COVID Research

Inside the

“New Normal”

of remote instruction

By Noah Pflueger-Peters

SINCE YOLO COUNTY ISSUED A SHELTER-IN-PLACE ORDER on March 18 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, life has changed dramatically for the College of Engineering’s students, graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) and faculty members. In keeping with Aggie spirit and pride, our community demonstrated tremendous flexibility and resilience in transitioning spring quarter classes online and have immersed themselves in the virtual environment to create a robust remote learning experience this fall.

As campus has started implementing procedures such as symptom surveys and contact tracing for positive COVID-19 tests for the indefinite future, the college has adjusted to this new normal of education at a distance. Though 2020 will be remembered as anything but a normal year, college faculty, staff and students are finding new ways to learn, teach and stay connected in this new environment.

“I tell students, ‘when you become an engineer, you become a problem solver,’” said Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) professor Klaus van Benthem. “As challenging as this is, I think the students will come out of this as better problem solvers and with experience dealing with an unforeseen situation.”

ASSISTING WITH TEACHING

Lab courses are challenging to teach online, but instructors and TAs have worked hard to keep the classes interactive and the students engaged. Remote instruction has been perhaps the most challenging for Introduction to Engineering Design (ENG 3), which teaches hands-on design, teamwork and presentation skills—three things that are hard to do online. To coordinate, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering (BAE) Assistant Professor of Teaching Jennifer Mullin and her team of 11 TAs meets weekly via Zoom to plan lessons, give feedback on what is and isn’t working and share resources to support one another. “We had to up our game as teaching assistants,” said ENG 3 TA and BAE Ph.D. student Clay Swackhamer. “We need to, in real time, figure out how to get students engaged, so we’ve had to be really flexible.” MSE Assistant Professor of Teaching Susan Gentry uses her TAs’ experience to help “re-invent” her classes and lead alternating one-hour discussion sections each week instead of labs. These discussions cover both lab-based topics and professional skills such as data analysis and how to write a research paper. “We’re trying to take advantage of the time to do things we might not have otherwise,” said Gentry. “It brings new opportunities for students to learn things and develop skills that they need.”

A thermal image from a MSE senior design team taken in COMSOL Multiphysics. Senior design teams are using modeling software like COMSOL to build their designs since they can’t meet in person. (Jared Putnam/UC Davis)

Rashtian tries to make his lectures engaging by using color, recording them live and maintaining face-to-face contact with students by showing his video. (Hooman Rashtian/UC Davis)

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the college have helped keep the hands-on component of laboratory instruction by buying experiment kits for every student in ECE lab courses and ENG 3, respectively, and mailing them to their homes so they can still work on the projects. “The students are really stoked about it,” said Swackhamer. “They like that they now have something physical to put their hands on.”

VIDEOS AND SIMULATIONS

Though the college has embraced simulations and videos out of necessity, Swackhamer, ECE Assistant Professor of Teaching Hooman Rashtian and others have been pleasantly surprised at how well they’ve helped their students learn.

Rashtian incorporates online circuit simulations in his lectures, which allow him to show, on the spot, the effect of changing component values on circuit performance. “Because students can see the simulation as they are introduced to the topic, they can develop a more intuitive understanding of the circuit,” he said. The TAs in ENG 3 have had a similar experience with another simulator called Tinkercad. Students can use it to build virtual Arduino circuits in a collaborative workspace and refine their design before translating it to the real world. The TAs can also check in, troubleshoot and leave comments in each workspace. “It’s basically the Google Docs of circuits,” said TA and BAE Ph.D. student Gui de Moura Araujo. “I still feel close to students because I can check in on their progress and help them in real time.” Asynchronous videos are also becoming increasingly important. Instead of a physical end-of-quarter showcase, ENG 3 students are learning to make videos for their final presentations. In an environment where keeping students engaged is a challenge, Rashtian uses video in live lectures to stay active and interactive, switching between multiple devices to give them the most thorough experience possible. TAs in ENG 3 and ECE make videos for their students on almost a daily basis and post them to Aggie Video. In ECE, the TAs use these videos to demonstrate the lab before the students try it, and in ENG3, TAs cover everything from wiring circuits and Arduino basics to recording Zoom meetings and adding videos to presentations. This is all part of building online toolkits for each class. “You need to spend a lot of time to refine and improve the quality and make it something that students enjoy watching,” said Rashtian. In addition, campus has compiled a plethora of resources for students, TAs and faculty on everything from technology like Zoom and Canvas to how to design a class for remote instruction to help them through the change.

The Introduction to Engineering Design (ENG 3) team meets over Zoom to prepare for the final week of classes and the course’s design showcase. (Jennifer Mullin/UC Davis) MSE Ph.D. student and TA Edward Conley leads a virtual discussion section on writing research papers in lieu of in-person labs. (Susan Gentry/UC Davis)

ONLINE DESIGN

Before the shelter-in-place, seniors engineering in each department were given real-world problems to solve with a design that they build in teams and present at the annual Design Showcase. The project is a capstone of their undergraduate experience and, for many, a stepping stone to jobs. BAE Ph.D. student Vivian Vuong, a graduate advisor to a BAE senior design team, was impressed with how much the students have remained enthusiastic. Her team has used Arduinos left over from siblings’ projects to build circuits and tested designs in their parents’ backyard to get as close to a real-world environment as they can. “They’re very scrappy,” she said. “They were very willing and able to figure it out themselves and make the best of this not-so-great situation.” For the MSE students, the shelter-in-place order came the same day that they presented their design concepts to their peers. With the projects already in progress, the teams had to shift from building something to creating models of the design using engineering software. “They still need to solve the same problem, they’re just now using a different tool,” said van Benthem, who taught the department’s senior design course this spring. Using modeling software was a challenge, however, as most students had never used it before. Despite the learning curve, van Benthem says it was a valuable learning opportunity and a good place to begin making modeling a permanent part of the undergraduate curriculum.

“It was a true challenge, but we are all running with it, I think, rather successfully,” he said. BUILDING COMMUNITY

A silver lining of remote instruction may be that it’s building a greater sense of community across the college as students, TAs and faculty support one another. This is important in ENG 3, where every student is building their own design or part of a design. Combining and modifying these ideas into a single design is known as iterative engineering design—something the instructional team has made sure to emphasized. “It’s put the students in a position where they have the opportunity to explain things to each other, even more than in the past,” said Swackhamer. “It’s really re-enforced the community aspect of engineering design.” Rashtian has found a way to incentivize this in his classes by giving extra credit to students who finish labs early and are willing to help their peers. This not only helps reduce the workload on Rashtain and the TAs, but helps students better understand the material.

“Often times we learn better when we teach, so by teaching the material to their peers, it helps them as well,” he said. Rashtian also tries to build community by holding daily office hours for all ECE students, who can make an appointment to talk to him about any challenges they’ve faced. A survey conducted by campus also noted the office hours were valued by students and instructors alike and it helped both feel connected to one another in an environment that can feel isolating. “There’s a lot of community happening,” said Vuong. “The undergrads are supporting each other, the grad students are supporting the undergrads while checking in with each other, and when I meet with most faculty members, the first question they ask is, ‘how are you doing?’”

UC Davis engineers fight food insecurity

through sustainable agriculture

By Noah Pflueger-Peters and Constanze Ditterich

WITH THE DAWN OF AGRICULTURE, HUMANS BECAME DEPENDENT ON FOOD PRODUCTION SYSTEMS that exploit nature’s limited resources of land, water and air. As the world’s population is expected to reach 9–10 billion by 2050 according to the U.N., the world must double food production to meet demand while using and reusing the resources we have left in a sustainable manner.

Ruihong Zhang and Isaya Kisekka at UC Davis are rising to meet the challenge by finding new ways to sustainably produce food, while conserving resources by using microbes to produce new sources of protein and managing and irrigating crops with pinpoint precision.

“We really need to think hard about how to be climate-smart and optimize our resources,” said Kisekka.

Professor Ruihong Zhang. Her new research looks to microbes like algae and fungi as new, sustainable sources of food. (Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis) HARNESSING THE POWER OF MICROBES

Zhang, professor of biological and agricultural engineering, says one way to produce food more sustainably is by tapping into the huge potential of microbes like fungi and algae. Growing livestock is an expensive and time-consuming process due to the land, resources and time that are needed, leading to a huge carbon footprint. By contrast, microbes such as fungi and algae can grow in less than a week in any climate and require a small fraction of the space and resources.

“We want society to start paying more attention to microbes as alternative food sources,” she said. “There are a lot of benefits environmentally and economically, especially for populations who live in areas that have very limited land for growing crops.”

Eating fungi and algae is nothing new, as mushrooms and seaweed are staples of diets around the world. Zhang plans to innovate by harvesting these microbes using agricultural byproducts such as almond hulls and carrot and tomato pomace, the material that’s left over after pressing for juice or oil. This method improves the sustainability of the entire food production system, as what was once waste gets broken down into sugars and other nutrients that help grow the microbes, which are then processed into more food.

By studying the fungi Asperigullus awamori, an edible fungi already used by the food industry for fermentation, and the microalgae Chlorella sorokiniana, which can be grown quickly with or without sunlight, Zhang and her graduate students hope to extract the high level of nutrients in both microbes for a sustainable food source. These microbes contain anywhere between 20 and 60 percent protein and provide all essential amino acids, along with beneficial lipids, dietary fibers and vitamins that make them healthy and easily digestible. “These microbe-based foods have their unique nutrients and nutritional value that you don’t find from meat or other protein sources—even different from some plant-based protein,” she said.

Zhang is already well known for her work using microbes to convert agricultural waste into renewable natural gas, biopolymers or chemicals. Most notably, she developed UC Davis’ Renewable Energy Anaerobic Digester (READ), which uses bacteria to turn campus’ organic waste into energy. For her and her team, using microbes to make food is simply another extension of this type of work.

Last year, a biological systems engineering senior design team Zhang mentored successfully turned raw fungal protein into crunchy snacks and algae proteins into alternative hamburgers. She also plans to continue testing the microbes in her lab to optimize growth processes and better understand their nutritional value and how they can be used as food. She and her students also recently conducted a pilot study focused on the production of microalgae from READ’s digestates.

“The more that I do, the more excited I am. I really see a huge potential for using microbes to grow food, break down waste and help the environment,” she said. “There’s a lot of power in that.”

Top photo: Isaya Kisekka (Lucy Knowles/UC Davis)

Bottom photo: Zhang’s lab uses agricultural byproducts to grow pellets of fungal protein, a new, sustainable source of food. (Ruihong Zhang/UC Davis)

MAKING THE MOST OF RESOURCES

In the U.S., California is king in agriculture, but the state’s susceptibility to climate change-induced drought makes the over $46 billion industry vulnerable.

“If you are growing an annual crop, you can say, ‘I’m not going to plant this year,’ but if you’re growing trees, you’re locked in for 25 years,” said biological and agricultural engineering associate professor Isaya Kisekka. “When you have these extreme droughts, you really have a very limited number of tools in your toolbox to adopt.”

Growers face limited options: buy water, which can be extremely expensive, pump groundwater, a practice that’s now heavily regulated, or make the most of existing resources through methods like regulated deficit irrigation. As an expert in precision irrigation, Kisekka and his team work with farmers to develop smart irrigation systems and management strategies that use water and fertilizer as efficiently as possible without damaging the environment.

Microtensiometers help Kisekka’s team better understand the trees in an orchard so they can develop a precision irrigation system. (Isaya Kisekka/UC Davis)

Developing a precision irrigation system means understanding an orchard on a very detailed level from the soil upwards. Even within 1,000 acres, the type of soil can vary a lot and make some parts of an orchard produce differently than others. Kisekka’s team helps growers figure this out by mapping the soil texture and quality across an orchard, which tells them how well it can hold water.

“Each farm is different,” he said. “If you have an orchard that yields very high in one corner and low in another corner, you shouldn’t be giving the entire orchard the same water because you’re going to waste water, nutrients and energy.”

After mapping the soil, the teams run a wide range of computer simulations on the orchard to predict how the crop will grow in response to different irrigation management strategies, soils and climates. They also consider the potential environmental impact, as precision irrigation can negatively affect both soil and groundwater quality through salt buildup in the roots. “If you use these highly-efficient systems without thinking about large-scale impacts at the watershed scale, you’re going to overdraft groundwater, so we need to couple these precision techniques with sustainable practices,” he said.

The team then leverages sensing and automation technologies to learn more about the specific plants and water flow in the field to optimize the entire production system. All of these data coming from the various sensors are fed into simulations, which use biophysical models and artificial intelligence to recommend an optimal irrigation schedule for a specific area of an orchard. With this information, growers can ensure they grow the same crops using fewer resources and with a lower carbon footprint.

“Right now, we’re in the age of data, so growers can really take advantage of all data coming back from all these different sensing platforms to grow crops sustainably,” he said.

Top photos: Different types of soil, as shown above, can exist within the same orchard, which means some areas might need less water to produce the same results. (Isaya Kisekka/UC Davis)

Left photo: A remote sensing map of a walnut tree orchard. Blue areas have better soil and therefore retain more water while the red areas don’t retain water well and therefore will need more water than blue. (Isaya Kisekka/UC Davis)