MMAE Seminar - Dr. Xiayun Zhao - Advance Engineering Education with & for Digital Additive Manufacturing
Armour College of Engineering's Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering Department will welcome Dr. Xiayun Zhao from Georgia Institute of Technology on Thursday, September 28th, to present her lecture, Advance Engineering Education with & for Digital Additive Manufacturing.
Abstract
Digitally-driven additive manufacturing (AM) presents unprecedented flexibility in design and manufacturing, which enables invention and production of high-performance parts with reduced cost and risk. The advantages of adopting AM technologies at different levels of education, for diverse educational purposes and disciplines, have been increasingly recognized in both academia and industry. A comprehensive and in-depth understanding for AM technologies is professionally important for students who desire to grasp emerging opportunities in manufacturing industry or entrepreneurial adventure. In this talk, starting with an overall view for my Additive Manufacturing course, I will present a sample class that is focused on teaching photopolymerization based AM processes. Thoughtful teaching approaches are to be adopted to structure an effective learning environment. This teaching practice aims to demonstrate my philosophy and passion in becoming a caring educator for inspiring hands-on and minds-on students. The talk will conclude with my vision of how courses centered on additive manufacturing could facilitate a new-generation of engineering education, which in turn could contribute to the research and development of additive manufacturing technologies for more demanding real-world applications.
Biography
Dr. Xiayun Zhao earned both her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2017 and 2009, respectively. Previously, she studied Precision Measurement Science and Control Technology at Tsinghua University in Beijing (China), where she received her B.S. in 2006. Her graduate research involved with process planning, and real-time process measurement and control for a novel in-house photopolymer additive manufacturing process, which has potential to fabricate micro biomedical parts. Xiayun was awarded to represent Georgia Tech in the prestigious symposium "Excellence in Graduate Polymer Research" in National ACS Meeting in 2017. Before deciding to pursue her Ph.D. degree, she also worked as an instrumentation & control system engineer in Houston, where she was engaged in several offshore drilling and petrochemical refinery projects for Oil & Gas industry clients (e.g. Exxon Mobil and Petrobras). Xiayun is excited to transfer and leverage her experience of both academia research and industry work to innovate in her future career of educating a new-generation engineering students.