Ashlee N. Ford Versypt

The central theme of this seminar is computer-based tools for chemical engineering education made broadly accessible to students, educators, researchers, and lay people. Major platforms discussed include graphical user interfaces (GUIs), interactive notebooks (e.g., Jupyter Notebooks and MATLAB Live Scripts), and GitHub repositories. These tools have been used by Dr. Ford Versypt to instruct and engage undergraduate chemical engineering students, prepare faculty for using these tools, train undergraduate and graduate students for computational research in science and engineering, and introduce lay audiences to chemical engineering concepts in informal learning environments outside of the classroom.

Examples of materials that Dr. Ford Versypt has developed and disseminated include: a MATLAB app introducing chemical engineering design concepts through a pharmaceutical dosing case study; a set of MATLAB Live Scripts to introduce undergraduate students to mathematical biology computational research; and lessons and example for solving systems of ODEs in MATLAB for the Materials and Energy Balances course. These and other resources are available in a collection of open-source software projects available at http://github.com/ashleefv. Also in this collection is an open-source learning module that she created and packaged (with support from CACHE) for an upper division/graduate elective course, focused on practical computational science and engineering concepts, including GUI design, version control, LaTeX, MATLAB, Python, and open-source and reproducible research computing. Dr. Ford Versypt also developed and co-led a session at the 2022 ASEE/AIChE Chemical Engineering Summer School featuring MATLAB and Python interactive modules for computations throughout the ChE curriculum. A subset of these resources will be highlighted in the seminar.

Many of these computational tools have been used in outreach applications for sharing chemical engineering concepts with K-12 students and the general public through events including: the chemical engineering design module for the Oklahoma State University (OSU) College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology Summer Bridge Program for incoming freshmen and the University at Buffalo Chemical Engineering Camp for high school students; the OSU Grandparent University biomedical engineering major for middle student students and their grandparents; and the Oklahoma EPSCoR Women in Science Conference for junior high and high school girls. The seminar will feature some of these examples while emphasizing lessons learned in their design and deployment for non-university audiences.

Dr. Ford Versypt earned a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, all in Chemical Engineering. She did her postdoc at MIT. She started her academic career at Oklahoma State University in 2014 before joining the University at Buffalo as a tenured associate professor in 2021. Dr. Ford Versypt leads the Systems Biomedicine and Pharmaceutics Laboratory. She has received a number of awards for her research, teaching, and service including the NSF CAREER Award, ASEE Chemical Engineering Division’s Fahien, Martin, and Corcoran Awards, and AIChE CAST Division Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education. Her research program is funded by the NSF, NIH (R35 MIRA, R01, R21), and others.

• Time: 11:00 AM
• Location: 206 Furnas Hall