Come check out the FREE 1-day STEM conference on Texas A&M’s campus, consisting of 4 professional development workshops. Hosted by ASME’s MEEN Girls, the undergraduate women’s group for mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University.
Tools for Systems Thinkers: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking by Leyla Acaroglu with Disruptive Design
Find the full article with original illustrations here
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is launching its 6th annual Campus RainWorks Challenge, a design competition that is open to colleges and universities across the country. EPA seeks to engage with students to foster a dialogue about responsible stormwater management, and showcase the environmental, economic, and social benefits of green infrastructure practices.
Registration for the 2017 Challenge is open from September 1st through the 30th. Student teams must register in order to submit their entries by December 15th. Winners will be announced in the Spring of 2018. Each first-place team will earn a student prize of $2,000 to be divided evenly among student team members and a faculty prize of $3,000 to support green infrastructure research or training. Second-place teams will win $1,000 for student teams and a $2,000 faculty prize.
Water pollution associated with stormwater runoff requires infrastructure solutions that are innovative, resilient, and affordable. Today’s scholars are tomorrow’s design professionals. The Campus RainWorks Challenge will harness their creativity and knowledge to jointly advance the agency’s mission to protect public health and water quality.
Learn more at: www.epa.gov/campusrainworks
Eight female engineering students at Texas A&M University were recently accepted into the competitive Clare Boothe Luce Scholars program, which provides funding for undergraduate research to talented female engineering students.
The $250,000 grant was awarded to Texas A&M’s Women in Engineering program this year in recognition of the College of Engineering’s commitment to supporting women’s pursuits in academia and research. The program benefits undergraduate students by providing an opportunity to pursue research for three years, helping them prepare for future academic success in graduate school.
I will be presenting my work titled “Designing Sustainable Manufacturing Networks: The Role of Exclusive Species in Achieving Ecosystem-Type Performance” at the IDETC-CIE 2017 conference, under the 22nd Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Conference (DFMLC) division, on Monday, August 7th.
Ecology is proving to be an innovative source for design principles. Studies have examined how ecological principles can enhance sustainability in industrial networks. Ecologically inspired manufacturing networks tend to focus on supporting symbiotic relationship formation, creating a cyclical flow structure that has been shown to result in efficiency and resource consumption improvements. Despite successes, bio-inspired manufacturing networks still fail to accurately mimic ecosystem cycling. The roles of exclusive actors and specialized predators in achieving the high cycling characteristic of ecosystems is investigated here. Exclusive actors participate in the network as either only a consumer (predator) or only a producer (prey). Specialized predators consume only one producer inside the system boundary. The populations of these special actors in manufacturing networks versus ecological food webs speaks to the potential influence these roles have on the cycling the network achieves. The trends shown here suggest less exclusivity is necessary for achieving ecologically-strong network cycling.
Layton, A.; B. Bras; M. Weissburg. Designing Sustainable Manufacturing Networks: The role of exclusive species in achieving ecosystem-type performance. Cleveland, OH, 2017. ASME 2017 International Design Engineering Technical Conference.
I am so excited to be working with the ENGAGE summer program at Texas A&M this week! Lots of future engineers. #ENGAGETAMU
“The ENGAGE Summer Camp is a six-day residential summer camp designed for students from underrepresented groups who are strong in science, technology, and mathematics. The camp gives students hands-on, memorable experiences while inspiring them to consider a career in engineering.
During the camp, students stay on campus in residence halls, engage in discussions with student and faculty panels, visit engineering laboratories and research centers, and work on engineering projects. Current engineering students serve as camp counselors and are with camp participants throughout the entirety of the summer camp.”
Network Earth: This is why I love working in bio-inspired design! There are so many things we can still learn from nature to make our lives and communities better.
Video Visualization: Mauro Martino, Jianxi Gao, Baruch Barzel, Albert-László Barabási. Narration: Shamini Bundell
“In a world filled with complex networks, this data visualization explains how mathematical tools can both predict and bring order to potentially chaotic situations. This Nature Video from 2016 recently won a prestigious National Science Foundation Vizzie award.” The accompanying paper: Jianxi Gao, Baruch Barzel, Albert-László Barabási. “Universal resilience patterns in complex networks” , NATURE LETTERS (530): 307, 2016. doi:10.1038/nature16948
Article: Sustainability is unhelpful: we need to think about regeneration by Herbert Girardet published Monday 10 June 2013 08.23 EDT in the Guardian
“Sustainable development is a concept to which few people would object; most of us would agree that we should not live as if there were no tomorrow. But … [it leaves us with many questions:] How long is sustainable: 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? And who and what should be sustainable: households, cities, whole nations, the world economy? And who should benefit: current generations or all humans who will ever be alive? And where is the critique of the current economic system: can SD really occur under the rules of capitalism, where the refusal to put a price on nature’s services and on ecological and social externalities is a systemic problem?… The concept of regenerative development aims to fill this gap: it means that we need to develop comprehensive rules for an environmentally enhancing, restorative relationship between humanity and the ecosystems from which we draw resources for our sustenance.”
BiSSL: Bio-inspired Systems Lab 