A seat at the engineering table
Students partner with U of T's Acceleration Consortium to take on engineering challenges in renewable energy and biotech.
“It’s like, if you were on an athletic team, but you never actually got to play the game. This is the real game.”
By Glen Herbert
This week the Design Engineering Studio (DES) students met with Gurpaul Kochhar and Jason Hattrick-Simpers, both professors and engineers with the Acceleration Consortium at the University of Toronto. The consortium is a research initiative that uses AI, robotics, and automation in “self-driving labs” to speed the discovery of new materials and molecules. It targets applications like renewable energy, biodegradable plastics, low-carbon cement, and cancer drugs. Directed by Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a chemistry and computer science professor, it involves nearly one hundred researchers across disciplines, from AI and engineering to chemistry and biology, with dozens of partners from industry, government, and academia.
In every way, it’s impressive, and one of the reasons they met with the DES students was to bring them onto the team. Meeting over Zoom, the students learned about the work. They were also presented with a series of projects that they could take on, four engineering challenges that are required within current research and design, yet are not currently underway. The feeling is that the DES students can help. “The hope is that you will prototype things,” said Hattrick-Simpers said to them during the call. “That you will develop something and teach us some of the tactile lessons, some of the best practices, the things I wish I’d known at the beginning.”
One project is to design and build a self-opening box, about three inches in diameter, that allows a robot arm to place and remove samples, and then closes to keep out ambient light.
“You may create something that is phenomenal,” said Hattrick-Simpers, “and we’d plug it right into the tool. That would be phenomenal. But even if we don’t get to that point, we will still have learned a lot, and we’ll be that much further ahead.”
Other projects include an automated mixer and dispenser for viscous fluids, a tool to measure the resistivity of materials, and a system to test coated surfaces, judging the parameters of the coating, durability, and adhesion. All are projects that would contribute to work being done currently within the consortium. Says Hattrick-Simpers, “We don’t have any of the things we are presenting right now, but we would like to have them.”
The benefit to the consortium is help with the work, but not only that. They see this as an opportunity to test the idea of working more closely and more regularly with talented, driven young people. “I’d like to see a more formal high school internship program,” said Hattrick-Simpers. A growing relationship with RSGC could be the first step.
For the students, the benefit is taking part in an experience at the cutting edge of materials development. The skills developed begin with engineering design, working within real-world constraints, and include all the skills that the students will need when they move ahead to post-secondary and beyond: collaboration, data collection and reporting, analytical thinking, and seeing the impact of their work. They’ll also be making personal connections with researchers at the schools that are members of the consortium, including U of T and UBC.
Judging from the feel in the room during the call, the students are up to the task. When the floor opened for questions, one of the first was, “Can you give us an example of an Opentrons device? Its range of motion, its head.” Kochhar got one and showed them how it worked. “We’ll be able to provide you with a series of technical drawings to begin working,” he said, and the students will then work from there.
The proximity of RSGC to the U of T campus is a benefit. While the meeting was online—they were intending to visit in person last week, though the snow day disrupted those plans—there will be opportunities to work together as things move ahead. Anything that students are unable to produce on campus in the DES lab, says Hattrick-Simpers, they can produce there. “You can come down and see your doohickey performing a measurement.” Nice. The lab is in walking distance of RSGC.
Toward the end of the call, a question was asked about what engineers at U of T are looking for in their student interns. What kinds of skills and postures are most valuable in this kind of work? “When I think about the best high school students—so far I’ve had three,” says Hattrick-Simpers, “resiliency is important. These projects— much like your projects in say, physics class—don’t have a lot of scaffolding. There isn’t a clear direct path. So, to be able to have something go wrong and not get discouraged and walk away from it … it’s good to have a willingness to embrace that and analyze the failure, and to accelerate that, interrogating a failure for what it is. Analysis is super important.”
“If you decide to work on one or more of these projects,” he continued, “being proactive, especially early on—asking questions, finding out what you don’t know—will help you arrive at a successful outcome.”
“And collaboration skills, which go hand-in-hand with proactive communication. You’d be working with us, and you’ll have the the resistance of meeting the deadlines, working within certain time constraints.”
It’s exciting, and entirely in keeping with what’s been happening within the College’s Design Engineering Studio, a dedicated space in See House to foster design thinking, collaborative inquiry, and project-based curricula. “It’s real,” says Chris D’Arcy, DES Coordinator. “It’s like, if you were on an athletic team, but you never actually got to play the game. This is the real game. … the boys will get a taste of what all their hours and efforts can lead to, which is an engagement with others around real-world problems, developing real-world solutions.”
For the students to take up the design challenges, work will begin now and continue through the summer. The effects of the experience, from the experience to the credentials it can confer, will be lasting.
Gurpaul Kochhar is training lead at the Acceleration Consortium and assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biology at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), specializing in chemistry education, computational chemistry, and physical/theoretical chemistry.
Jason Hattrick-Simpers is a professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Toronto and a Research Scientist at CanmetMATERIALS. He holds a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.S. in Physics from Rowan University and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Maryland. His research interests focus on the use of AI and experimental automation to discover new functional alloys and oxides that can survive in extreme environments and materials for energy conversion and storage.
