Thank you for visiting our video, and welcome to our discussion! 

I'm a graduate researcher at UCF and a member of this year's IRES program. The other researchers and I are very excited to be traveling to Germany and visiting DLR facilities in the coming weeks.

I am eager to answer any questions about our program or my experiences.

Thank you for sharing your work! This seems like a wonderful opportunity for students to collaborate internationally on scientific research. You mentioned in your video that the travel restrictions from the pandemic limited access to the lab in Germany and the experience shifted to virtual format. Can you elaborate on how the program adapted? Do students have access to conduct research in lab settings elsewhere? what aspects of the research are they collaborating on with the team in Germany? 

I am also curious to learn more about the outreach program in other countries that you briefly mentioned in the video. This seems like a nice connection for undergraduate students to mentor younger students. Can you elaborate on the goals for the outreach? What age group are involved?

I would also be interested to learn more about how you are assessing the impact of the project.  

Our program was forced to adapt to travel and in-person restrictions from the pandemic. We weren't able to travel to Germany last year, but wanted to further our collaboration with DLR, so we continued to conduct research at our UCF facilities and were in frequent communication with our advisors from DLR via Zoom. The IRES students have access to UCF research laboratories for experiments, as well as computer clusters for simulations. The IRES student researchers also meet weekly via Zoom to discuss logistics, planning, outreach, and our separate research projects. We also planned and conducted a virtual symposium where IRES students, UCF faculty, and DLR faculty presented their recent research projects. Fortunately, this summer the IRES students are traveling to Germany to conduct research in DLR facilities.

Each IRES student is paired with a different DLR advisor and a different research project, however some students share advisors and projects. The project is usually based on their previous research experience, if applicable.

We have done Outreach through Skype-A-Scientist, as well as UCF's STEM week events. Skype-A-Scientist matched us with multiple grade-school classrooms around the world to present to. We presented via Zoom to mainly 2nd-10th grade classrooms in the US, Canada, Malaysia, and the Philippines. In these presentations we discussed some of our research topics at a low level, explaining the motivation and real-world solutions we hope to achieve. Our outreach goal is to connect with a diverse group of young students and stimulate interest in STEM.

The effect of our project is assessed by Dr. Bonnie Swan with UCF PEER. Program Evaluation and Educational Research Group (PEER), a service center at the University of Central Florida (UCF), offers high quality evaluation, related research, and reporting services for educational programs, grants, and community based organizations.

UCF PEER: https://ccie.ucf.edu/peer/ 

I hope this helps!

Hi Everyone, I am a faculty member and PI of the IRES. We have a great group of student researchers who have been working on research with our international partners. This year our students will be traveling to Germany. There is usually a great deal of communication and preparation that happens before an international research experience. The students meet with the advisors and make a plan for the research they will do and the facilities they will use. The video gives an insight into how we managed during the pandemic to keep the collaboration alive and successfully engage with our collaborators towards our travel this year. 

We are excited to answer your questions

Thanks for sharing your work, Seetha, Benjamin, and team. This seems like a great opportunity for students. As you know, the field of engineering has struggled to diversify and create inclusive environments for women and students of color. But your program seems to be doing a great job of engaging women. What have learned about how to welcome and support young women in the engineering field? Are there ways that these experiences are also changing the perspectives and cultures of existing engineering teams? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Thanks for this great question Scott. We are excited that our program has been successful at engaging women and minorities in STEM. Our recruitment efforts have been significant, widespread and ensure societies and organizations such as the Society of Women Engineers, Society of Women in Space Exploration, McNair Scholars Program, Transfer community and many others have access to information on the program and application support. While this is a first step in encouraging a diverse applicant pool, we also ensure that once selected the students have access to mentorship and support from past participants. We have weekly meetings to ensure our students are comfortable in their research progress and communication with international partners. Finally, we emphasize STEM outreach and engagement including blogs and K-12 activities to build pathways for future students from underrepresented groups to feel welcome as future cohorts. These have also contributed to changing perspectives within and outside the group as more students, future participants and researchers see the success of the teams both in research and engaging a diverse research community.

Thank you for sharing this program! It sounds like the undergraduate and graduate students had enriching and collaborative international experiences relative to advanced combustion. I was curious...how or why did you select sites in Germany as your international partner, versus other potential countries? Thanks again for your work.

Thanks for this answer. That's great that students were able to work in state-of-the-art facilities relative to high-temperature coating materials and combustion. I am currently involved in an Engineering Research Center with many connections to industry, and this experience reminded me of the proprietary nature of much of engineering, which can lead to competition and secrecy instead of collaboration and sharing. So you must have a great relationship with these labs where students can experience state-of-the art design while still meeting governmental rules regarding the sharing of scientific information. (I kind of wondered about that in my question too...I thought the federal governments of the US and Germany must have pretty strong collaborations in order to allow this type of work to happen.) Thanks again for sharing and I wish you the best as the project moves forward.