CIV faculty and postdocs participate to SBU's Engineering Academy

During Summer 2023, Professors Wei Li and Xinwei Mao partnered with the Engineering Academy at Stony Brook University (SBU) to deliver summer camps to educate the engineers of the future. This NSF project, Engineering Academy, is led by Mónica Bugallo, the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at SBU. The Engineering Academy addresses factors that inhibit involvement in engineering, by engaging students and teachers from low-achieving middle schools in the passion, challenges and opportunities of engineering. The project is posed to impact a broad spectrum of participants, with a focus on low-income students.

Specifically, in the civil engineering part of the program, the students were introduced to the various sub-disciplines in civil engineering and provided with hands-on experiments in geosystems engineering and environmental engineering. For example, the students used photoelastic materials to visualize internal stresses induced by external forces. They also used sand made of round particles and angular particles to build sandcastles and compared the strengths of these two types of sand using the height of the sandcastles as indicators.

In the area of water treatment, Dr. Mian Wang (post-doctoral associate in Dr Mao’s group) inspired the students to design a wastewater treatment filter using locally available filter matrix at various sizes, shapes and combination ratios.