Ashlee Ford Versypt

Congratulations to Ashlee as the 2022 CAST Division David Himmelblau Award winner. She speaks on Interactive Computing Activities as Chemical Engineering Educational Tools in University and Informal Learning Environments.
The central theme of this webinar is computer-based tools made broadly accessible to students, educators, researchers, and lay people. Major platforms discussed include graphical user interfaces (GUIs), interactive notebooks (e.g., Jupyter Notebooks and MATLAB Live Scripts), and GitHub repositories. These tools have been used in instructing and engaging undergraduate chemical engineering students, preparing faculty for using these tools, training undergraduate and graduate students for computational research in science and engineering, and introducing lay audiences to chemical engineering concepts in informal learning environments outside of the classroom.
Examples of materials that the presenter has developed and disseminated include: a MATLAB app introducing chemical engineering design concepts through a pharmaceutical dosing case study; a software program for converting systems-biology markup language models into ODE models in Python; BeeNestABM-an open-source agent-based model of spatiotemporal distribution of bumblebees in nests; a set of MATLAB Live Scripts to introduce undergraduate students to mathematical biology computational re-search; and lessons and example for solving systems of ODEs in MATLAB for the Materials and Energy Balances course. These and other resources are available in a collection of open-source software projects available at github.com/ashl.... Also in this collection is an open-source learning module that she created and packaged (with support from CACHE) for an upper division/graduate elective course, focused on practical computational science and engineering concepts, including GUI design, version control, LaTeX, MATLAB, Python, and open-source and reproducible research computing. The presenter also developed and co-led a session at the 2022 ASEE/AIChE Chemical Engineering Summer School featuring MATLAB and Python interactive modules for computations throughout the ChE curriculum. A subset of these resources will be highlighted in the webinar.
Many of these computational tools have been used in outreach applications for sharing chemical engineering concepts with K-12 students and the general public through events including: the chemical engineering design module for the Oklahoma State University (OSU) College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology Summer Bridge Program for incoming freshmen and the University at Buffalo Chemical Engineering Camp for high school students; the OSU Grandparent University biomedical engineering major for middle student students and their grandparents; and the Oklahoma EPSCoR Women in Science Conference for junior high and high school girls. The webinar will feature some of these examples while emphasizing lessons learned in their design and deployment for non-university audiences.
Dr. Ford Versypt earned a B.S. from the University of Oklahoma and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, all in Chemical Engineering. She did her postdoc at MIT. She started her academic career at Oklahoma State University before joining the University at Buffalo Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering as a tenured associate professor in January 2021. Dr. Ford Versypt leads the Systems Biomedicine and Pharmaceutics Laboratory. She has received a number of awards for her research, teaching, and service including the NSF CAREER Award, ASEE Chemical Engineering Division Fahien Award, and AIChE 35 Under 35. Her research program is funded by the NSF and the NIH. She is a trustee of CACHE and an affiliate faculty member in the UB Department of Engineering Education. Towards computer-based chemical engineering education, she designs and uses graphical user interfaces and interactive computing activities as chemical engineering educational tools in university and informal learning environments.