Education and Community Outreach

While our research team has made significant progress on the scientific, experimental, and analytical side of ductile fracture initiation in large-scale steel structures during Ultra-Low Cycle Fatigue, we have also been committed to educational and outreach programs for K-12 students and under-represented minorities in engineering. Our vision as an individual investigator project – with limited funding and resources – began as a lecture series and undergraduate research program, but has resulted in an unexpected large influence in the NSF/NEES community.

To date, the project has been directly responsible for two outreach lectures; the first to ninth grade students at McClatchy High School in Sacramento, CA (view pictures) and the other to sixth grade students at Woodland Prairie Elementary School in Woodland, CA (view pictures). Both public schools had a large population of Latino students, especially true in the agriculturally dominated setting of Woodland, CA. These lectures had the same theme –

general engineering, structural engineering, and earthquake engineering – and were delivered using a PowerPoint presentation of mostly pictures and other graphics that K-12 students could understand and enjoy. Additionally, an undergraduate at the University of California at Davis representing the student chapter of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) participated in both of these events by operating a small bench-top shaking table (provided by NEES, Incorporated) to illustrate some very basic concepts of structural dynamics and earthquake engineering.

Indirectly, these lectures have been integrated into several education and outreach lectures across the US, by posting a replicate of the presentation on the NEES webpage (download here **). Earthquake engineering researchers can download a copy of the presentation and easily modify the slides, or add additional slides, for their own lecture. Melanie Brown, of NEES, Inc. has been instrumental in administrating this lecture to the network of earthquake engineering researchers.

Finally, this project has sponsored a senior Latino engineering student at the University of California at Davis to assist during the second phase of testing at the NEES site in Berkeley on steel column-foundation connections. He was given many responsibilities during both the setup and the actual experiments that resulted in his personal growth as a researcher, more confidence, and invaluable laboratory experience for full-scale structural testing. During our interaction with this student, he has become incredibly excited about engineering and has shown an extraordinary thirst for knowledge that definitely grew in strength as the project progressed. His hard work and dedication has led to an offer from the University of California at Davis to pursue a financially supported graduate degree in structural engineering under the guidance of the PI on this project.

**Please feel free to download and use this presentation for other education events. We have included notes on each slide to assist during the presentation. Edit as necessary, however, please preserve the recognition of the original authors’ (Ben Fell and Amit Kanvinde) slides. Thank you