Two SVSU faculty members received the Braun Fellowship in December 2020.
Both are planning to improve research and teaching methods within their fields.
The Braun Fellowship fosters scholarly research among accomplished faculty.
Its goal is to fund projects that encourage growth among various fields and improve education.
Aneesha Gogineni, an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering, and Sandun Kuruppa, an assistant professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering, will each receive up to $37,500 over the course of three years.
Gogineni has been involved in fields of Thermal, Fluids, Bioengineering, HVAC and pedagogical studies.
She received her PhD from Wichita State University and has been an SVSU faculty member since 2016.
Before COVID, she received the Dow Professor Award and Dow Departmental Innovation Award, which she used to redesign more hands-on courses for SVSU students.
She is currently focused on her online Thermodynamics and Heat transfer courses.
Gogineni said she was unsatisfied with common resources for online learning, such as animations and video lectures.
“Students are stymied when conceptual homework problems are written as real-world situations in exam problems,” she said.
In order develop skills, students needed resources to simulate real-world problems, she explained.
She wanted to use a tool that would not only increase understanding, but pique interest. Her solution: Virtual Reality.
“To bridge the gap between theory and application in an online class, I plan to prepare Virtual Reality lessons,” she said.
Gogineni will use the Braun Scholarship to research Virtual Reality and more interactive ways to teach her students.
After she receives feedback and analyzes students’ progress, she said she wants to present her work at conferences to promote Virtual Reality as a more readily available course tool.
Kuruppa works with electric machine drives and new electric technology involving transportation and robotics.
He received his PhD from Pu due.
As more transportation becomes autonomous, Kuruppa said he believes the
methods used to find and repair issues should be improved to be more efficient.
“I want to take a holistic approach to fault detection,” he said.
Instead of tackling issues on a case-by-case basis, Kuruppa said he wants to look at systems as a whole and find problems early on before they become serious and costly issues.
This will lead to better understanding of the systems for him and his students, Kurruppa explained.
With the Braun Fellowship, he said he plans to create a complete laboratory setup geared toward more accurate fault detection in electric software.
“I hope to engage students with engineering problem solving and improve efficiency in failure predicting,” he said.
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