Day: November 29, 2016

Unscripted: Daisy and the Engineers

DaisyDaisy Isaksson is a fifth-grade student at Dollar Bay Elementary. A couple weeks ago, she surprised one of Michigan Tech’s engineers from the Center for Technology & Training by beating the results of several PhDs, professional engineers and engineering students in a classroom activity called “Stop That Truck!”

The activity was designed by Drew Roberts, a civil engineering senior, under a Transportation and Civil Engineering (TRAC) Program module updated by civil engineer Chris Gilbertson from the Center for Technology & Training under a Michigan Department of Transportation grant. TRAC is a national outreach program that encourages the teaching of STEM (with a civil engineering flavor) to students at a young age by providing well-designed learning modules to high school and middle school teachers.

Read more at Unscripted, by Allison Mills.

Great Lakes Climate Modeling in the News

Pengfei Xue
Pengfei Xue

Pengfei Xue (CEE) and his modeling work through the Great Lakes Research Center, which led to a more comprehensive climate and hydrodynamics model for the whole Great Lakes region, has been featured in several science media outlets including Science Daily, Phys.org, Terra Daily and Supercomputing Online News. The story was shared numerous times by collaborators and the science community on Twitter.

Weather the Storm: Improving Great Lakes Modeling

The collaborative work brought together researchers from Michigan Technological University, Loyola Marymount University, LimnoTech and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. Pengfei Xue, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan Tech, led the study through his work at the Great Lakes Research Center on campus.

One of the important concepts in climate change, in addition to knowing the warming trend, is understanding that extreme events become more severe. That is both a challenge and an important focus in regional climate modeling. —Pengfei Xue

Read more at Michigan Tech News, by Allison Mills.

In the News

TechCentury, an engineering and technology publication of the Engineering Society of Detroit, reported on research led by Pengfei Xue(CEE), using computer modeling to better predict weather and its impacts on the Great Lakes. Read the article here.