DETROIT – A new report from leading national higher education and workforce experts says colleges and universities should work with industry to modify their curricula to ensure students gain the knowledge, skills, and abilities they will need upon graduation for jobs that involve new lightweighting technologies, materials, and processes.
The report, the first in a series of six scheduled releases, was created by a team of college and university faculty (Expert Educator Team, or EET)—experts in both materials science and education and workforce preparation—assembled by LIFT – Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS).
The report includes recommendations about college-level competencies required for emerging technologies and lightweight metal solutions across several industries. The report urges programs at both the technical/production (two-year, associate’s degree) and design/engineering (four-year, bachelor’s degree) levels to review curricula and integrate materials and approaches that address competencies in four different manufacturing areas, including integrated computational materials engineering (ICME), metamorphic manufacturing, distortion control, and thin-wall aluminum die casting.
As part of those recommendations, the EET also suggests how the LIFT Learning Lab at the organization’s headquarters in Detroit can better support students through internships, teacher training, and on-site instruction. This includes both bringing students to LIFT for work-and-learn opportunities and creating virtual learning experiences for those who are unable to attend sessions in person. Virtual experiences would also help to scale the training to a large number of programs.
The six EET members were selected from APLU’s member universities and other LIFT university research partners because of their significant knowledge of manufacturing technologies and experience within the manufacturing industry. They are: Fazleena Badurdeen, director of graduate studies in manufacturing systems engineering, University of Kentucky; Amy Clarke, associate professor and site director, Center for Advanced Non-Ferrous Structural Alloys, Colorado School of Mines; Chad Duty, associate professor, Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee Knoxville; Muhammad Jahan, assistant professor, Miami (Ohio) University; Gene Liao, professor and director electric-drive vehicle engineering and alternative energy technology, Wayne State University; Kelly Zelesnik, dean, engineering, business, and information technologies, Lorain County Community College.
“This team of educators has done and continues to do an amazing job of taking highly technical information from the ongoing LIFT project portfolio and filtering that work down to what is needed to help educate our students going forward,” said Emily DeRocco, education, and workforce development director, LIFT.
The second report of recommendations is due out this fall and will focus on competencies and strategies for four additional technology areas: thin wall ductile iron castings, powder consolidation processes, agile fabrication of sheet metal components, and nanoparticle reinforced aluminum matrix composites.
For more information about the project, visit www.aplu.org/lift-eet.
LIFT, operated by the American Lightweight Materials Manufacturing Innovation Institute (ALMMII), is a Detroit-based, public-private partnership committed to the development and deployment of advanced lightweight metal manufacturing technologies, and implementing education and training initiatives to better prepare the workforce today and in the future. LIFT is one of the founding institutes of Manufacturing USA and is funded in part by the Department of Defense with management through the Office of Naval Research. Visit www.lift.technology or follow on Twitter @NewsFromLIFT to learn more.
The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) is the largest cross industry collaborative research & development consortium in North America and is dedicated to driving innovation in commercial, defense, robotics and environmentally sustainable manufacturing.