A history of engineering education research in Portugal and Ireland

Comunicação apresentada em 121st Annual Conference & Exposition - "360º of Engineering Education", Indianapolis, IN - USA, June 15-18, 2014The American Society for Engineering Education is the oldest professional society in the world that is solely dedicated to the betterment of engineering education. In its early days, ASEE was a gathering of faculty who wanted to improve the practice of engineering education through experimentation with new curricula, new teaching styles, or new gadgets. Presentations often consisted of “this is what I did” and “this is how the students reacted.” Beginning in the 1990s, through the influx of federal dollars in the Coalitions, a new discipline began to emerge—Engineering Education—and along with this discipline a research area was born. At this point in time, the concept of rigorous Engineering Education Research (EER) is fairly well-established in the US, with dedicated programs for EER at the National Science Foundation, PhD degree programs in EER, and the reinvention of the Journal of Engineering Education to support this endeavour. Departments dedicated at least in part to Engineering Education Research are emerging on campuses across the country. There has also been an emergence of Engineering Education Research across the globe; however, efforts in other countries have often been slower due to many factors. This paper describes the emergence of Engineering Education Research in two countries in the European Union—Portugal and Ireland. The evolution of EER in these two countries is set in a larger global context

Annual Report 2014

Dear Friends, As an alumnus and 19 year member of the faculty at Louisiana Tech University, I am invested and passionate about our College’s role in preparing the BEST graduates to respond to the needs and challenges of our ever-changing world. I believe my mechanical engineering degree from Louisiana Tech provided me with that preparation, and I aspire for us to continue to build and enhance our legacy of innovation and leadership in engineering and science education. We are also focused on transformative research that leverages our strengths and strategic opportunities. Both of these priorities are elevating our national recognition as evidenced by our University’s consistent rise in national, rankings despite the challenges of higher education budget cuts. While there have been many changes and challenges for our College this past year, there are still many exciting accomplishments to report. Our theme for this annual report is ”Success Beyond the Books,” as we have highlighted a variety of programs and activities that provide our graduates with learning experiences that go beyond just a classroom lecture. This fall, we are expanding our highly successful hands-on, project-driven ”Living with the Lab” first-year curriculum and piloting a first-year ”Living with Cyber” curriculum for our Computer Science and Cyber Engineering students. Our student organizations continue to be highly active and engaged, participating in regional and national conferences and competitions such as our American Society of Civil Engineers concrete canoe team (Deep South Conference winner), American Institute of Chemical Engineers senior design team (first place at National Spring meeting), Eco-marathon team (Design award winner), Society of Women Engineers (National Outreach Award), National Society of Black Engineers (two time National Chapter of the Year), and Cyber Engineering forensics team (fourth place national competition). In graduate studies and research, we are continuing to produce outstanding interdisciplinary graduates at the masters and doctoral levels, and we graduated 20 Ph.D. students during 2013-14, with over $16 million in research expenditures in the previous year. Our faculty continue to make national and international news for their research as they fulfill our vision for being the best college in the world at integrating engineering and science in education and research. Our ”beyond the books” experiences are fueling an increasing demand for our programs. Last fall, we experienced a nearly 30 percent increase in our first-time freshman enrollment in the College, and, based on orientation registrations this summer, we expect another 20 percent increase this fall. I am thankful for the outstanding support of our Engineering and Science Foundation Board in successfully completing our Capital Campaign for our new Integrated Engineering and Science Education Building. It will provide critically needed space to support our ”Living with the Lab” and ”Living with Cyber” curricula.I hope you enjoy reading about the many successes of our faculty and students in this report. Their hard work continues to grow the prestige and legacy of our College producing the Best Engineers and Scientists for Tomorrow. Sincerely, Hisham Hegab,Dean and Thigpen Professorhttps://digitalcommons.latech.edu/coes-annual-reports/1006/thumbnail.jp

The Benefits of a Science Support Program for Low-Income Latina/o Students

A current national priority is to increase the number of students prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM; U.S. Department of Education, 2015). Unfortunately, Latina/os are underrepresented in STEM fields (National Science Foundation, 2010). STEM support programs may be one avenue for increasing the number of Latina/o students who enter the STEM pipeline (Afterschool Alliance, 2011), but few studies have examined the benefits of participation in a STEM program for Latina/o youth, and very little is known about the specific program activities that are related to beneficial outcomes. Social cognitive career theory offers a model of career development that emphasizes the importance of learning experiences, which in the context of STEM programs are program activities. In the current study, one-on-one, in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 39 participants who were involved in a science support program to investigate the following research questions: 1) What are the benefits of a science support program for Latina/o youth? and 2) What are the program activities that are related to these benefits? Results revealed 12 benefits of program participation: 1) access and exposure, 2) mastering science knowledge and skills, 3) academic outcomes, 4) broadened worldview, 5) confidence, 6) exploration opportunities, 7) higher order thinking, 8) professional development, 9) science interest, 10) science self-efficacy, 11) science is achievable, and 12) technical skills. Six activities were found to be related to the benefits: 1) math and science coursework, 2) oral presentations, 3) college visits and field trips, 4) presentations by professionals, 5) lab activities, and 6) mentoring. The results of this study provide important information about the activities, or learning experiences, that are related to the benefits of participating in a science support program, and they have important implications for the development and refinement of STEM programs for youth who identify with groups that are underrepresented in STEM

Revitalizing us manufacturing to capitalize on innovation

We find that a conventional engineering degree approach to education is not sufficient to meet the new challenges in the ecosystem of manufacturing, design and business innovation, and product realization. Instead a new form of engineering education, the “Professional Masters” is required that takes the grounding provided by typical Bachelor of Science in engineering degree and provides condensed, formalized, experiencewith systems,applications, projects, and non-technical topics to create a true professional ready to maximize their value to the company and ready to use their experience to lead. The Master of Engineering in Manufacturing (MEngM) at MIT was developed over a period of 10 years, and has more than 200 alumni. It is based on the notion of a need for graduate level education in the profession of engineering that is not fulfilled by the conventional research- oriented Master of Science degree. We have learned that there is a large pool of outstanding students who will seek out this degree once it is offered, and who have as alumni drawn strongly positive reviews from their employers. Students in the program are drawn to the notion that manufacturing is how technological advances and innovations become rooted in a nation's economy. They want to understand the essential components and growth opportunities of the foundation - manufacturing and innovation - of an economy. There are many indicators of the decline of manufacturing in the US, most of them economic. One troubling indicator is the persistent lack of interest in careers in this field, particularly at the collegiate and post-graduate level. While there are continual calls for better labor force training and government programs to support the same, there are actually disincentives for promising young professionals to enter this field. Societal perception and industry needs seem to run counter to one another. We propose that the MEngM can serve as one example of a new national model for professional manufacturing engineering education. It can profoundly impact the US’s innovation ecosystem which is the foundation of our manufacturing based economy today and in the future

Gidakiimanaanawigamig’s Circle of Learning: A Model for Partnership between Tribal Community and Research University

Since 2002, the National Center for Earth-Surface dynamics has collaborated with the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, the University of Minnesota, and other partner institutions to develop programs aimed at supporting Native American participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, and especially in the Earth and Environmental Sciences. These include the gidakiimanaaniwigamig math and science camps for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, the Research Experience for Undergraduates on Sustainable Land and Water Resources, which takes place on two native reservations, and support for new majors at tribal colleges. All of these programs have a common focus on collaboration with communities, place-based education, community-inspired research projects, a focus on traditional culture and language, and resource management on reservations. Strong partnerships between university, tribal college, and Native American reservation were a foundation for success, but took time and effort to develop. This paper explores steps towards effective partnerships that support student success in STEM via environmental education

STEM Center for Student Retention and Success: A Proposal

The STEM pipeline, a commonly used analogy (Kuh, 2006; Tierney, 2000), has been shrinking. Furthermore, degree attainment for women and underrepresented minority students in STEM are even lower than for undergraduates as a-whole (National Science Foundation, 2007). With low numbers of students enrolling in STEM fields and even smaller numbers of women and minorities in the STEM pipeline, colleges and universities need to pay particular-attention to retaining the students they have. This capstone proposes a STEM Center that provides an infrastructural support for undergraduate students in the School of Science and Engineering at Merrimack College. The Center will consolidate programs under a single entity and create a continuum of resources designed to support students at every stage of their education. Specifically, using George Kuh’s high impact practices (Kuh, 2012) faculty and staff will plan and implement retention initiatives including experiential learning opportunities, undergraduate research, STEM-focused clubs and a Living Learning Community (LLC) for female students. There is also increased coordination between faculty and staff to provide targeted advising during critical points in the semester. Tinto’s Interactionalist Theory of individual student departure (2012) and Bolman and Deal’s Organizational Theory (2013) are used to guide the organization of the infrastructure for student support services within the school

The impact of National Science Foundation investments in undergraduate engineering education research: A comparative, mixed methods study

The U.S. invests billions of taxpayers\u27 dollars in research tied to the national priorities that contribute to its competitiveness in a global economy. As the federal funding agency with an explicit focus on engineering education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) contains a portfolio of projects focused on improving the quantity of engineering graduates and the quality of engineering programs. Within the agency, the Division of Undergraduate Education invests approximately $190 million (FY 2012) annually on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education projects. Although the DUE portfolio includes a suite a projects with different foci supporting national initiatives and Principal Investigators (PIs) report their results in annual reports and conferences, there is little consistency on how impact is defined, evaluated, and measured. ^ While many agree on the importance of investing in research, the stiff economic climate necessitates that the research that demonstrates impact is what will continue to be supported. However, the dearth of scholarship on impact contributes to the lack of understanding around this topic. This study links the fragmented literature on impact to form a unified starting point for continuing the conversation. While existing literature includes three dimensions of research impact (i.e., scientific, societal, and domain-specific impact), this study focuses on the domain-specific impacts of engineering education research using two guiding frameworks, namely, Toulmin\u27s Model (1958) and the Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development (Earle et al., 2013), and a multiphase mixed methods research design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011).^ The qualitative phase of this study explores how researchers on NSF-funded STEM education R&D projects talk about the impact of their work; the findings reveal eight themes that are commonly discussed when PIs articulate the impact of their research, and two themes related to how they support their claims. The findings also indicate that the STEM discipline associated with the study and the project focus have more to do with the types of impact PIs claim than the amount of funding awarded to the project. As a result of identifying the points of alignment between PIs\u27 perspectives on impact and existing literature, a preliminary description of what impact looks like in this context is proposed—using the three dimensions of research impact as an organizing framework. Although this study puts forth a preliminary description of the impact of STEM education research, extensions of this work are necessary before providing practitioners and policymakers with a valid, comprehensive framework characterizing what impact means in this context.^ Ideas supporting the types of claims PIs make when discussing the impact of their work were used to develop a survey that was distributed to a small sample of current and former NSF Program Officers (POs) in the second phase of this study. The survey results provide preliminary evidence on how PIs and NSF PO\u27 perspectives on research impact compare, and affirm that additional studies are needed. Consequently, implications for policy and practice and potential research directions are also discussed

Report on the sixth blind test of organic crystal structure prediction methods.

The sixth blind test of organic crystal structure prediction (CSP) methods has been held, with five target systems: a small nearly rigid molecule, a polymorphic former drug candidate, a chloride salt hydrate, a co-crystal and a bulky flexible molecule. This blind test has seen substantial growth in the number of participants, with the broad range of prediction methods giving a unique insight into the state of the art in the field. Significant progress has been seen in treating flexible molecules, usage of hierarchical approaches to ranking structures, the application of density-functional approximations, and the establishment of new workflows and `best practices' for performing CSP calculations. All of the targets, apart from a single potentially disordered Z' = 2 polymorph of the drug candidate, were predicted by at least one submission. Despite many remaining challenges, it is clear that CSP methods are becoming more applicable to a wider range of real systems, including salts, hydrates and larger flexible molecules. The results also highlight the potential for CSP calculations to complement and augment experimental studies of organic solid forms.The organisers and participants are very grateful to the crystallographers who supplied the candidate structures: Dr. Peter Horton (XXII), Dr. Brian Samas (XXIII), Prof. Bruce Foxman (XXIV), and Prof. Kraig Wheeler (XXV and XXVI). We are also grateful to Dr. Emma Sharp and colleagues at Johnson Matthey (Pharmorphix) for the polymorph screening of XXVI, as well as numerous colleagues at the CCDC for assistance in organising the blind test. Submission 2: We acknowledge Dr. Oliver Korb for numerous useful discussions. Submission 3: The Day group acknowledge the use of the IRIDIS High Performance Computing Facility, and associated support services at the University of Southampton, in the completion of this work. We acknowledge funding from the EPSRC (grants EP/J01110X/1 and EP/K018132/1) and the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC through grant agreements n. 307358 (ERC-stG- 2012-ANGLE) and n. 321156 (ERC-AG-PE5-ROBOT). Submission 4: I am grateful to Mikhail Kuzminskii for calculations of molecular structures on Gaussian 98 program in the Institute of Organic Chemistry RAS. The Russian Foundation for Basic Research is acknowledged for financial support (14-03-01091). Submission 5: Toine Schreurs provided computer facilities and assistance. I am grateful to Matthew Habgood at AWE company for providing a travel grant. Submission 6: We would like to acknowledge support of this work by GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Vertex. Submission 7: The research was financially supported by the VIDI Research Program 700.10.427, which is financed by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and the European Research Council (ERC-2010-StG, grant agreement n. 259510-KISMOL). We acknowledge the support of the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM). Supercomputer facilities were provided by the National Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF). Submission 8: Computer resources were provided by the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), supported by NSF grant number ACI-1053575. MBF and GIP acknowledge the support from the University of Buenos Aires and the Argentinian Research Council. Submission 9: We thank Dr. Bouke van Eijck for his valuable advice on our predicted structure of XXV. We thank the promotion office for TUT programs on advanced simulation engineering (ADSIM), the leading program for training brain information architects (BRAIN), and the information and media center (IMC) at Toyohashi University of Technology for the use of the TUT supercomputer systems and application software. We also thank the ACCMS at Kyoto University for the use of their supercomputer. In addition, we wish to thank financial supports from Conflex Corp. and Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Submission 12: We thank Leslie Leiserowitz from the Weizmann Institute of Science and Geoffrey Hutchinson from the University of Pittsburgh for helpful discussions. We thank Adam Scovel at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) for technical support. Work at Tulane University was funded by the Louisiana Board of Regents Award # LEQSF(2014-17)-RD-A-10 “Toward Crystal Engineering from First Principles”, by the NSF award # EPS-1003897 “The Louisiana Alliance for Simulation-Guided Materials Applications (LA-SiGMA)”, and by the Tulane Committee on Research Summer Fellowship. Work at the Technical University of Munich was supported by the Solar Technologies Go Hybrid initiative of the State of Bavaria, Germany. Computer time was provided by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. Submission 13: This work would not have been possible without funding from Khalifa University’s College of Engineering. I would like to acknowledge Prof. Robert Bennell and Prof. Bayan Sharif for supporting me in acquiring the resources needed to carry out this research. Dr. Louise Price is thanked for her guidance on the use of DMACRYS and NEIGHCRYS during the course of this research. She is also thanked for useful discussions and numerous e-mail exchanges concerning the blind test. Prof. Sarah Price is acknowledged for her support and guidance over many years and for providing access to DMACRYS and NEIGHCRYS. Submission 15: The work was supported by the United Kingdom’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (EP/J003840/1, EP/J014958/1) and was made possible through access to computational resources and support from the High Performance Computing Cluster at Imperial College London. We are grateful to Professor Sarah L. Price for supplying the DMACRYS code for use within CrystalOptimizer, and to her and her research group for support with DMACRYS and feedback on CrystalPredictor and CrystalOptimizer. Submission 16: R. J. N. acknowledges financial support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. [EP/J017639/1]. R. J. N. and C. J. P. acknowledge use of the Archer facilities of the U.K.’s national high-performance computing service (for which access was obtained via the UKCP consortium [EP/K014560/1]). C. J. P. also acknowledges a Leadership Fellowship Grant [EP/K013688/1]. B. M. acknowledges Robinson College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge Philosophical Society for a Henslow Research Fellowship. Submission 17: The work at the University of Delaware was supported by the Army Research Office under Grant W911NF-13-1- 0387 and by the National Science Foundation Grant CHE-1152899. The work at the University of Silesia was supported by the Polish National Science Centre Grant No. DEC-2012/05/B/ST4/00086. Submission 18: We would like to thank Constantinos Pantelides, Claire Adjiman and Isaac Sugden of Imperial College for their support of our use of CrystalPredictor and CrystalOptimizer in this and Submission 19. The CSP work of the group is supported by EPSRC, though grant ESPRC EP/K039229/1, and Eli Lilly. The PhD students support: RKH by a joint UCL Max-Planck Society Magdeburg Impact studentship, REW by a UCL Impact studentship; LI by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre and the M3S Centre for Doctoral Training (EPSRC EP/G036675/1). Submission 19: The potential generation work at the University of Delaware was supported by the Army Research Office under Grant W911NF-13-1-0387 and by the National Science Foundation Grant CHE-1152899. Submission 20: The work at New York University was supported, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office under contract/grant number W911NF-13-1-0387 (MET and LV) and, in part, by the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number DMR-1420073 (MET and ES). The work at the University of Delaware was supported by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.S. Army Research Office under contract/grant number W911NF-13-1- 0387 and by the National Science Foundation Grant CHE-1152899. Submission 21: We thank the National Science Foundation (DMR-1231586), the Government of Russian Federation (Grant No. 14.A12.31.0003), the Foreign Talents Introduction and Academic Exchange Program (No. B08040) and the Russian Science Foundation, project no. 14-43-00052, base organization Photochemistry Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Calculations were performed on the Rurik supercomputer at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Submission 22: The computational results presented have been achieved in part using the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC). Submission 24: The potential generation work at the University of Delaware was supported by the Army Research Office under Grant W911NF-13-1-0387 and by the National Science Foundation Grant CHE-1152899. Submission 25: J.H. and A.T. acknowledge the support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under the program DFG-SPP 1807. H-Y.K., R.A.D., and R.C. acknowledge support from the Department of Energy (DOE) under Grant Nos. DE-SC0008626. This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. This research used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DEAC02-05CH11231. Additional computational resources were provided by the Terascale Infrastructure for Groundbreaking Research in Science and Engineering (TIGRESS) High Performance Computing Center and Visualization Laboratory at Princeton University.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Wiley via http://dx.doi.org/10.1107/S2052520616007447

LOCALIZATION AND BROADBAND FOLLOW-UP OF THE GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE TRANSIENT GW150914

This Supplement provides supporting material for Abbott et al. (2016a). We briefly summarize past electromagnetic (EM) follow-up efforts as well as the organization and policy of the current EM follow-up program. We compare the four probability sky maps produced for the gravitational-wave transient GW150914, and provide additional details of the EM follow-up observations that were performed in the different bands.The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO 600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, for the construction and operation of the Virgo detector, and the creation and support of the EGO consortium. The authors also gratefully acknowledge research support from these agencies as well as by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, Department of Science and Technology, India, Science & Engineering Research Board (SERB), India, Ministry of Human Resource Development, India, the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, the Conselleria d'Economia i Competitivitat and Conselleria d'Educacio Cultura i Universitats of the Govern de les Illes Balears, the National Science Centre of Poland, the European Commission, the Royal Society, the Scottish Funding Council, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance, the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA), the Lyon Institute of Origins (LIO), the National Research Foundation of Korea, Industry Canada and the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, the National Science and Engineering Research Council Canada, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Leverhulme Trust, the Research Corporation, Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan, and the Kavli Foundation. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the NSF, STFC, MPS, INFN, CNRS, and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for provision of computational resources. The Australian SKA Pathfinder is part of the Australia Telescope National Facility which is managed by CSIRO. The operation of ASKAP is funded by the Australian Government with support from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Establishment of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory was funded by the Australian Government and the Government of Western Australia. ASKAP uses advanced supercomputing resources at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the Observatory site. A.J.C.T. acknowledges support from the Junta de Andalucia (Project P07-TIC-03094) and Univ. of Auckland and NIWA for installing of the Spanish BOOTES-3 station in New Zealand, and support from the Spanish Ministry Projects AYA2012-39727-C03-01 and 2015-71718R. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the United States Department of Energy, the United States National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico and the Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number AST-1138766. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2012-39559, ESP2013-48274, FPA2013-47986, and Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2012-0234. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. The Fermi LAT Collaboration acknowledges support for LAT development, operation, and data analysis from NASA and DOE (United States), CEA/Irfu and IN2P3/CNRS (France), ASI and INFN (Italy), MEXT, KEK, and JAXA (Japan), and the K.A. Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council and the National Space Board (Sweden). Science analysis support in the operations phase from INAF (Italy) and CNES (France) is also gratefully acknowledged. The Fermi GBM Collaboration acknowledges the support of NASA in the United States and DRL in Germany. GRAWITA acknowledges the support of INAF for the project "Gravitational Wave Astronomy with the first detections of adLIGO and adVIRGO experiments." This work exploited data by INTEGRAL, an ESA project with instruments and science data center funded by ESA member states (especially the PI countries: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain), and with the participation of Russia and the USA. The SPI ACS detector system has been provided by MPE Garching/Germany. We acknowledge the German INTEGRAL support through DLR grant 50 OG 1101. IPN work is supported in the US under NASA Grant ;NNX15AU74G. This work is partly based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin 48 in Telescope and the 60 in Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) project, a scientific collaboration among the California Institute of Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the Oskar Klein Center, the Weizmann Institute of Science, the TANGO Program of the University System of Taiwan, and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the universe. M.M.K. and Y.C. acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation PIRE program grant 1545949. A.A.M. acknowledges support from the Hubble Fellowship HST-HF-51325.01. Part of the research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. J-GEM is financially supported by KAKENHI Grant No. 24103003, 15H00774, and 15H00788 of MEXT Japan, 15H02069 and 15H02075 of JSPS, and the "Optical and Near-Infrared Astronomy Inter-University Cooperation Program" supported by MEXT. The Liverpool Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by Liverpool John Moores University in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. LOFAR, the Low Frequency Array designed and constructed by ASTRON, has facilities in several countries, which are owned by various parties (each with their own funding sources), and that are collectively operated by the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) foundation under a joint scientific policy. R. Fender acknowledges support from ERC Advanced Investigator Grant 267697. MASTER Global Robotic Net is supported in parts by Lomonosov Moscow State University Development programm, Moscow Union OPTICA, Russian Science Foundation 16-12-00085, RFBR15-02-07875, National Research Foundation of South Africa. We thank JAXA and RIKEN for providing MAXI data. The MAXI team is partially supported by KAKENHI grant Nos. 24103002, 24540239, 24740186, and 23000004 of MEXT, Japan. This work uses the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, operated by CSIRO. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the observatory site. Support for the operation of the MWA is provided by the Australian Government Department of Industry and Science and Department of Education (National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy: NCRIS), under a contract to Curtin University administered by Astronomy Australia Limited. The MWA acknowledges the iVEC Petabyte Data Store and the Initiative in Innovative Computing and the CUDA Center for Excellence sponsored by NVIDIA at Harvard University. Pan-STARRS is supported by the University of Hawaii and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Planetary Defense Office under grant No. NNX14AM74G. The PanSTARRS-LIGO effort is in collaboration with the LIGO Consortium and supported by Queen's University Belfast. The Pan-STARRS1 Sky Surveys have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This work is based (in part) on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, Chile as part of PESSTO, (the Public ESO Spectroscopic Survey for Transient Objects Survey) ESO programs 188.D-3003, 191.D-0935. S.J.S. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement No. [291222] and STFC grants ST/I001123/1 and ST/L000709/1. M.F. is supported by the European Union FP7 programme through ERC grant No. 320360. K.M. acknowledges support from the STFC through an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship. F.O.E. acknowledges support from FONDECYT through postdoctoral grant 3140326. Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project No. CE110001020. Funding for Swift is provided by NASA in the US, by the UK Space Agency in the UK, and by the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI) in Italy. This work made use of data supplied by the UK Swift Science Data Centre at the University of Leicester. We acknowledge the use of public data from the Swift data archive. The TOROS Collaboration acknowledges support from Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia (MinCyT) and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnologicas (CONICET) from Argentina and grants from the USA NSF PHYS 1156600 and NSF HRD 1242090

The Boston University Photonics Center annual report 2013-2014

This repository item contains an annual report that summarizes activities of the Boston University Photonics Center in the 2013-2014 academic year. The report provides quantitative and descriptive information regarding photonics programs in education, interdisciplinary research, business innovation, and technology development. The Boston University Photonics Center (BUPC) is an interdisciplinary hub for education, research, scholarship, innovation, and technology development associated with practical uses of light.This annual report summarizes activities of the Boston University Photonics Center in the 2013–2014 academic year.This has been a good year for the Photonics Center. In the following pages, you will see that the center’s faculty received prodigious honors and awards, generated more than 100 notable scholarly publications in the leading journals in our field, and attracted $14.5M in new research grants and contracts this year. Faculty and staff also expanded their efforts in education and training, through National Science Foundation–sponsored sites for Research Experiences for Undergraduates and for Teachers. As a community, we hosted a compelling series of distinguished invited speakers, and emphasized the theme of Innovations at the Intersections of Micro/Nanofabrication Technology, Biology, and Biomedicine at our annual Future of Light Symposium. We took a leadership role in running national workshops on emerging photonic fields, including an OSA Incubator on Controlled Light Propagation through Complex Media, and an NSF Workshop on Noninvasive Imaging of Brain Function. Highlights of our research achievements for the year include a distinctive Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for Assistant Professor Xue Han, an ambitious new DoD-sponsored grant for Multi-Scale Multi-Disciplinary Modeling of Electronic Materials led by Professor Enrico Bellotti, launch of our NIH-sponsored Center for Innovation in Point of Care Technologies for the Future of Cancer Care led by Professor Cathy Klapperich, and successful completion of the ambitious IARPA-funded contract for Next Generation Solid Immersion Microscopy for Fault Isolation in Back-Side Circuit Analysis led by Professor Bennett Goldberg. These three programs, which represent more than$20M in research funding for the University, are indicative of the breadth of Photonics Center research interests: from fundamental modeling of optoelectronic materials to practical development of cancer diagnostics, from exciting new discoveries in optogenetics for understanding brain function to the achievement of world-record resolution in semiconductor circuit microscopy. Our community welcomed an auspicious cohort of new faculty members, including a newly hired assistant professor and a newly hired professor (and Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department). The Industry/University Cooperative Research Center—the centerpiece of our translational biophotonics program—continues to focus on advancing the health care and medical device industries, and has entered its fourth year of operation with a strong record of achievement and with the support of an enthusiastic industrial membership base