Minor Certificate Program in Computational Naval Sciences to Enable NAVAL STEM Careers
Abstract
The United States 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) acknowledges a concerning shift in the global security environment from decades of dominant superiority in air, land, sea, space,and cyberspace to current day~s scenario, where every domain is increasingly being contested by other nations around the globe (Mattis 2018). The NDS underscores rapid technological advancements in computational disciplines (e.g., advanced computing, big data analytics, artificialintelligence, autonomy, and robotics) as one of the fundamental drivers to reversing such a shifting trend in the security environment and advancing an international order that is most conducive to national security and prosperity. Further, the NDS aims to modernize key capabilities (e.g., advanced autonomous systems) by investing broadly in their military application andcomplementing our current civilian workforce expertise with recruitment of information experts, data scientists, computer programmers, and basic science researchers and engineers. These views of NDS are also corroborated by those of National Science Foundation, according to which economic progress and national security of the United States has relied on scientific breakthroughsfor the better part of the past 100 years, resulting in the US becoming the world~s technology leader.To address these issues, it can be speculated that jobs that will require skills encompassing the aforementioned topic areas will grow in the foreseeable future. However, while the jobs requiring high-skilled STEM backgrounds have increased six times faster than non-STEM fields in the last decade (Noonan 2017), there is a supply gap of graduates in STEM fields. While several reasonscontribute to this substantial increase in STEM jobs, the major demand comes from the advances in computational-based philosophies to mitigate the ever increasing design, development and testing costs for the development of next generation DoD systems, especially naval propulsion systems, munitions, aircrafts, submarines, cyber physical systems and ships. In addition, thisvacuum will be further exacerbated by the fact that 30% of the current DoD science and technology workforce will retire by 2020 (Seng & Flattau 2009). Therefore, there is a clear and urgent need to develop a globally competitive workforce for naval science and technology (S&T) jobs, especially trained with computational skillsets, a major requirement for most 21st century technological jobs. Without a critical mass of computationally-trained human resource base, cost effective development and maintenance of future Naval systems that are needed for our national security and prosperity will remain highly improbable.The overall idea of the proposed effort is to develop a set of technical elective courses focused on computational-based approaches applicable to naval systems. We plan to develop and implement an exploratory elective minor certificate in computational naval sciences focused on Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) and fluid and thermal sciences, and include it in the current undergraduate curriculum at University of Cincinnati (UC) and Old Dominion University (ODU). The rationale is that undergraduate STEM curricula that already contain some flavor of GNC and fluid and thermal sciences, if complemented with Naval STEM focused computational minor certificate will establish and maintain pathways of trained Naval S&T workforce, and simultaneously reduce the employee training costs so that new hires can be assimilated in their respective job profiles seamlessly. In addition, since the majority of students in the undergraduate program in US universities are US citizens, the certificate program will have a wider reach. Once the certificate program is established, because of its inherent nature, it will be self-sustaining through the university~s tuition streams. The ultimate goal of our program, which is in-line with UC~s mission (UC founded the co-op program over 100 years
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 15, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912486
Entities
People
- Prashant Khare
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Cincinnati