Five questions to respond:

1. What refinements to the 2009 Strategic Academic Vision are needed-both in terms of more narrowly focusing or removing current research themes or adding new ones? Consider collaborative, multidisciplinary research themes that can help to forge UC Merced’s identity.
   
   The research themes in the vision should also include Basic Science and Engineering to build the core strength not only for present (five) applied research themes, but also for adapting to future needs of applied directions. Building such core strengths and competency not only enables UC Merced to be adaptive and versatile, but is also indispensable for global competition and international impact. Within Mechanical Engineering (ME) program, the basic research encompasses areas as solid mechanics, dynamics, controls, thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer and fluid mechanics. These areas combined with basic areas in other engineering programs as well as physics, mathematics and biology form a comprehensive multi-disciplinary basis for almost every applied research theme in science and engineering.
   
   
2. What are the important research problems or questions in your field(s) and, relative to your response to question one, what research themes does your disciplinary or interdisciplinary field contribute to?
   
   

The graduate program in Mechanical Engineering is aligned with present UC Merced’s vision and with three out of five research themes identified by the campus that provide context and focus for the university’s future research initiatives.  The research theme in Environmental Sustainability is tightly connected to areas of research in thermal fluids, energy, materials, and policy that are of interest to at least 9 of the faculty members in our group (Blanchette, Davila, Diaz, Gopinathan, Lee, Ma, Martini, Modest, Winston).  Human health is related to the work of two of our faculty members (Li, Goyal) and Cognitive Science and Intelligent Systems is closely related to the work in robots, artificial intelligence, and controls that is performed by 4 faculty of the program (Carpin, YangQuan Chen, Kallman, Sun). Finally Dynamics of Social and Economic Progress is aligned with the work of one our faculty members (Yihsu Chen).

Some of our faculty’s research is unique on their own right such as combustion research by Modest, molecular modeling of interface dynamics and tribology by Martini, fractional order dynamic systems by YangQuan Chen, mechanical modeling of biomolecules and other biomechanical systems by Goyal and solar energy technologies by Winston.

We have faculty searches open in the areas of Design and Manufacturing, Thermofluids, and Sustainable Energy. We further intend to build our core strengths in all basic areas of mechanical engineering. The specific research applications are intended to remain open to debate each year, enabling us to incorporate input from newer faculty.

1. Within the context of the 2020 Project, what sort of resources are realistically needed for you to address these important research themes, problems, or questions?

FTE Faculty:

As of Fall 2013, the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Program at UC Merced has 7 ME core faculty and 10 affiliated faculty, totaling 17 FTE faculty, with total 22 graduates (19 Ph.D. students and 3 M.S. students).  By 2020, we expect to have

• 40 FTE faculty in ME Graduate Program, among which 25 are ME core faculty and 15 affiliated faculty.

• 110 graduate students.

In order to attract excellent graduate applicants, it is essential for the ME program to be able to offer prestigious and competitive fellowship supports to the first-year graduate students. A major issue in funding graduate students throughout the UC system is non-resident tuition fees. These fees are substantial (over $10,000 more than resident fees) and applied to all non-CA US citizens in their first year of graduate school, and they are applied to all non-US citizens for all pre-candidacy years of graduate school. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of students are not CA residents, and non-US citizens in Engineering. Given that all UCM programs have (or will have) to pay non-resident tuition for students in the first year, we anticipate that the UCM graduate division will design and implement the UCM-wide policy for paying first-year nonresident tuition fees. Furthermore, to attract the best international pool of graduate applicants, a start-up university like UC Merced must engage them early on in their undergraduate programs through summer internships or exchange programs and invest in streamlining their visa processes.

For faculty recruitment, as is the case at the campus level, we need to be able to offer attractive startup packages to hire the best faculty candidates we can find. Further, to bring international impact and competency, we must catalyze international collaborations that may require funds to support MoUs and visiting positions for faculty from international institutions.

Library Acquisition:

Although it is clear that additional resources will be eventually needed, it should be possible to start a graduate program without a substantial one-time increase in library funds.  The Mechanical Engineering Faculty is taking an active role in the selection of books and journals to be acquired, to ensure that a research-oriented collection is established. It is noted that, as more online resources are taking over the traditional library resource, we should maximize the coverage of our online subscription, for example, Scopus is right now not subscribed. It is also needed to have more faculty involvement in the acquisition process such as “New Book display/review/order room”.

Computing Costs:

The engineering programs at UCM emphasize the use of computers in all aspects of the engineering curricula. Due to the increasing importance of computers in the engineering practice, computing is incorporated in all lecture, laboratory and design courses offered. For computational work, the Mechanical Engineering Program would need ample access to high performance computing facilities or resources. Current computing resource is not enough for a growing ME Graduate Program.  Efforts are being made to develop desktop supercomputing facility with CUDA-GPU technologies at UC Merced. UC Merced must invest in its computational infrastructure if it wishes to be considered a leading research institution.

Equipment:

Graduate Labs

The Mechanical Engineering Faculty believes that laboratory experience is an extremely important component of engineering education. We observed that the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Program has 0 (zero) lab component in graduate course offering, although they have extensive laboratory training in graduate research. The following principles are proposed to guide our efforts in graduate educational/research lab developments:

1. The labs must reflect the state-of-the-art technology in equipment, instrumentation, computer controls and interfaces, as well as methodology.

2. The labs must reflect a balance between breadth in mechanical engineering, and the focus areas of the Mechanical Engineering Faculty.

3. Certain teaching activities may be conducted in faculty research laboratories. This allows students to be exposed to the current research frontiers and the highly specialized instrumentation and equipment even before entering the proposed mechanical engineering graduate program.

We have identified the following areas that need substantial lab components for graduate education in the next 5 years:

• Nano-fabrication facility

• Mechatronics and robotics

• Sustainable energy

• Rapid prototyping of real time controls

• Advanced thermo-fluids

Additional space should be planned for SoE to allow for starting an Engineering Research Center with extramural funding

Space and Other Capital Facilities:

Our consensus on faculty graduate office/lab space is 50 sq ft per student/scholar. Therefore, additional 77x100 = 7700 sq ft lab/office space is needed in the next 5 years at the minimum level.  Given 20% (1 in 5) additional visiting scholars/exchange researchers, our total demand for space would be at least 9240 sq ft.

In addition to the above general student seating space, the Mechanical Engineering Program has yet to develop two general support facilities:

The Machine Shop

The machine shop is an important resource for undergraduate education and graduate research. The equipment in the shop includes 4 milling machines (2 are numerically controlled), 4 lathes, drilling presses and sanding machinery, arc and gas welding equipment, and metal and wood cutting and sawing equipment. The current machine shop is acceptable for teaching purposes, but is not equipped to handle many research-driven machining requests (For Sachin…I recently discovered they don’t even have a set of metric taps). We are in the process of acquiring an Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) system, which can be used to fabricate micron-sized components.

The Electronics Shop

The Mechanical Engineering program has yet to build the Electronics Shop, which can be shared by EECS. A dedicated full time Lab Technician is required for the Electronics Shop. A dedicated full-time Lab Technician is required for the Electronics Shop.

Other Operating Costs:

For a graduate program at the size of 110 students, a full time Graduate Advisor is needed to manage the ME Graduate Program to ensure each student’s program is carefully taken care of.

1. What national programs align most closely with yours today and what are the programs (if any) to which you aspire to be like by 2020? If you aspire to establish a unique program, what differentiates it?
2. How does your program help to meet important campus metrics of campus enrollments (undergraduate and graduate students), research productivity, student retention rates, reliance on non-ladder rank faculty, etc.?

            Campus enrollments:

The projected growth of ME graduate students is proportional to growth in the vision. Furthermore, our plans call for the undergraduate enrollment in mechanical engineering to increase from 358 in the academic year 2012-2013 to nearly 800 in 2020, and correspondingly, the faculty will increase from 9 to 25 FTE. A projection for the size of the graduate program considering a healthy ratio of 4 to 5 graduate students per faculty would yield a size of the graduate student population between 100 and 125 in 2020.

Benefits to the ME Undergraduate Program:

The proposed graduate program will greatly strengthen the Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Program in the following aspects:

1. The graduate program is expected to increase the number of funded research projects and interaction with private companies and national laboratories, providing undergraduate and graduate students more opportunities for integrated education through their participation in research projects and internship programs.

2. The graduate program will create a pool of qualified teaching assistants. Currently, there is a shortage of graduate students who are qualified to be TAs for mechanical engineering undergraduate courses, especially for upper division courses. We have tried to hire part-time lecturers from local companies to cover this need.

Furthermore, a mechanical engineering program with significant cross-disciplinary research activities will provide opportunities for the growth of other engineering and science graduate and undergraduate programs.