Enhancing Professional Skills Among Engineering Students By Interdisciplinary International Collaboration

Providing necessary knowledge and skills for engineering students to become successful professionals is a tricky task. Besides disciplinary knowledge, e.g., communication skills, ability to work in teams, and international experience are often mentioned as important. Regarding internationalization, most engineering programs in Sweden rely on either student exchange or low-level internationalization-at-home, such as international literature and lecturers. This paper explores sustainable international experiences for students on their home turf provided through an international interdisciplinary collaboration where engineering students in Sweden and marketing students in Australia work together on a project. The setup simulates a consultancy firm with development and marketing offices in different countries that cooperate to launch an application for the Australian market. The paper is based on interviews and surveys with students and teachers participating in this, since 2017, ongoing project. Findings reveal that students encountered several challenges that are hard to simulate in an ordinary university setting, e.g., language barriers, cultural differences, time differences, differences between disciplines, and varying work habits and values. The results also highlight opportunities such as learning from each other’s perspectives and expertise, developing a more professional approach, presenting to people from other industry backgrounds, and gaining a better understanding of different cultures. The results show that the students gain professional experience that is of great value for their future profession. From a teacher’s perspective, the paper discusses important issues when setting up an international inter-disciplinary collaboration, e.g., alignment of exercises, building a common ground, and the need for flexibility

Bipolar outflow on the Asymptotic Giant Branch - the case of IRC+10011

Near-IR imaging of the AGB star IRC+10011 (= CIT3) reveals the presence of a bipolar structure within the central ~0.1 arcsec of a spherical dusty wind. We show that the image asymmetries originate from ~1E-4 Msun of swept-up wind material in an elongated cocoon whose expansion is driven by bipolar jets. We perform detailed 2D radiative transfer calculations with the cocoon modeled as two cones extending to ~1,100 AU within an opening angle of ~30deg, imbedded in a wind with the standard r^{-2} density profile. The cocoon expansion started <~200 years ago, while the total lifetime of the circumstellar shell is ~5,500 years. Similar bipolar expansion, at various stages of evolution, has been recently observed in a number of other AGB stars, culminating in jet breakout from the confining spherical wind. The bipolar outflow is triggered at a late stage in the evolution of AGB winds, and IRC+10011 provides its earliest example thus far. These new developments enable us to identify the first instance of symmetry breaking in the evolution from AGB to planetary nebula.Comment: accepted for publication in MNRAS, high-resolution pdf version can be found at http://www.leluya.org/downloads/Vinkovic_et_al_IRC+10011.pd

Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA)

Stellar physics and evolution calculations enable a broad range of research in astrophysics. Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) is a suite of open source libraries for a wide range of applications in computational stellar astrophysics. A newly designed 1-D stellar evolution module, MESA star, combines many of the numerical and physics modules for simulations of a wide range of stellar evolution scenarios ranging from very-low mass to massive stars, including advanced evolutionary phases. MESA star solves the fully coupled structure and composition equations simultaneously. It uses adaptive mesh refinement and sophisticated timestep controls, and supports shared memory parallelism based on OpenMP. Independently usable modules provide equation of state, opacity, nuclear reaction rates, and atmosphere boundary conditions. Each module is constructed as a separate Fortran 95 library with its own public interface. Examples include comparisons to other codes and show evolutionary tracks of very low mass stars, brown dwarfs, and gas giant planets; the complete evolution of a 1 Msun star from the pre-main sequence to a cooling white dwarf; the Solar sound speed profile; the evolution of intermediate mass stars through the thermal pulses on the He-shell burning AGB phase; the interior structure of slowly pulsating B Stars and Beta Cepheids; evolutionary tracks of massive stars from the pre-main sequence to the onset of core collapse; stars undergoing Roche lobe overflow; and accretion onto a neutron star. Instructions for downloading and installing MESA can be found on the project web site (http://mesa.sourceforge.net/).Comment: 110 pages, 39 figures; submitted to ApJS; visit the MESA website at http://mesa.sourceforge.ne

Dust Formation In Early Galaxies

We investigate the sources and amount of dust in early galaxies. We discuss dust nucleation in stellar atmospheres using published extended atmosphere models, stellar evolution tracks and nucleation conditions and conclude that the (TPAGB) phase of intermediate mass stars is likely to be the most promising site for dust formation in stellar winds. The implications of chemical evolution models for high redshift galaxies are investigated and we show there is no difficulty in producing dusty galaxies at redshifts above 5 if supernovae are a dominant source of interstellar dust. If dust does not condense efficiently in SNe then significant dust masses can only be generated at by galaxies with a high star formation efficiency. We find the visual optical depth for individual star forming clouds can reach values greater than 1 at very low metallicity (1/100 solar) provided that the mass-radius exponent of molecular clouds is less than two. Most of the radiation from star formation will emerge at IR wavelengths in the early universe provided that dust is present. The (patchy) visual optical depth through a typical early galaxy will however, remain less than 1 on average until a metallicity of 1/10 solar is reached.Comment: in press MNRAS, 17 pages with 19 figs, corrected typo

The missing link: Bordetella petrii is endowed with both the metabolic versatility of environmental bacteria and virulence traits of pathogenic Bordetellae

Gross R, Guzman CA, Sebaihia M, et al. The missing link: Bordetella petrii is endowed with both the metabolic versatility of environmental bacteria and virulence traits of pathogenic Bordetellae. BMC Genomics. 2008;9(1): 449.Background: Bordetella petrii is the only environmental species hitherto found among the otherwise host-restricted and pathogenic members of the genus Bordetella. Phylogenetically, it connects the pathogenic Bordetellae and environmental bacteria of the genera Achromobacter and Alcaligenes, which are opportunistic pathogens. B. petrii strains have been isolated from very different environmental niches, including river sediment, polluted soil, marine sponges and a grass root. Recently, clinical isolates associated with bone degenerative disease or cystic fibrosis have also been described. Results: In this manuscript we present the results of the analysis of the completely annotated genome sequence of the B. petrii strain DSMZ12804. B. petrii has a mosaic genome of 5,287,950 bp harboring numerous mobile genetic elements, including seven large genomic islands. Four of them are highly related to the clc element of Pseudomonas knackmussii B13, which encodes genes involved in the degradation of aromatics. Though being an environmental isolate, the sequenced B. petrii strain also encodes proteins related to virulence factors of the pathogenic Bordetellae, including the filamentous hemagglutinin, which is a major colonization factor of B. pertussis, and the master virulence regulator BvgAS. However, it lacks all known toxins of the pathogenic Bordetellae. Conclusion: The genomic analysis suggests that B. petrii represents an evolutionary link between free-living environmental bacteria and the host-restricted obligate pathogenic Bordetellae. Its remarkable metabolic versatility may enable B. petrii to thrive in very different ecological niches

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Python in a week : Conceptual tests for learning and course development

Programming has gradually become an essential skill for engineers and scientists across disciplines and is an important part of the CDIO Syllabus covering fundamental knowledge and reasoning. Recently, there has been a shift away from introductory programming languages like C and Java towards Python, especially in programs where the focus lies on handling and analysing large quantities of data, such as energy technology, biotechnology, and bioinformatics. This paper illustrates the successful setup of a one-week-long introductory Python programming course with a hands-on approach. Given the limited time, a challenge is how to effectively teach students a meaningful set of skills that enables them to self-guide their future learning. Moreover, since the course does not include any summative assessment, we need other means of measuring students’ learning and guiding course development. We address these challenges by coupling short lectures with short quizzes for formative assessment, adding another learning activity to the course. We find that, in the absence of summative assessment, short, frequent quizzes with immediate feedback are an excellent tool to track the learning of a class as a whole. Students report that the quizzes, albeit challenging, improved their understanding of programming concepts, made them aware of potential mistakes, and were a fun learning experience. Furthermore, the results from this paper illustrate how a new programming language can be taught to students without prior programming skills in a short period of time. We summarise our lessons learnt for designing and integrating quizzes in short-format programming courses

International professional skills: Interdisciplinary project work

Higher education should provide learning situations that prepare students for a future profession and make them world-ready. This paper reports insights from an international interdisciplinary collaborative project aiming to create learning experiences that are close to a professional situation. The collaboration setup simulates a setting of a digital agency with a development team in Sweden and a marketing team in Australia working together to solve a task. The collaborative project has been active since 2017, completing its fifth iteration in 2021. Postcourse survey results show that the students felt that a real situation was created with a high level of collaboration and commitment, internationalization, well selected digital collaborative tools, and that an interdisciplinary community of practice was created among the students

Internationalization at home : An international interdisciplinary experience

In today’s global society, international experience isimportant for students studying all subjects. This paper providesinsights and learnings from a long-term project with the purposeto provide international interdisciplinary experience forengineering students in Sweden as well as for marketing studentsin Australia. The paper discusses the design of the latest iterationof a long-term collaborative project that enables students who donot have the opportunity to engage in exchange studies in aprofessional international setting. The main objective of this paperis to give inspiration and a starting point to the implementation ofinternational learning experiences as an integrated part ofstudents’ education.

Python in a week : Conceptual tests for learning and course development

Programming has gradually become an essential skill for engineers and scientists across disciplines and is an important part of the CDIO Syllabus covering fundamental knowledge and reasoning. Recently, there has been a shift away from introductory programming languages like C and Java towards Python, especially in programs where the focus lies on handling and analysing large quantities of data, such as energy technology, biotechnology, and bioinformatics. This paper illustrates the successful setup of a one-week-long introductory Python programming course with a hands-on approach. Given the limited time, a challenge is how to effectively teach students a meaningful set of skills that enables them to self-guide their future learning. Moreover, since the course does not include any summative assessment, we need other means of measuring students’ learning and guiding course development. We address these challenges by coupling short lectures with short quizzes for formative assessment, adding another learning activity to the course. We find that, in the absence of summative assessment, short, frequent quizzes with immediate feedback are an excellent tool to track the learning of a class as a whole. Students report that the quizzes, albeit challenging, improved their understanding of programming concepts, made them aware of potential mistakes, and were a fun learning experience. Furthermore, the results from this paper illustrate how a new programming language can be taught to students without prior programming skills in a short period of time. We summarise our lessons learnt for designing and integrating quizzes in short-format programming courses