South Dakota Mines Fall 2022 STEAM Café lineup
includes a wide range of engaging topics.
STEAM Café, an ongoing series of free informal talks
by Mines faculty, staff and visiting experts, is a partnership between the
university, South Dakota Public Broadcasting and Hay Camp Brewing Company.
An acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering,
Arts and Mathematics, STEAM Café is held at 6 p.m. on the third Tuesday of each
month at Hay Camp
Brewing Company in Rapid City.
The 2022 Fall STEAM Café lineup includes:
Sept. 21*, 6 p.m. (*please
note: this is a Wednesday)
Rocker Days at STEAM Café
featuring Walker Research Group graduate students
Presented by: South Dakota Mines graduate
students and moderated by Dr. Travis Walker, associate professor of chemical
and biological engineering at Mines.
-
Maryam
Amouamouha has invented a device that could
revolutionize water treatment and improve water quality and availability
around the world. The
device can be installed in a home or business in place of a costly septic
system and could be scaled up to clean wastewater from multiple homes or
even a small town.
-
Laura
Brunmaier is working to overcome a major hurdle in
the ability to research and explain how blood vessels form and how they
react to various contaminants or to new medicines. The device that
Brunmaier helped to invent allows researchers to study living blood
vessels in real time outside the body.
- Sebnem
Ozbek is investigating cold spraying of polymer-based materials and working
on building a micro cold spray setup. Cold spraying of polymers has many
potential applications, including corrosion-resistant coatings on metal
surfaces and thin-layer coatings on various surfaces.
Oct. 18, 6 p.m.
National Security Innovation
Network (NSIN): South Dakota Mines student projects for Ellsworth Air Force
Base
Presented by: Mines students and moderated by
Jason Combs, program director of the NSIN at Mines.
- “Gate
Defense” – This team of metallurgical and mechanical engineers helped
Ellsworth improve 11 gates that are designed to control traffic flow and
speeds. The current gates are
extremely heavy, often stick and require multiple people to operate.
- “ROADCON”
– This team included mechanical and electrical engineers who worked on
signs which notify base personnel what the road conditions are during
winter storms. The team provided Ellsworth leadership with options to
improve reliability, remote update capabilities and visibility of the
signs during inclement weather.
- “UNFUNDED”
– This team of a chemical and a mechanical engineers tackled one of
Ellsworth’s most difficult problems: developing a decision-making tool to
aide senior base leadership in making end-of-year funding decisions (an
advanced data analysis and data visualization problem). The team provided
solutions that helped clarify what data was required for the decisions,
standardized terms, cleaned and conditioned the data and then used Excel
power tools (Power Pivot, etc.) to provide an interactive dashboard.
If you are interested in learning more about
what Mines students are doing to help the DoD or if you are interested in
solving DoD problems, you can find more information and examples at the Mines
website here.
Nov. 15, 6 p.m.
John Steinbeck’s “Bombs
Away”: A Propagandist at Work
Presented by: Dr. Rodney Rice, emeritus
professor of humanities at Mines.
When the U.S. entered World War II in 1941,
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck served voluntarily as an unpaid
consultant to the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), a foreign
news editor for the Office of War Information and a contributor to the Writer’s
War Board. At the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Steinbeck
published a book entitled “Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team” in 1942 with
photographs by Life magazine’s John Swope. To gather material for the book,
Steinbeck and Swope travelled roughly 20,000 miles, immersing themselves in
military flying culture. Dr. Rodney Rice, emeritus professor of humanities at
Mines and retired Air Force veteran, will discuss how writing “Bombs Away”
propelled Steinbeck into a new situation that demanded specialized rhetoric and
propaganda techniques designed to counter the threat of fascism and rally
support for the war.
Dec. 20, 6 p.m.
The Bone Collection:
Curating Fossils Through the National Park Service’s Paleontological
Collections Fund
Presented by: Geology faculty/Museum of
Geology experts Dr. Rachel Benton, Kayleigh Johnson, and Dr. Nathaniel Fox.
The National Park Service’s (NPS) Paleontological
Collections Fund was created to support the preparation, conservation,
curation, research and excavation of fossil resources collected on NPS lands
and housed at the James E. Martin Paleontological Laboratory on the South
Dakota Mines campus. Since May 2019, these funds have supported more than a
dozen student workers, aided student research and helped curate thousands of
NPS specimens. A discussion on the NPS Paleontological Collections Fund’s
mission and activities to date will be presented by Dr. Rachel Benton, a geology
& geological engineering faculty member at Mines; Kayleigh Johnson, Museum
of Geology preparator and lab manager and Dr. Nathaniel Fox, Museum of Geology
associate director.