CLIMATE-CARE Certificate

The NRT trainees will enroll and complete the proposed Sustainability Design & Engineering certificate, which will require the equivalent of 4 courses and 4 Individualized Professional Development (IPD) elements in addition to research. Specifically, 3 elements are needed to satisfy the NRT certificate: (1) complete 1 required and 1 elective courses from the list in the home department, and 2 remaining courses from the four categories. In addition, the trainee will sign-up for at least one co-curricular activity. (2) The trainee will complete at least 2 semesters of research and write a thesis. (3) The trainee will complete the required elements of IPD and additional skills.

The trainees can complete the certificate in a minimum of 1.5 years or extend the certificate training throughout the period of masters or PhD. The certificate fits without additional burden (of time, requirements, or financial commitment) with current masters or doctoral program requirements. Upon completion, it will appear in the trainee's academic transcript.

Core Technical Training: The trainees will select 4 from the following courses. The Masters degrees typically requires 10 courses and an optional thesis; the PhD degrees will require 10 courses and a thesis. The courses are categorized into four focus areas (Table 1). We plan to open a new cross-cut, special topic course – Engineering solutions for climate resilience.

Required Skills and Competencies

Trainees will receive formal training in Communication, Teamwork and Ethics in the following modules.

Individualized Professional Development (IPD): We will prepare trainees with balanced skills for successful careers through required IPD elements: (1) Departmental seminars and soft skill training; (2) NRT annual symposium; (3) IPD advising; (4) Additional skill training. The faculty and trainees will participate in community and team activities throughout each year, e.g., annual symposium, student socials, student-faculty mixers, workshops, seminars, holiday party, and informal biweekly events such as open office hours.

Seminars and Soft Skills: All graduate degree programs at Penn require students to attend departmental seminars as a two-semester course, providing students with a collective experience with the members of their cohort while attending seminars and acquiring valuable skills in their training experience. We will adapt this course for our NRT fellows. We will also introduce several modules on soft skills: e.g., responsible conduct in research (RCR) through case studies, cultural sensitivity and responsiveness, how to write a paper, how to give an oral presentation, how to read literature critically, how to write a research proposal, how to work in teams (with peers and with supervisors and subordinates), and ethics case studies. Some of the highlights of the courses are described below.

• Students complete an ethics module (2-week session), focusing on ethics in technology and scientific impact on society, and working on case studies. EAS9000 (Responsible Conduct of Research in Engineering) is mandated for 1^st year PhD students in SEAS in Fall semester. Training through CLIMATE-CARE NRT will supplement EAS9000, where case studies will be featured on human rights during raw material sourcing extraction, and construction materials synthesis, green canopy unequal distribution in cities, availability of heat protecting solutions in low-income housing, environmental justice impacts to communities where toxic building materials are disposed at end of life, as well as the critical needs vs. affordability by the communities to increase climate resilience, among other topics.
• Students complete an individualized development plan (IDP) focusing on the NRT, degree experience, and career planning. The trainees will be advised on an individualized basis on how to complete their IDP and will discuss their plans with their advisors and thesis committees annually.
• Students will attend the weekly departmental seminar series, and AESOP/PICS/Water Center events as part of the co-curricular activities. The trainees will interact with the speakers, read a published work of the speaker before their visit, prepare a set of questions – scientific and personal – in the meeting with the speaker during the visit.

NRT Annual Symposium: We will hold a 1-day annual symposium for the CLIMATE-CARE NRT community to present their original research work with others and interact with invited keynote speakers nationwide. In addition to the mandatory participation (and presentation) in the NRT symposium, trainees are encouraged to attend the symposia that support the NRT (see Table 1).

IPD Advising: We will periodically survey student experiences around implicit bias, mentoring, and explicit bias, among other topics. All NRT trainees and mentors will undergo orientation workshops where elements of the resources described above will be communicated. The sessions are a forum to discuss admittance, curricular planning, individualized development plan (IDP) activities, and long-term planning. All NRT trainees will have a thesis committee for their doctoral and masters thesis. The composition of the committees will balance Sustainability Design & Engineering expertise among the committee members.

Additional skill training. Every trainee will be required to complete the IDP elements above and also to participate in the Internship Program, Undergraduate Research Mentoring, or Entrepreneurial Immersion. In addition, trainees will participate in workshops developed by Penn’s Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL) on “Unconscious Bias in Teamwork” and “Inclusive Mentorship in Research.”

Internship Program: Trainees will have options to participate in internship at the national labs (e.g., National Institute of Science and Technology, NIST, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, LLNL) and industrial sites (e.g., Dow, KieranTimberlake, Corning), and non-profit education organization (e.g., Green Building United, GBU). Each internship will be 10 weeks long funded by Penn or the partners. The trainees will receive a pre-internship orientation with a checklist of rules, expectations, and goals. We will seek to expand the number of internship sites and funding sources for future cohorts of trainees.

Undergraduate Research and Mentoring: CLIMATE-CARE NRT trainees choosing to participate in 8-week Undergraduate Research Mentoring will be matched with visiting undergraduate students through the bridge programs, the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs through Penn’s NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC), the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM) and Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program (PURM), which host a high degree of URM students. The mentoring will be structured with elements: defining the project goals, designing the research, methods, analysis including validation, reproducibility, statistical and error analysis, and inferring conclusions from results, while working on a topic of NRT-funded research. The program will also cover mentor-mentee relationships and responsible conduct in research during orientation.

Entrepreneurial Immersion: With a growing number of students starting companies and our faculty funding startups, we have well-established programs such as PCI Ventures led by Penn Center of Innovation (PCI) to support the creation of spinouts from Penn through targeted programs and activities. We have also established MatSci Makerspace, a student-led initiative but supported by MSE department to promote a hands-on materials science education, and the George H. Stephenson Foundation Educational Laboratory & Bio-MakerSpace for prototyping new technologies. Tangen Hall, a new building housing Venture Lab in partnership between SEAS, WSOD and Wharton Business School, consolidates Penn’s startup ecosystem to provide experiential learning experience. Students who pursue such avenues own their intellectual property 100% as long as it is not tied to federal funding. To formalize the entrepreneurial immersion, we will partner with PCI through their signature PCI Fellows Program and NSF funded Penn I-Corps program, which are open to graduate students. We will also put our technology for annual Y-prize competition, a partnership between SEAS and Wharton, aiming to take Penn Engineering faculty’s technology to the marketplace.