Discipline: Science and Mathematics Education
Subcategory: Education
Session: 4
Bryan Acevedo-Marrero - University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez
The devastation caused by Hurricanes Irma and María in Puerto Rico increased awareness regarding the importance of educating infrastructure related disciplines enabling cross-disciplinary solutions to complex infrastructure challenges. Puerto Rico needs more prepared STEM professionals, and to raise public awareness on the vulnerability of the infrastructure. This opens an opportunity to recruit and train students to become competitive professionals with expertise in infrastructure resiliency and sustainability. Current environmental design, engineering, construction, and project management curricula do not foster interactive learning experience on infrastructure-related disciplines. This affects their integration and ability to collaborate. After a natural disaster, multiple disciplines need to work together to merge the projects’ schedules and provide innovative solutions, thus making collaboration and integration essential for the project’s success. To prepare students to design and build resilient infrastructure, a cross-disciplinary Resilient Infrastructure and Sustainability Education – Undergraduate Program (RISE-UP) is created. The program provides students with the intellectual and practical academic space to generate case study research and turn them into hands-on solutions for real problems including the ones created in the aftermath of the said hurricanes. The project creates a shared curriculum across the three campuses consisting of 15 credit hours (5 courses) and fosters collaboration among campuses. Also, the curricular sequence provides a Capstone course and experiential learning (research and internships) at to allow students to gain practical work experience and apply the knowledge acquired in their courses. To implement our initiative, we established a collaborative interfaculty cooperation among three University of Puerto Rico (UPR) campuses: Rio Piedras, Mayagüez, and Ponce. Each campus offers a different educational component relevant to the interaction we are expecting through this initiative. The Rio Piedras Campus offers a bachelor’s degree on Environmental Design; Mayagüez one offers engineering degrees in Civil, Electrical, and Materials Science; and the Ponce Campus offers two-year degrees on Construction and Architectural Drafting. Moreover, innovative cross-sector partnerships between the university, the federal agencies, and local endeavors as well as other stakeholders will provide the intellectual and practical academic space to conduct case study research. The curricular sequence is in the planning process and will be implemented next semester. The initiative benefits society through training of engineers, surveyors, and environmental designers to work on resiliency and sustainability themes, and to develop a database of case studies available for research and modeling. Lastly, the projects seek to shorten recovery efforts and minimizing the effect of future natural events on infrastructure.
Funder Acknowledgement(s): This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1832468
Faculty Advisor: Carla Lopez del Puerto, carla.lopezdelpuerto@upr.edu
Role: My role is to assist the research team with case study selection of damages caused by hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico. I am also assisting in the development of a case study database that will be used for both research and in the courses of the curricular sequence.