How To Do Grad School

Gerald Higginbotham is a PhD student in Social Psychology at University of California-Los Angeles. The article we discuss is called “’Reparations?’: A case study of White Americans’ psychology toward past racial wrong-doing” and can be found here: https://www.psychologyinaction.org/psychology-in-action-1/2019/9/22/reparations-a-case-study-of-white-americans-psychology-toward-past-racial-wrong-doing

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Heather holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During her time in graduate school, she began working with MIT D-Lab and developed a passion for STEM education and indigenous innovation. At D-Lab, she co-founded and co-instructed D-Lab: Education in addition to mentoring students from other D-Lab classes.

While at MIT, she began developing the Practical Education Network (PEN) with a team of fellow students and others. They won numerous competitions including the MIT Sloan Africa Innovate Business Plan Competition (2015), IEEE/IBM SmarterPlanet Challenge, 1st Place Curriculum (2012), and the MIT Global Challenge/IDEAS Competition (2011).

Since graduating in 2015, Heather has been leading PEN in their pursuit of scaling experiential learning in resource-limited settings. She has worked with hundreds of students and teachers from Boston to Ghana to Peru.

PEN website: https://www.practicaleducationnetwork.com/

Heather can be found on Twitter @esibeem

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Uriah Israel holds a PhD in Applied Physics and Complex Systems from the University of Michigan and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. We discuss the setup of our research accountability group, the Mutual Improvement Society, reading, writing and how to build research skills.

Whitesides’ Group: Writing a Paper - https://www.tulane.edu/~lamp/whiteside.pdf

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In this bonus episode, I read from an essay called “You and Your Research”  in Richard Hamming’s book, “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.”

Korie Grayson is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell University. After undergrad, Korie worked at a biomedical device company called CryoLife in Atlanta, GA manufacturing the HeRO Graft, the only fully subcutaneous graft clinically proven to maintain long-term access for hemodialysis patients with central venous stenosis.

Shortly after, Korie was accepted into the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Degree program at Cornell University and was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship and the Alfred P. Sloan Diversity Fellowship.

She was awarded the Robert Mozia Graduate Distinguished Service Award by the Diversity Programs in Engineering (DPE) office for using her education, skills, and experience to make outstanding contributions in the Cornell community and beyond. Furthermore, she was named Graduate Student of the Year in 2017 for her significant contribution to DPE, the College of Engineering, and the lives of others by demonstrating initiative and positively contributing to the college’s climate toward diversity and inclusion.

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William Tarpeh is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. We discuss a wide range of topics including contextualizing your research in the literature, PhD accountability groups, and the importance of mentorship in grad school.

Will is the Director of the Tarpeh Lab, which develops and evaluates novel approaches to resource recovery from “waste” waters at several synergistic scales: molecular mechanisms of chemical transport and transformation; novel unit processes that increase resource efficiency; and systems-level assessments that identify optimization opportunities. You can find more information about the lab at: https://tarpehgroup.stanford.edu/ or @TarpehDiem on Twitter.

Omolola (Lola) Eniola-Adefeso is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan. We discuss how she got involved in research through undergraduate opportunities, some of her feelings about writing and some great advice for newly minted grad students.

She is currently a Professor and Miller faculty Scholar in the University of Michigan's Chemical Engineering department. She serves as Vice Chair for Graduate Studies and has appointments in Biomedical Engineering as well as Macromoelcular Science & Engineering. She earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004 and spent 2 years at Baylor College of Medicine in the department of pediatrics as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. Read about her recent work related to COVID-19 immune response: https://news.umich.edu/how-rod-shaped-particles-might-distract-an-out-of-control-covid-immune-response/

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Jessy Grizzle is the Director of the Michigan Robotics Institute. We discuss how his experience as an undergraduate researcher led him to pursue a research career and he shares some useful ideas about scientific writing.

He received the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 1983. He is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, where he holds the titles of the Elmer Gilbert Distinguished University Professor and the Jerry and Carol Levin Professor of Engineering. He jointly holds sixteen patents dealing with emissions reduction in passenger vehicles through improved control system design. Professor Grizzle is a Fellow of the IEEE and IFAC. He received the Paper of the Year Award from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society in 1993, the George S. Axelby Award in 2002, the Control Systems Technology Award in 2003, the Bode Prize in 2012 and the IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award in 2014. His work on bipedal locomotion has been the object of numerous plenary lectures and has been featured on CNN, ESPN, Discovery Channel, The Economist, Wired Magazine, Discover Magazine, Scientific American and Popular Mechanics. See some of his work here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMfDV8rkQqWhUwnTAYAq0tQ

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Launching on July 16th, the How To Do Grad School Podcast's mission is to uncover the habits and systems grad students need to produce great research. We’ll talk with successful current and former graduate students across the world and try to get a sense of what habits, systems and tools they've developed to start and sustain great research projects.

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