teaching

Courses, course development, and mentoring.

Mechanical engineering students graduate into problems their textbooks usually do not yet contain. The students I taught in 2021 are now designing battery packs whose failure modes were research questions when they sat in my classroom. My obligation is not to transmit a settled body of knowledge but to leave students able to reason about systems no one has fully characterized yet.

Courses at RIT

MECE-789 · Continuum Mechanics

Graduate · Spring 2024, Spring 2025, Spring 2026 · next offered Spring 2027

A graduate course designed and developed from scratch in the CEW Lab’s own subject area. Built on first-principles derivation, with a live research application attached to every major result and open-ended investigative problem sets in place of short exercises.

MECE-529 / 629 · Renewable Energy Systems

Dual-listed undergraduate and graduate · Fall 2024, Fall 2025 · next offered Fall 2026

Taken over to keep a graduate energy elective in the department’s rotation. Currently being revised with updated battery and energy content and an applied-AI component — machine learning for battery lifetime prediction, and machine vision for manufacturing quality control.

MECE-203 · Strength of Materials I

Undergraduate core · Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022

Fundamental principles of the mechanics of deformable media — stress, strain, deflection, and the relationships among them — across tension, compression, shear, torsion, and bending.

Guest lectures in Introduction to Nanotechnology and Microsystems (MCSE-702), Battery Design and Manufacturing (CHME-789), and Electrochemical Engineering (CHME-650).

Course development

  • AI4Battery, under development through the ROC-BEAT consortium, with a parallel offering at Alfred University; ROC-BEAT also carries Machine Vision for Battery Manufacturing.
  • An introductory module packaged for transfer through RIT’s articulation agreement with Monroe Community College.
  • A formal Energy Engineering credential is a three-year goal of the ROC-BEAT consortium.

Mentoring in the lab

Every trainee co-develops an Individual Development Plan and keeps a hypothesis journal — predictions recorded before each experiment, then revisited in monthly one-on-ones. Everyone presents at a national meeting (ECS, MRS) each year. We recruit through RIT’s LSAMP and CSTEP programs, and through ROC-BEAT and RIT’s TechTigers program our activities reach Deaf and hard-of-hearing learners alongside their peers.