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KU team wins valuable time on supercomputer to research improved aerodynamics
LAWRENCE — A team led by a University of Kansas professor of aerospace engineering has been awarded time on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. They’ll use it to help solve one of the “grand challenges” in developing the next generation of aircraft. The group was one of 51 teams around the world to receive the INCITE award from the U.S. Department of Energy and will have the use of 590,000 “node hours” of time on the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Institute prepares Native American students with skills to pursue advanced degrees in science
LAWRENCE – The Haskell Environmental Research Studies (HERS) Institute, an eight-week summer program in partnership with the University of Kansas, seeks to prepare Indigenous undergraduate students for graduate school through mentoring and learning experiences, in and out of the classroom. The HERS Institute is now accepting applications for its 10th cohort.
Geoscience researchers call for updated metaphor to help make field more inclusive and equitable
LAWRENCE — A group of geoscience researchers is reimagining the “leaky pipeline” metaphor traditionally used to describe the lack of diversity and inclusion in their field, with about 90% of doctorates going to white people and less than 4% of tenured faculty positions in geoscience departments being held by people of color. The authors, including University of Kansas researcher Blair Schneider, have written a paper in Nature Geoscience describing the barriers that Black, Indigenous and other people of color face as they attempt to advance their careers.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Cody Howard, School of Engineering, 785-864-2936, [email protected], @kuengineering
KU team wins valuable time on supercomputer to research improved aerodynamics
LAWRENCE — A team led by a University of Kansas professor of aerospace engineering has been awarded time on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. They’ll use it to help solve one of the “grand challenges” in developing the next generation of aircraft.
The group headed by Z.J. Wang, Spahr Professor of Aerospace Engineering, was one of 51 teams around the world to receive the INCITE award from the U.S. Department of Energy. Wang and his colleagues — Joshua Romero of NVIDIA Corporation and Nick Wyman of Cadence Design Systems — will have the use of 590,000 “node hours” of time on the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The computing time is “so valuable,” Wang said. “If you actually purchased this time from commercial vendors, it’s worth millions of dollars.”
Complex turbulent flow predicted with a wall-modeled large eddy simulation of the NASA Common Research Model High-Lift Configuration. Wang’s project is focused on developing and applying a technique called “wall-resolved large eddy simulation” — basically, a computer simulation of a wind tunnel test — to predict the performance of high-lift configurations on aircraft. Such configurations help airplanes generate enough lift during taking off and landing, but they also create hard-to-predict air flows, turbulence and noise. That makes it tricky to get the design of high-lift configurations just right.
“The large eddy simulation of high-lift configurations is considered a grand challenge in aerospace engineering,” Wang said. “If we are successful in this project, we will have a better understanding of the complex turbulent flow, and valuable data will be generated to enable the development of turbulence and wall models.”
Wang and his colleagues have spent years developing a computational fluid dynamics tool — known as hpMusic — to understand the complex turbulence involved, and it has been used by General Electric to tackle complicated turbomachinery problems. But the challenges presented by high-lift configurations are so difficult, Wang said, that some have predicted it might be unsolvable for another decade. The INCITE award, and the use of the Summit supercomputer, could significantly shorten that interval.
A node hour uses one node on a supercomputer for one hour. The Summit computer at Oak Ridge Laboratory has more than 4,000 nodes and is billed as the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. Competition for those hours is fierce. The Department of Energy received 121 proposals — the INCITE competition is open to any researcher or research organization in the world — requesting more than 120 million node-hours. Those proposals were assessed by 11 peer-review panels of international experts before the awards were made.
The award “is a nice recognition of our reputation and capability,” Wang said.
“It validates KU as a leader in high-performance computational fluid dynamics,” he said. “Those 51 teams are selected from all over the world — they represent the cream of the crop in computational sciences and engineering.”
Wang has been at KU since 2012. In addition to GE, Cadence and NVIDIA, his research is also supported by the Air Force Office of Science Research and the Army Research Office.
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Contact: Claudia Bode, Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis, 785-864-1627, [email protected]
Institute prepares Native American students with skills to pursue advanced degrees in science
LAWRENCE — Growing up as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Annalise Guthrie never expected to have a career in science. She is not alone. Only about 16% of Native Americans attain bachelor’s degrees, with far fewer going to graduate school in the sciences.
But wise role models and supportive learning experiences changed her life.
This is the goal of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies (HERS) Institute. The eight-week summer program in Lawrence seeks to prepare Indigenous undergraduate students for graduate school through mentoring and learning experiences, in and out of the classroom. The program started as the brainchild of Daniel Wildcat, professor of Indigenous and American Indian studies at Haskell Indian Nations University. In 2009, Wildcat teamed up with Joane Nagel, University Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas, to establish HERS as a key aspect of education initiatives for Kansas NSF EPSCoR.
Since its first summer in 2009, HERS has trained 110 Native students with affiliations to 60 tribal communities across the country. And 45 of the interns have gone to graduate school.
That’s a remarkable feat given that Native Americans and Alaskan Natives made up less than 1% percent of doctorate recipients in the sciences from 2010 to 2020, according to a national report.
“We’re really trying our best to turn that around,” said Jay Johnson, director of the HERS Institute and professor of geography & atmospheric science at KU. He leads the program with faculty from Haskell Indian Nations University.
Guthrie is one of 13 interns in the 2021 HERS Institute. From training in the HERS program and other opportunities like the University of Kansas PREP program, she learned how to write research proposals and conduct a research project. She now attends KU, pursuing a doctorate in ecology & evolutionary biology with guidance from Sharon Billings, Dean’s Professor, and funding from a National Science Foundation fellowship.
Funding for HERS comes from Kansas NSF EPSCoR, which stands for the “Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.” NSF uses EPSCoR to level the playing field for areas in the country whose scientists receive a lower percentage of federal support.
HERS, which has been active nine of the past 13 summers, will welcome its 10th cohort of interns in summer 2022, a milestone that also coincides with the 30th anniversary of the launch of NSF EPSCoR in Kansas.
Guthrie hopes to assist with the 2022 summer HERS program, mentoring the next cohort and giving back to her community just as other HERS alumni have done since the program started. She is also on track to pursue a career that will help her tribal community. She said this calling became apparent to her during the HERS program when she realized that any of the students in her cohort could be the scientists who do research to mitigate the major problems facing Indigenous communities.
“It was empowering for me,” she said.
What makes HERS so successful?
Much of the enduring success of the HERS Institute relies on building connections across cultures.
“If you want Native students to identify as scientists, they need to see direct evidence that science can address an issue of importance to their community,” Johnson said.
The interns start with ideas about how their communities are suffering from climate change and other environmental issues. Then, the instructors help the students refine their ideas into research projects.
“We basically teach them everything they need to know to turn an idea into a research question and a research proposal,” Johnson said.
The writing-intensive program goes from classroom instruction about climate change, GIS mapping and other science concepts to fieldwork and community engagement.
“We tour the Haskell wetlands and the Konza prairie,” Johnson said, “and we recently began collaborating with the Oneida tribe in Green Bay, Wisconsin.”
The unique addition to the program gives students a chance to work with a tribal community to address authentic and pressing challenges.
The interns are mentored by graduate students at KU, many of whom are HERS alumni. Their support for the interns extends beyond the summer, creating a network to last into their professional careers.
Johnson said that the instructors also use the practice of “two-eyed-seeing” to ensure that the interns learn to view the world through both a Western scientific lens (or eye) while also firmly holding onto the Native perspective.
The HERS Institute is now accepting applications from undergraduates across the country for summer 2022. Learn more at http://hersinstitute.org/apply.html or contact Katrina McClure at [email protected].
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Geoscience researchers call for updated metaphor to help make field more inclusive and equitable
LAWRENCE — As a Black woman in geosciences, especially a full professor who holds an endowed chair position, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe has jokingly called herself a unicorn.
“That’s how rare it is,” said Berhe, professor of soil biogeochemistry and Ted and Jan Falasco chair in earth science and geology in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of California Merced. “There is no reason why in 2022 that should be the case.”
The geosciences are among the least diverse STEM fields, with about 90% of doctorates going to white people and less than 4% of tenured faculty positions in geoscience departments being held by people of color.
To help combat this problem, a group of geoscience researchers is reimagining the “leaky pipeline” metaphor traditionally used to describe the lack of diversity and inclusion in the academy. The authors, including Berhe and University of Kansas researcher Blair Schneider, have written a paper in Nature Geoscience describing the “hostile obstacle course” that Black, Indigenous and other people of color face as they attempt to advance their careers.
“The leaky pipeline implies that the attrition of white women, BIPOC and members of other minoritized communities is a passive process: nothing more than a ‘drip, drip’ from holes within an otherwise robust system,” the authors wrote. “In reality, we (and others) argue that the imagery of a leaky pipeline fails to represent the exclusionary experiences of many.”
The paper, officially published Jan. 21, has already received 14,000 online views and more than 1,600 tweets. It currently ranks in the top 1% of most-viewed articles tracked by Altmetric.
The hostile obstacle course metaphor puts emphasis on systemic problems instead of individuals and better represents the experiences of marginalized geoscience scholars, the authors said. The obstacle course recognizes that barriers are not experienced equally.
“Our hope is that this reframing of the conversation puts the responsibility to address it rightfully with the leaders in our academic institutions, scientific leaders and senior folks who should take the responsibility to fix the current climate,” Berhe said, “so that when we actually recruit students from whatever background it might be, they actually find a safe place — a home — in our academic institutions in science, and they don’t experience isolation, microaggression, harassment and discrimination.”
The authors presented an image to describe the metaphor and accompany the paper. It shows a white man and a Black woman preparing to ascend a staircase. The stairs represent career progression and retention in the field, with the top being career achievement. Each person faces obstacles on their climb, but the woman of color has far more and different kinds of barriers — racism, sexism, sexual harassment, gender harassment and more — to overcome.
Schneider, associate researcher and science outreach manager at KU’s Kansas Geological Survey, is one of the paper’s seven authors. Like Berhe, she is a co-principal investigator for the ADVANCEGeo Partnership, the group that wrote the paper and an effort funded by the National Science Foundation to address sexual harassment and other exclusionary behaviors that lead to hostile workplaces in the earth, space and environmental sciences.
“I really do appreciate the people who originally brought forth the leaky pipeline metaphor,” Schneider said. “They were starting a dialogue that hadn’t happened yet. But let’s update this to actually include this intersectionality component and the different barriers people face based on their identities.”
Growing up, Schneider said she never knew pursuing a career as a scientist was an option for someone like her.
“None of that was promoted to me,” she said. “I do feel like it was kind of luck along the way that I ended up where I am.”
As a white woman, Schneider said that even though she has faced sexism and harassment in her field, her experiences can’t compare to her colleagues of color.
“I haven’t dealt with any racism,” Schneider said. “I haven’t feared for my life in certain situations like other colleagues and friends have, and so it’s also very eye-opening. I don’t think I would still be here if I had gone through that.”
Moving forward, the group hopes this metaphor will reframe conversations and inspire new policies to recruit and retain people with diverse identities and lived experiences.
“Policies that you put in place for white women aren’t necessarily going to help women of color,” Schneider said. “Policies that you put in place to help women in general don’t necessarily help those who have disabilities.”
“It’s important to me to make sure that the next generation of scholars who are coming behind me don’t have to go through the same stuff,” Berhe added. “There are plenty of people who are still starting to climb on that staircase, and I really want us to remove those obstacles because we have an obligation to provide everyone with a safe learning and work environment.”
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