Education and Outreach

During the course of our industrial interactions, our experience has shown that there are not enough professional people trained in the type of cross-disciplinary research necessary to ensure the advancement of plasma-aided manufacturing. Therefore, in the course of activities, each research area exposes graduate and undergraduate students to the ERC concept of a systems approach to research. Our cross-disciplinary research has already affected major changes in the nature of plasma-aided manufacturing research and education--many of which could not have been achieved without the ERC's presence.

We are concerned that engineers in industry today are not aware of the latest advances in the field and that more of our youth, particularly women and minorities, need to be encouraged to enter engineering fields. Therefore, we have developed an education and outreach program to expose elementary, middle and high school students to science, engineering and plasma-aided manufacturing. In addition, several outreach programs have been implemented to activly recruit a more diverse group of undergraduates from other educational institutions.