(97d) Building Computational Skills for Mathematical Modeling in Science and Engineering through an Interdisciplinary Elective Course

An upper division elective course for seniors and graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields has been developed to build computational skills for mathematical modeling. The course aims to fill a gap in the practical training of students starting computational research projects across various STEM disciplines who have inconsistent previous experiences in computer programming and numerical methods. By accelerating the training time to develop competency in implementing modern best practices, students are enabled to be productive at using computational tools for research early in their graduate studies, ideally allowing them to satisfy time-sensitive demands for generating research results. Undergraduate students can also benefit from learning practical computational skills that they can transfer into other courses and future projects in industry or other career paths. The practical training is achieved by covering modern software tools for mathematical modeling in science and engineering and for reproducible research computing via an active, hands-on approach supplemented by reading materials. Rather than covering just the basics of programming or detailed algorithms for numerical methods, the course is geared towards implementing tools for solving realistic continuum scale science and engineering problems, managing open source code projects, and disseminating computational research results through scientific documentation and publications. The course is taught by a chemical engineering faculty member with research expertise in applied mathematics and computational science and engineering. MATLAB and Python are taught side-by-side throughout the course, primarily using case studies from chemical engineering applications. Additional modern software tools including Git and LaTeX are also covered in the course. The presentation will describe the course with the goal of enabling other educators to adapt and reuse the course content.