Mechanical Engineering Professor Selected As Fellow For Teaching Workshop

April 4, 2018


Dr. Donghyeon Ryu will participate in an ASCE ExCEEd Workshop in Florida this summer.

Donghyeon Ryu official portrait
Dr. Donghyeon Ryu

SOCORRO, N.M. – Dr. Donghyeon Ryu of the Mechanical Engineering Department was selected as a 2018 ExCEEd Fellow and will participate in the American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual Teaching Workshop at Florida Gulf Coast University in August 2018.

The ExCEEd Teaching Workshop is a six-day practicum that provides engineering educators with an opportunity to improve their teaching abilities. ASCE has successfully presented this workshop each summer for the past 19 years. Faculty members across the country and around the world have benefited from this workshop. 

Ryu said being selected as a fellow is a high honor because the workshop is highly competitive. This was his second application for the ExCEEd Workshop.

“This is one of the most prestigious teaching workshops that I can attend that is offered by the ASCE,” he said “My first goal is to improve my teaching. I am very interested in improving by learning the most advanced teaching pedagogy.”

Ryu said he’s looking forward to the workshop discussions with colleagues from around the country and the world. He said he expects to learn a lot from other attendees from other universities.

Dr. Andrei Zagrai, chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department, wrote a recommendation letter for Ryu with glowing praise for his effectiveness and command of the classroom.

“As soon as becoming an assistant professor at NMT [in 2014], Dr. Ryu immediately began initiating independent research projects through active collaborations,” Zagrai said. “I have witnessed that he has strived to expand his research expertise beyond his comfort zone, such as development sensing materials and composites using functional polymers and nanomaterials, design of multifunctional composites, and characterization of optoelectronic thin films.”

Ryu’s collaborations include other academic departments at NMT, the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Lab and Los Alamos National Lab, the Engineering Institute at LANL, the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, the NASA White Sands Test Facility, and the Korea Railroad Research Institute.

In late 2017, Ryu landed a $750,000 research grant from NASA as a principal investigator to develop autonomous structural composites (AutoCom) for next-generation unmanned aerial vehicles.

Zagrai said, “Dr. Ryu’s enthusiastic plan to make passionate research goals happen actually produced preliminary results attesting that the AutoCom concept actually works. I am extremely excited to see the research outcomes at the end of the AutoCom project and furthermore beyond the project.”

Ryu earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and his master’s in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, both from the University of California – Davis. He earned his bachelor’s at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Ryu is the director of the Lab for Smart Materials and Structures at NMT.

 

 

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