The following course is currently being taught by Dr. Composto:
EAS 5110/ENMG 5100-Societal Grand Challenges at the Interface of Technology and Policy
Spring Term
This new collaborative course — co-taught by faculty from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, Weitzman School of Design and School of Engineering and Applied Science — uses societal grand challenges as scenarios for identifying repeatable, process-oriented best practices for solving complex, systemic problems in the energy transition. This course will complement the material covered in the Kleinman Center Introduction to Energy Policy course (ENMG 5020) taught in the fall. It will be an opportunity to learn from one another and build a holistic understanding of the technical and policy dimensions of the energy transition and the global response to climate change and environmental degradation. This course will deliver content learning outcomes about technical, societal, and policy aspects of focal grand challenges, while providing all participants (including instructors) experience and skills to address community-derived problems in teams composed of members from disciplines that rarely collaborate.
The course will be broken into three chapters. For the first third of the semester, we will focus on basics of policy and engineering literacy, with each student bringing their own expertise to the table The middle third of this course will be built around case studies of grand societal challenges; some of which have seen considerable progress towards being solved, others which are still the subject of great uncertainty and disagreement. The final third of the semester will be structured largely around group projects for which students with diverse expertise will work together to identify a grand societal challenge and isolate the technical and policy barriers to solving this challenge. Over time, this course will serve as a working, iterative “laboratory” on parameters that affect the success of convergence style research and problem solving.
EAS EAS2xxx Energy Technology, Sustainability and Policy Grand Challenges in 2030 and beyond
Summer Term
Students are hungry to learn about the energy transition and sustainability. The energy transition presents a once-in-a-lifetime career-defining challenge for our students. Because of the breadth of this challenge, the very expertise across sectors needed to achieve the transition can present barriers to learning. This course will prototype an effort to better understand these barriers in the classroom so that students will learn methods to overcome them. A seminar format will emphasize discussion between students from different backgrounds. No background in technology or policy is required. The three sections of the course are: 1) Basics of policy, sustainability and technology literacy. This section will focus on communicating across disciplines to allow students to understand the drivers behind the energy transition and the role of sustainability. 2) Energy and sustainability case studies will be drawn from a continuum of stages of development, from the mature (efficiency standards) to present challenges (microplastics) to the future (hydrogen fuel). 3) Final projects by interdisciplinary teams will address emerging grand energy and sustainability challenges over a five- to twenty-year horizon. Students will identify barriers limiting technology development, describe the role of sustainability, and explore opportunities for interaction between policy and technology. Teams produce a final report and presentation..
The following courses are past courses taught by Dr. Composto:
MSE 3300 – Soft Materials
Prerequisite(s): Junior or Senior standing, CHEM 102.
Fall Term
This course will serve as an introduction of soft condensed matter to students with background in chemistry, physics and engineering. It covers general aspects of fundamental interactions between soft materials with applications involving polymers, colloids, liquid crystals, amphiphiles, food and biomaterials.
MSE 5400 – Phase Transformation
Spring Term
The phase of a material determines macroscopic properties such as strength, diffusion, and permeability. Whereas thermodynamics provides an idealistic understanding of phase behavior, the real phase (composition) and morphology of a solid material depends on the rate of transformation from one state to another. Namely, kinetics is the study of the rates at which systems approach the ideal state predicted by thermodynamics. Thus, transport/diffusion underlies our understanding of phase transformations. Technology applications will include, polymer nanocomposites as kinetically arrested materials, rapid solidification to create new materials, purification methods for integrated circuits, and drug delivery.