Courses

The following course is currently being taught by Dr. Composto:

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.


The following courses are past courses taught by Dr. Composto:

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.


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.