My position, Lecturer With Potential Security of Employment, is expected to demonstrate excellence and impact in three primary aspects which are detailed in the UCD APM 285: Teaching and Learning, Professional Achievements and Activities, and University and Public Service. For the time period of July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2018, I detail below the activities that have contributed to each of the above three topics. I am requesting a 1.5X merit because I believe I have excelled at two of the three aspects in these ways:
- Teaching and Learning
I have taught 130% more units than has been recommended for the LPSOE faculty over the past two years and have went above and beyond to innovate in all of the courses I have taught.
- Professional Achievements and Activities
I have published 2 journal articles, 3 conference papers, hosted a very successful research conference in my field, and presented my work extensively along with carrying enough funding to support 22 students in a variety of projects.
Teaching and learning constitutes approximately 60% to 70% of my job. Over the past two years, I taught thirteen UCD courses1 (three of which were new course preparations while one was a complete course redesign): ENG 122 (Introduction to Vibrations) Fall 2016 & 2017, EME 150A (Mechanical Design) Fall 2017, two sections of EME 185A/B (Mechanical Systems Design Project) Winter/Spring 2017 & 2018, MAE 223 (Multibody Dynamics) Fall 2017, and MAE 297 (Graduate Seminar) Spring 2017. Note that this 6+ course per year assignment is higher than the recommended 4-5 courses (i.e. 1.5X research faculty assignment) for L(P)SOE's by the prior vice provost and the Dean of the College of Engineering.
I have put considerable effort into incorporating research backed educational practices into my courses as part of my long-term goal to innovate in the classroom. I attempt to clearly define student learning in each course and focus on improving student learning with respect to that definition. The following lists the teaching practices I employ almost universally across all of my courses: 1) utilize rubrics designed to assess learning objective mastery, 2) use exam reflection surveys, 3) increase the amount of in-class active learning and decrease in-class lecturing, 4) collect (at least) weekly feedback from the students and respond to this via extra in-class content, extra videos, and/or written notes, 5) heavy use of Canvas and its various features for improving learning, 6) post all notes, videos, assignments, etc. publicly on a comprehensive website, and 7) release the vast majority of my teaching materials as open educational resources under liberal copyright licenses.
I taught this course for the second time with teaching assistant Destiny Garcia. We made use of the Unitrans bike rack design project I developed the prior year and added a lesson on lightweight prototyping, detailed in an EELC blogpost, in addition to the Unitrans maintenance facility visit. The students gave lightning talks about their group projects and we further developed a set of rubrics for grading the project memos, reports, and presentations. This project has been adapted by Prof. Jiancheng Liu at the University of Pacific, Stockton. As a side project, I have mentored two Google Summer of Code students in the development of a 2D Beam Bending software package for future computational learning modules for the course.
I taught this course twice during the period. In the first offering, I developed a weekly one hour in-class computational learning module providing 40 hours of active learning through live coding and a series of Jupyter notebooks 2. After the first offering, I developed a proposal to the UCD Center for Educational Effectiveness and was awarded $22k to transform ENG 122 from lecture-style to learning through in-class "computational thinking" exercises. This funding included the creation of an interactive open access textbook, a set of computational homeworks, development of a project, an educational oriented software package, the setup of computational cloud infrastructure (JupyterHub) for the course and the College of Engineering, and the creation of a training workshop for this pedagogy approach.
Graduate student Kenneth Lyons and I were funded by the grant to do this work. We successfully accomplished these goals and have presented the work locally and nationally as invited speakers to SacPy3, the UCD College of Education Graduate Group, and at JupyterCon 20184. Kenneth also presented the work for us at SciPy 2018, the popular conference on scientific and engineering computing with Python, as an accepted presentation.
As mentioned, this work included the development of a workshop with my Olin College colleague, Allen Downey, entitled "Computational Thinking in the Engineering Curriculum", which we delivered for the first time this past January at UC Davis to about 20 faculty and graduate students at the Data Science Initiative classroom. I also invited Allen to give a well attended talk entitled "Programming as a Way of Thinking". We plan to continue to develop and teach this workshop at coming conferences and it has been adapted for the Olin Summer Institute.
Since I have begun this work I have received requests from half a dozen professors on campus to assist them with similar instructional needs. For example, Valeria la Saponara (MAE) has adopted the Jupyter tool for her composites course. I also applied to a $3M NSF IUSE grant with Delmar Larsen of the Chemistry department to add Jupyter to the widely used LibreTexts project. Although denied, it received favorable reviews and we have plans to resubmit. Lastly, I am now a co-editor for a new journal entitled "The Journal of Open Source Education" which was conceived to allow educators to publish similar teaching materials as developed in my work.
Over the past two years, I have significantly increased the amount of time each team gets direct mentorship from myself and the teaching assistants. I have pushed for more TAs per team (decreased the ratio of teams to TA from 15 to 7) and have introduced a lead TA position with an 35% appointment. During the Spring quarter, 22 teams each met with the instructors for 50 minutes each week, an increase from 25 minutes in 2016. I believe this change is directly correlated with the improvements in students' learning and the resulting quality of the students' work.
The teaching assistants and I have developed numerous improvements to the course5. Students struggle with a number of practical engineering skills each year and we've come up with a series of learning modules that help address these: technical report writing, CAD based finite element analysis, 3D printing, project management with modern cloud services, and an introduction to micro-controllers. These are in addition to the design process learning modules which I have converted mostly to an active learning pedagogy.
We have developed a 15 page instructor guide for the course that provides week-by-week tasks for all of the involved instructors. We have improved the assessments with a comprehensive set of learning objective mastery rubrics for all of the written and oral assignments. These have been utilized for Canvas based ABET assessments with support from the CoE (Jennifer Quynn) and the CEE (Kara Moloney). This past year, we introduced Canvas quizzes for the reading materials to support the active learning shift. Lastly, I've enhanced the student peer evaluation process with a combination of CATME and custom generated reports. In particular, we provide anonymized views of the teams peer scores four times throughout the course to help quickly identify struggling teams. The teams use this information to work on group problems internally and the instructors use it to deliver target interventions and mediation This required us to convince the CoE to buy a site wide software license for CATME.
I have also worked to improve the project solicitation to gain new industry partners and to strengthen continued relationships with established partners. We have relationships with local, national, and international sponsors/organizations including: Micro-Vu, Buffalo Bicycles, LightRiver Tech, Chalmers University of Technology, UCD Facilities, EksoBionics, Hegemony Tech, UCD ARC, WasteBusters, Wetlands Work, Western Cooling Efficiency Center, UCD Med Center, UCD Vet Medicine, Seeley International's Integrated Comfort, Felt Bicycles, Nike Research Lab, ICUEMOTION, Sandia National Labs, InSciTech, LLNL, Dillon Engineering, Hill Engineering, and more. I have improved the professional presentation of the solicitation through a custom proposal submission website and a curated mailing list of 200+ potential sponsors. I collect midterm and final feedback via surveys from the sponsors and used these to improve communication among the sponsors, teams, and instructors. Steve Velinsky and I have recruited 66 projects over the past two years that provided approximately $50k of project funding6.
After the 2017 course, I went with two students to deploy their water sanitation project on the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia, which was funded through two student awarded Blum Center Grants and a CITRIS Tech for Social Good grant. This work has been featured in the College of Engineering magazine and website.
Another very exciting element of this course is an exchange and design competition I have developed with my collaborators Profs. Petros Abraha and Shigemichi Oshima at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan. Over the past two years, some 20 Japanese students have visited Davis over three trips and participated in Engineering Week and the CoE design showcase. We have held cultural exchange lunches and dinners and visited local engineering companies and research labs. The highlight of the exchange have been the two final design competitions between the Meijo and UCD students, which was a huge success. Due to these efforts, this past year I was awarded a $24k Global Affairs Seed Grant and took 12 UCD student to Japan for an unbelievable educational trip. We visited Nobel Prize winning research labs, the Toyota factory and museum, and all of the students presented their work to over 80 students and faculty in an international setting, something that is very unique for undergraduates. The Meijo Engineering Department was an incredible host. About a dozen of the faculty provided their personal time to us either through a lab tour or by attending the students' presentations.
It is hard to express how much I enjoyed teaching this course. I came out of each class so excited because I love the material so much. Due to the simultaneous, self inflicted, heavy load in ENG 122 described above, I mostly followed the style of the past offerings. But I did swap out most chalkboard examples with computational examples through live active coding exercises using a modern alternative to Autolev (the prior software used in this course) that I co-developed and maintain called PyDy. This resulted in about 20 Jupyter notebooks that I plan to turn into a companion interactive text as the years progress. I also managed to develop two new lectures to provide students an introduction to trajectory optimization of dynamic systems. Lastly, I made all of the lecture videos available on YouTube for public consumption and already have over a hundred views.
The goals for my offering of MAE 297 were: 1) increase the diversity (industry/academic, gender, age, etc.) of the speakers and the topics, 2) bring as many speakers as possible from outside UCD on the limited budget, and 3) initiate a method to share the talks with the world. The speaker schedule, biographies, and videos can be viewed on the course website. Most of the speakers' talks were posted publicly to YouTube and one of the speakers, Prof. Devin Berg, adopted the format with the website and videos for his new seminar series at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.
I gave guest lectures in EME 1 (Kong) on Bicycle Dynamics, MAE 223 (Eke) on Kane's Method with PyDy, TTP 298A (Kornbluth) on Human Powered Machines, and scored poster presentations in ENG 3 (Vander Gheynst).
During this period I mentored 5 graduate students (1 as primary MSc advisor, 2 as an MSc committee member, 1 as a GSR advisor, and 1 as Google Summer of Code mentor). My primary advisee, Abe McKay, completed his MSc, doing field work in Kenya funded through a Blum Center Grant and collaborating with the non-profit World Bicycle Relief. I mentored 5 teaching assistants in the above described courses. I have also mentored 3 post graduate and 11 undergraduate 7 researchers on various projects. One of the post graduates, Scott Kresie, wrote a conference paper and presented at ICSC 2017. Lastly, I mentored two extracurricular student teams. The Solar Boat Team took 2nd place at both the 2017 and 2018 competitions, has secured external funding close to $10k, and has grown to a 20+ member, popular team. The Quadriplegic Friendly Tricycle Team raised over $18k and completed their tricycle design. Both of these teams have supported projects for EME 185.
I developed, taught, and/or facilitated 7 workshops during the review period 8. Internally, I co-taught a workshop introducing the programming language R to campus LPSOEs for the purposes of scholarly teaching and learning research, developed and taught the computational thinking workshop described above, and facilitated a workshop by international visitor Carlos Marroquin (Guatemala) on the design of appropriate technology in collaboration with the UC Davis D-Lab. Externally, I developed and co-taught two workshops at SciPy: Simulating Robot, Vehicle, Spacecraft, and Animal Motion with Python and Automatic Code Generation with SymPy, and co-taught a Software Carpentry workshop for the California Delta Stewardship Council, Department of Water Resources, and the EPA on "An Introducing Data Science with R".
This topic represents 20% to 30% of my work and a variety of activities can fulfill this, for example: writing textbooks, writing/reviewing pedagogical focused proposals, research on pedagogy, engineering research in my discipline, presenting at conferences, participation in professional organizations, etc.
I am quite happy to have co-authored a paper on version 1.0 of the computer aided algebra system SymPy, which I have been a core developer of for the past decade, in PeerJ Computational Sciences. In just over a year we already have 110+ citations and it was named as the top cited paper in all of PeerJ's publications for 2017. I make use of this software package for teaching in both ENG 122 and MAE 223 as well as research. I also published a paper in the Journal of Open Source Software on a software package I developed that allows a user to solve optimal control and parameter identification problems with direct collocation. I published three conference proceedings papers and also have the rough draft of an interactive textbook for ENG 122, as mentioned above. Note that I attempt to strictly publish in Open Access venues, as an ethical imperative.
The second highlight of the past two years was being the lead organizer and host of the 2017 International Cycling Safety Conference, an annual specialized conference that brings together cross disciplinary researchers from engineering, urban planning, policy, and transportation studies to discuss bicycling safety. Davis, CA was chosen by the steering committee to host the first offering outside of Europe. With Deb Niemeier (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Mont Hubbard (Mech. and Aero. Engineering), and Susan Handy (Environmental Science and Policy) as co-organizers we brought over 170 national and international visitors in for the conference. We partnered with the UCD National Center for Sustainable Transportation, the City of Davis, multiple bicycle companies, and local advocacy groups. This resulted in over 90 peer reviewed short papers, 60 presentations, 30 posters, and 2 workshops and the best work of the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Safety Research.
I or students I mentored was awarded or co-awarded 10 different grants during this period totaling just over $160k9. I was rejected on two $3M large collaborative grants to the NSF (SI2-SSI and IUSE), but received favorable reviews and plan to resubmit the proposals. The following lists the awarded grants:
[$22k, PI] UCD Center for Educational Effectiveness Undergraduate Instructional Innovation Program: "Development of an Interactive Textbook Backed by Cloud Infrastructure to Pilot Active Computational Learning in an Upper Level Mechanical Vibrations Engineering Course"
- [$24k, PI] UCD Global Affairs Seed Grant: "Influence of Culture on Mechanical Design: A Proposal For an Undergraduate Exchange and Design Competition Between Japanese and American Students"
- [$775, PI] CITRIS Tech for Social Good: Cambodia Washing Station, submitted by P. Juvekar and S. Iqbal
- [$58.5k, CO-PI] 2017 Google Summer of Code: Mentoring Organization SymPy
- [$45.5k, CO-PI] 2018 Google Summer of Code: Mentoring Organization SymPy
- [$3.4k] Blum Center Poverty Alleviation through Sustainable Solutions: "Bicycle Powered Irrigation Pump Design", submitted by Abraham McKay
- [$4k] Blum Center Poverty Alleviation through Action: "Water Filtration System in the Floating Villages of Cambodia", submitted by P. Juvekar and S. Iqbal
- [CO-PI] COSMOS: Transportation Cluster, submitted by Susan Handy
and the denied proposals:
[$3M] Collaborative Research: SI2-SSI: Infrastructure for Cross-Disciplinary Scientific Computation Through Optimized Symbolic Code Generation with SymPy [Anthony Scopatz (University of South Carolina), Jason K. Moore (UC Davis), Zi-Kui Liu (Penn State), and Kyle E. Niemeyer (Oregon State University)]
- [$3M] Collaborative Research: IUSE: Dissemination of the LibreTexts Libraries through Expansion and Training in Digital Interfaces to Enhance Science Education across the Nation [Delmar Larsen (UCD Chemistry)]
I participated in 7 conferences with various levels of involvement10: 1) 2016 SciPy [attended, taught workshop, reviewed tutorial submissions], 2) 2016 Bicycle and Motorcycle Dynamics Conference [attended, presented, co-wrote a conference paper, served on organizing and scientific committees, reviewed abstracts], 3,4) 2016 & 2017 UCD Scholarship of Teaching and Learning [attended], 5) 2017 SciPy [attended, taught workshop, reviewed tutorial submissions], 6) 2017 International Cycling Safety Conference [lead organizer, attended, co-authored two conference papers, student and collaborator presented], 7) 2018 UCD Assessment Symposium [attended, lead round table].
University and public service amounts to approximately 10% of my work. This work can include committee work, leadership, community service, contributions to student welfare, professional outreach, and communications to the public. I have played a service role in several internal initiatives and also extended my services to the public through talks, interviews, and workshops.
During the review period I have served on the MAE Undergraduate committee and on the MAE Website committee. I also worked with Jenny Quynn (CoE), Ben Shaw (MAE), and Steven Wiryadinata (MAE) to develop several ABET assessments for EME 185 for the 2018 review. I created and presented a talk for decision day and was the Master of Ceremony for the MAE Master's students at the 2018 commencement. I also sadly had to deal with two deaths this past year. The Quadriplegic Friendly Tricycle Team's sponsor, Greg Tanner, passed away after a long battle with ALS. I accompanied four of the team members to Greg's funeral and supported the students on hearing the news. As you are all aware, undergraduate Joseph Goodwin, passed away just weeks before graduation. I worked with many of the students who were affected by this tragic event to organize a memorial gathering for Joseph. I believe this emotional support was helpful for the students' grieving and contributed to their welfare. Many of the students have thanked me for leading this.
I also engaged with the public in a number of ways this review period11. I spoke to a visiting group of Laguna High School Students organized by Barbara Linke for her NSF funded course and spoke at the Sacramento Python Users Group (SacPy) about my educational efforts that utilized the Python programming language. I was interviewed several times about the ICSC 2017 conference for NPR and other news outlets. The Huffington Post and The New York Times interviewed my collaborators and me about our work on bicycle dynamics and control. I also arranged tours for around 30 students to TechnipFMC and DMG Mori last spring to further build our relationships with them. Lastly, the workshops at SciPy 2017, SciPy 2017, and the workshop for the Delta Stewardship Council, Department of Water Resources, and the California EPA provided non-academics with modern computational skills. My extensive contributions to open source software, particularly with the SymPy and PyDy projects, also provide substantial public benefit.
I taught five additional courses during the appraisal period: EME 150A and two sections each of EME 185 A/B.↩
Jupyter is a tool for weaving traditional textbook content with code and interactive web-based content.↩
SacPy is a local industry oriented users group for the Python programming language.↩
A new conference series created due to the exponential demand and wide adoption of the tool for research, industry, and education.↩
During the appraisal period I also developed the new MAE Innovative Design Studio for our design classes. The studio has been used for EME 150A, EME 130A/B, and EME 185A/B for the last three years. I also visited Olin College's capstone design day to survey their program methodology.↩
During the appraisal period I additionally solicited 45 proposals, advised 33 projects, with $52k worth of funded prototypes for EME 185A/B.↩
Additional guest lectures during the appraisal period: Prof. Eke's 2016 multibody dynamics graduate course (MAE 223), Prof. Lin's 2016 computer science senior design course (ECS 193), Dr. Kornbluth's 2016 design for development course (TTP 298A)↩
I mentored 3 additional undergraduates during the appraisal period: 1 UCD and 2 GSoC.↩
I taught 1 additonal workshop in the appraisal period.↩
Additional grants totalling $73k for the appraisal period: [$3.3k, PI] CITRIS Tech for Social Good: "Quadriplegic Friendly Tricycle", submitted by undergraduates A. Shaw and A. Wu, [$6k] Blum Center Poverty Alleviation through Action: "Septic System System in the Floating Villages of Cambodia", submitted by undergraudates J. Wu, R. Muradian, and Y. Guan, [$64k, CO-PI] 2016 Google Summer of Code: Mentoring Organization SymPy↩
Additional conference activity for the appraisal period: SciPy 2015 [attended, presented research talk, taught workshop, reviewed submissions], First Year Engineering Education 2015 [attended], International Society of Biomechancis Technical Group on Computer Simulation 2015 [developed talk and demo, wrote abstract]↩