Arlington, TX, Texas
March 9, 2025
March 9, 2025
March 11, 2025
Diversity
7
10.18260/1-2--55031
https://peer.asee.org/55031
13
Jaivardhan is a PhD student in the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering department at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research focuses on statistics, optimisation, and their intersection.
Erick Jones is an assistant professor in the IMSE department at UTA and the founder and director of the Sustainable and Equitable Allocation of Resources or SEAR Lab. He obtained a PhD from the Operations Research and Industrial Engineering program at the University of Texas at Austin, a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University, and is a fellow of GEM, NSF INFEWS, and DOE MLEF. He spent several years working in the design, manufacturing, oil and gas, and HVAC industries. During this time, he traveled around the world and witnessed how the lack of basic infrastructure like electricity, HVAC systems, clean water, internet, and banking negatively affects the quality of life of the majority of the world’s population. These experiences motivated him to pursue research that can enhance quality of life by improving access to sustainable resources and economic opportunities, particularly where a lack of physical infrastructure or economic resources presents a major obstacle, leading to the creation of the SEAR lab. The SEAR lab investigates how communities, companies, and countries can allocate their limited resources in a way that maximizes their desired outcomes in a sustainable, equitable, and resilient but also elegant way. The SEAR lab assesses these problems by combining physical experimentation, data analytics, and stochastic systems optimization to provide actionable decisions and create scalable prototypes.
Dr. Victoria C. P. Chen is Professor of Industrial, Manufacturing, & Systems Engineering at The University of Texas at Arlington. She holds a B.S. in Mathematical Sciences from The Johns Hopkins University, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University.
We present K-12 educational lesson plans towards conducting college level research in engineering. These experiences are an extension of a National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Teachers project (EEC-2055705), where math and science K-12 teachers are trained to conduct research on sustainable and resilient engineering systems in various disciplines. For the Industrial Engineering (IE) project, our trainees employed an analytics process to study options in sustainable building design. Decisions in the early design phase have a long-lasting impact on every pillar of sustainability: people, planet, and prosperity. Most students think engineering is building robots, but the IE analytics process is a generally applicable computational approach to study engineering systems. This training will be brought into the classroom by asking their students to consider this engineering-related question: When an engineer works on something innovative, how do they approach the problem on the job or in college? The students will then learn to follow our IE analytics process using design of experiments, machine learning, and optimization in a real-world context. This collaboration has enabled teachers to broaden their understanding of what engineering offers, and they can now share this with their students to encourage them to find the engineering discipline that matches their interests.
Zagozda, K., & Wheelock, R., & Aghapour, R., & Rahman Mohammadpour, S., & Sood, J., & Jones, E. C., & Chen, V. C. P. (2025, March), Bringing College Level Engineering Research Experiences into the K-12 Classroom Paper presented at 2025 ASEE -GSW Annual Conference, Arlington, TX, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--55031
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