Cloud Hosting

You're a big advocate in promoting STEM education for all. Can you talk about your involvement for those efforts?

Its really a goal of mine and my colleagues to improve diversity, equity and inclusion.For the After School Academy, I worked very closely withCecilia Leal (associate professor of materials science and engineering) to formulate solid programming. Cecilia and I are both motivated to address DEI issues, so we sought support from the IDEA Institute, in their GIANT program for grassroots initiatives.

With the African School on Electronic Structure methods andApplications (ASESMA), my group teaches materials engineering methods to Africanstudents.The program is in part funded by NSF, and my trip was supported by the Illinois MRSEC.This year, we went to Rwanda, taught people about electronic structure simulations and worked on a project together. They asked insightful questions, listened to the lectures and did an excellent job participating and discussing.We hope that such activities will also help improve DEI in STEM education, which is a very long-term problem.

While diversity and inclusivity are important in wider society, we can directly address how to work toward a more diverse student population through our departmental efforts, too.

What's your most memorable teaching moment?

I taught a new grad class last semester on machine learning. To illustrate this,I came up with thebowtie project. I made up a random equation and ran the equation every morning to see if I would wear a bowtie to class or not. Every day the class met, I would either wear or not wear a bowtie, and the students recorded the outcome. I gave them no other data points, but I told them a few factors I used to determine my choice, like the temperature or the wind speed of the day. I let them use machine learning to figure out the additional factors that I considered.

As a final project, the students needed to predict whether I would wear a bowtie on the last day of class. To do this, they needed to collect data for the semester, clean up and format the data, and train a machine-learning model. It worked out pretty well, and the predictions were better than what would have been pure guessing.

What advice would you give to aspiring materials engineers or educators?

Put the time into the classes. Try to get as much knowledge as you can and learn how to do things yourself and reliably. Get those skills because that's what you're going to use later on in your career.

Its also important to find good mentors, who introduce you to new ways of thinking about a problem and finding interesting problems. I would recommend spending time thinking about this by yourself, looking at the literature, and talking to leaders in the field about this. These leaders are not far - you can find them in our very own department!

Take some risks. When you pick your research theme, you can go a bit outside your comfort zone. If you have a faraway goal and the road there seems painful, maybe it's worthwhile trying it anyway. And dont overthink this step too much. If you're doing a degree in materials engineering here at The Grainger College of Engineering, youll get an excellent education that will make you flexible. Im sure youll do great, even if you're not 100% sure what you're going to do 10 years down the road.

You pilot small airplanes. How did that happen?

I always wanted to be a pilot, but I never thought about it too much until we hired Axel Hoffman. During his interview, he told us he flew himself down that morning from Chicago. That was the first time I thought flying was not out of reach or completely crazy. Since we have a local flight school, I started taking lessons and I earned my license in 2021. Just last week I flew myself down to Nashville for a meeting and it was awesome.

Follow Andr Schleifeon LinkedIn and Twitter.

The rest is here:

Q&A: Overthinking kills creative materials engineering | The ... - The Grainger College of Engineering