latin phrase loosely translates as "Don't Let the Bastards
Grind you Down".
About This Site
The site is accessed through six different links:
- Home- This page.
- Useful Links- These are hyperlinks that I visit often and are here for my own personal use. Feel free to browse them...
- Current Projects- Some of the projects I am currently working on or have archived here if they are complete.
- About Me- Contains both my professional and personal personas: curriculum vita, personal information, writings, photos, etc.
- My Network- Links to my on-line presence and organizations I belong to.
- Thoughts- Ideas and symbols that inspire me, links to my blogs, and other ideas that haven't made it to the project stage yet.