Over the past year, MICDE’s educational programs and activities have experienced tremendous growth. The Graduate Certificate in Computational Discovery and Engineering currently has 50 students enrolled, spanning 19 departments from 5 different schools and colleges. Sixteen students graduated within the last academic year, and 44 have graduated since the Graduate Certificate was established in 2013. Even further, the number of women in the program went from zero in 2014 to 15 currently enrolled.
The Ph.D. in Scientific Computing has experienced extraordinary growth, with 74 students enrolled from 20 departments, and four schools or colleges. We added a section to our web site with both programs’ alumni information.
We are working to broaden as well as to deepen the activities and resources available to students in both programs. Twenty MICDE fellowships were awarded this academic year to students in our programs. We continued to sponsor student software teams at competitions, as well as individual students presenting their work at leading conferences. On-campus, MICDE student activities include networking lunches, and the Scientific Computing Student Club (SC2). On the programmatic front, our non-engineering students now have access to a CAEN account that gives them more options to connect and use U-M High Performance Computing resources. Relevant grant opportunities for students are tracked and updated in MICDE’s grant webpage.
2016-2017 MICDE Fellow Yuxi Chen (ClaSp) presenting his work at the MICDE Annual Symposium
Several educational projects and initiatives are afoot at MICDE, including a Massively Open Online Class (MOOC) in Computational Thinking targeting both high school students and their teachers. This MOOC aims to introduce learners to algorithmic approaches to problems. This initiative is being developed in collaboration with the School of Education, the office of Academic Innovation, and with input from a number of high schools in the Detroit Metropolitan Area.The two new courses launched by MICDE faculty last year, Methods and Practices of Scientific Computing, and Data-Driven Analysis and Modeling of Complex Systems, were successful in their first offerings during the 2016-2017 academic year, and are being offered again in 2017-2018. Other teams of MICDE faculty are at work across campus to develop new courses in computational science.