The objective of this project is to enhance the educational experience of graduate students in the engineering design research community by sponsoring their travel to an international workshop on developing and publishing journal articles from conference papers. Participants are selected from the best student-authored papers submitted to the annual American Society of Mechanical Engineers conference on design engineering research.
This program will benefit the best of our nation's new design researchers by building their skill in publishing articles in scholarly journals. They will also receive the opportunity to build relationships with other researchers from the US and from around the world.
This project supported the travel and participation costs of five graduate students to attend an international workshop on publishing engineering design research in archival journal transactions. The workshop was held in Grenoble, France and was attended by 35 faculty and students from Europe, in addition to the student delegation from the US. All students that participated in the half week workshop returned to their home institutions and shared their experiences and lessons learned with other students, thus broadening the impact of the workshop beyond the attendees. This sharing included organizing labwide writing workshops, mentoring junior student in writing, and giving formal presentations to their classmates. Each student was able to convert their workshopped conference paper into a journal version, with four accepted and one still under review. From a broader point of view, the international workshop introduced US graduate students to others studying engineering design. This led to at least one formal collaboration where a graduate student was able to find a partner at another US school to help collect experimental data related to her research. The graduate students were able to participate in cultural activities that provided an informal forum to exchange their experiences with respect to graduate school with others from Europe. All students and their faculty mentors recognized the value of this workshop and strongly encourage future sponsorship of this activity. Even without sponsorship, the majority of participants and faculty would recommend this to their peers.
