Junior Faculty Teaching Fellow Spotlight: Jon Edd
Each month, the CFT Newsletter highlights the work of our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. This month, Jon Edd, Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department talks about his teaching philosophy and interests:
After teaching thermodynamics for a year and a half, I find that one of the primary challenges for students is to assimilate the abstract ideas of energy and entropy, via the necessary vocabulary, into an intuitive understanding for each term in the respective balance equations. To address this, I include real-world examples and video clips into lectures, but I am also exploring the integration of research and educational goals to improve student learning. Specifically, I am working to connect efforts in the laboratory to those in the classroom through scaling of thermal-fluid flows back and forth between the micro and macro worlds respectively.
“I include real-world examples and video clips into lectures, but I am also exploring the integration of research and educational goals to improve student learning.”
My lab’s research efforts build from the field of biological microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS), or the application of micro-scale engineering techniques to the quantitative analysis and precise manipulation of bio-matter, and as a thermal-fluid sciences group, we have specialized on energy and its transformations on the scale of single cells. In our efforts to turn controlled single-cell energetic processes into solutions for problems in biomedicine and biotechnology, we combine the classroom fundamentals of fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics with the principles of engineering design.
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