Computational science and engineering education, research and training at a HBCU- Experiences and outcomes

Computational science and engineering (CSE) and high performance computing (HPC) have now become an integral part of several engineering and science disciplines. Still the number of students from under-represented universities and minority institutions who are involved and educated in these fields is very minimal. The interdisciplinary computational science and engineering graduate program at our University (a major historically black college and university) was initiated in 2005 and has now graduated more than 25 students (including minorities and women, and in particular, African Americans) from various disciplines of science and engineering. This graduate program is the first such program at a historically black college and university (HBCU) in the nation, and is highly interdisciplinary, offering a curriculum that combines the stronger domain knowledge of several areas of science and engineering with the CSE core areas of applied numerical analysis, software data structures, parallel and high performance computing and data visualization. The interdisciplinary nature of the program and the presence of students from various diversified backgrounds pose significant challenges in the core computational courses. The details of the CSE educational program, experiences and outcomes from this graduate program are discussed in this paper. Representative case studies of the experiences and outcomes of the students from the program over the years are highlighted. A complementary outreach aspect of the CSE educational program at our university is the annual workshop on CSE and HPC for faculty members from other minority serving institutions across US and Puerto Rico. This educating the educator workshop has benefited the participating faculty, allowing them to not only get trained and exposed in these areas but also act as catalysts to propagate their knowledge to their students, serving a larger minority population. Our experiences and outcomes from the past few years and their impact on the CSE education and training of under-represented minorities are highlighted. The positive outcomes of the initial Master's level graduate program are now enabling the establishment of a PhD program in CSE (first among HBCU in the nation) that is currently pending approval for establishment. Details of the PhD program development and structure are briefly presented. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.