Research

Philosophy

I like to use a combination of physical experiments and computer simulation to solve engineering problems. Physical experiments can more closely represent what is happening in a system, but simulation will let you see inside that system and visualize specific relationships or data that you would not be able to get otherwise. It's a win-win! And by "physical experiments" I don't just mean making waves in the towing tank. If you're in my class, you're probably helping me run an experiment, too!

I am also a big proponent of open source software. If you don't already know LaTeX, stop reading this and go learn it right now.


Active Areas of Research

Effects of project-based learning and teams on first-year undergraduate engineering students

I have taught a first-year intro to engineering course for many years, and we are always fiddling with it and trying to make it a better course. Recently, my co-instructors and I decided to begin assessing whether our chosen approaches are working or not. We frequently present at the ASEE annual conference.

I am a faculty collaborator on Tandem, a team support tool being developed by U-M's Center for Academic Innovation.


Effects of implicit bias on obstacles to student learning (or, as I like to call it, "How Not to Be a Primitive Asshole")

Implicit biases are biases we have for or against people and things... but we don't know we have these biases. We absorb them through the societies that we move through. An unknown bias can put you in uncomfortable situations by, essentially, making you act like an ignorant idiot when consciously you definitely know better. By recognizing potential implicit biases, we can bring our brains into the 21st century and make working with each other way more easier and a lot more fun.


Past Areas of Research

Hydrodynamics of marine structures

I conducted research on the hydrodynamics of a variety of marine structures. Everything from Navy ships to fish spawning reefs. I primarily used OpenFOAM to simulate the fluid flow and around structures. The simulations were validated against real world data such as model tests, ship sea trials, or river flow data.


Design loads for ships and marine structures using probabilistic methods

My dissertation work centered on using extreme value theory to generate extreme ship responses in a rational way. The details are here. In short, waves that might be dangerous for one ship might NOT be dangerous for a different type of ship. This approach uses what we know about a given ship's movement in waves to find the waves that will cause big motions of the ship so that you only have to simulate a few cases to produce the extreme stresses the ship or structure will see. This information can then be handed off to the structural engineers so the ship structure can be designed to withstand these design loads.

My original method was improved by the student following me, Dae-Hyun Kim, and the details of his work are here. The result is what we call the Design Loads Generator (DLG), and it runs very quickly because it is based on linear theory. The output of the DLG are sets of wave conditions that will lead to linear-based extreme responses. Unfortunately, the entire world is nonlinear. So, we take the DLG wave conditions and run them through high fidelity nonlinear codes, such as OpenFOAM, to generate more accurate maps of pressure and stress on the marine structure.


Microplastic pollution in the Great Lakes

I grew up in Benton Harbor/St. Joseph, MI, and the Great Lakes have always been near and dear to my heart. When I stumbled on the issue of microplastic pollution, I decided I needed to act. After all, engineering is causing this problem, so engineering ought to help solve it! At IAGLR 2014, I chaired a session on microplastic pollution in the Great Lakes, and we brought together many of the active researchers in this area. This session also supported NOAA's Great Lakes Land-based Marine Debris Action Plan. In 2016, I was part of eXXpedition Great Lakes 2016, in which researchers all around the Great Lakes sampled for microplastics.