Spark Seminars Summer 2021
Students will be able to enroll in the following seminar to fulfill the SPARK General Education Requirement. *For first year students who began in Spring 2021 or for first year students who will begin in Fall 2021. (05/19/2021)
Engineering Inspired by Nature
Taught by: Sachin Goyal
If birds didn't exist, would engineers ever conceive of inventing a plane? Nature has evolved over geological time scales to achieve such intriguing mechanisms that engineers strive to learn from even today to develop new technologies. In this seminar course, you will brainstorm and investigate how nature can inspire engineering research. We will explore cutting-edge examples of such research from within UC Merced and beyond. Can we surpass nature in our engineering designs? Do we really understand how nature has solved a specific engineering problem? These are the types of questions that we will debate in the context of those research examples.
