Achievement

One of the goals of our IGERT is to train our students to be able to communicate with various constituencies at the appropriate level. One of our trainees, Mike Gasda, had some experience in industry before he entered our program, but he needed more opportunities to develop his skills in talking to large groups about a technical topic. The IGERT program has encouraged him to participate more in teaching and community outreach. He has given talks on fuel cells to students from the junior high school level all the up to graduate students. He has given talks on fuel cells and nanotechnology to groups of local high school teachers. Finally, he has guest-lectured for two class sessions in the graduate level Introduction to Fuel Cells course, which is sponsored by the IGERT program. He has had to tailor his talks at three significantly different levels to effectively communicate his knowledge of fuel cells to his audiences.