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Identifying the right time to ramp up courses for new technologies is one of the key challenges of science, technology, engineering, and math educators. Picking the wrong technology leaves students without jobs; waiting too long to add skills for a new, essential technology could mean that a college loses students to competitors. To help it sort out information about emerging technologies, the National Science Foundation has historically found it useful to support meetings where the best and the brightest people working in fields related to the one on the horizon discuss what they think is ahead.

On May 23 and 24, the Northeast Biomanufacturing Center and Collaborative (NBC2) based at Montgomery County Community College gathered 83 individuals involved in either the biofuels industry or biofuels education to share their thoughts about trends in the development of biofuels. During the meeting at Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu, Hawai’i, the summit participants shared their ideas about the best ways to educate technicians for careers in the emerging biofuels industry. The educators and biofuels industry leaders, who included several biodiesel and microalgae pioneers, worked in small groups on the skill standards. Vicki Glaser, executive editor of Industrial Biotechnology, led the group in the photo that opted to discuss the skill standards outside on the beautiful campus.

Summaries of the participants' presentations and the complete draft skill standards are contained in Educating Biofuels Production and Analysis Technicians for Future Industry Needs: The Report from the Biofuels Workforce Summit. The report was released at the 20th ATE Principal Investigators Conference (October 23 to 25, 2013) in Washington, D.C. For copies of the report contact Jennifer Imbesi at jimbesi@mc3.edu.

ATE Grant Subject Area Breakdown

ATE@20: Two Decades of Advancing Technological Education will be released this week at the 20th ATE Principal Investigators Conference in Washington, D.C.

The book and the blog of the same name highlight the accomplishments of the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program via the stories of individual students and educators who have benefited from ATE-supported initiatives.

Copies of the book can be obtained by emailing requests to ATE Central at ate20@atecentral.net.

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The research mentoring program that Del Mar College biotechnology faculty developed with the Revising Science Education with Vision (REVISION) Advanced Technological Education grant was recently recognized by Excelencia in Education for its outstanding efforts to accelerate Latino student success in higher education.

As the leader of one of the seven associate-degree-level programs profiled in the 2013 edition of Examples of Excelencia, ATE Principal Investigator J. Robert Hatherill was invited to attend the Seventh Annual Celebraci?n de Excelencia on October 1 in Washington, D.C. Examples of Excelencia systematically identifies and honors higher education programs that have evidence of boosting Latino students' enrollment, performance, and graduation rates.

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Biotechnology graduates contend with a Catch-22 as they begin biomanufacturing careers.

Medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and other employers in highly-regulated biomanufacturing industries want technicians who have experience following Food and Drug Administration regulations. Internships that would provide students with real-world work experiences in these fields are rare, however, because government regulations limit what inexperienced people are permitted to do in biomanufacturing workplaces.

To address this challenge, Vivian Ngan-Winward, obtained an Advanced Technological Education project grant to create STUDENTfacturED, a company that provides a simulated, regulated environment at Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) where she directs the biomanufacturing program.

STUDENTfacturED is the second entrepreneurial program SLCC's Biotechnology Department has launched with ATE support. InnovaBio, a contract research organization at SLCC, was the first.

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If you are a community college faculty member who has hesitated to apply for an Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) because you are not sure how to proceed, a Mentor-Connect application would be a great place to start. But you've got to get going.

Applications for Mentor-Connect are due at 5 p.m. on October 15. The application and instructions are at http://teachingtechnicians.org/

Twenty community colleges will be selected by November 8 to receive mentoring and technical support from Mentor-Connect to help prepare full proposals for the Small Grants for Institutions New to the ATE program track.

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Judith Ramaley was new in her position as assistant director of the Education and Human Resources Directorate at the National Science Foundation when she attended her first Advanced Technological Education Principal Investigators Conference in the fall of 2001.

For some time before the meeting she had been thinking about SMET. Not only did she dislike the sound of the acronym then used to refer to science, math, engineering and technology, it was not logical to her either. Switching the order of the letters to make science and math cradle engineering and technology made more sense to her.

Ramaley had not planned to share her opinion about SMET with the ATE principal investigators; however, something at the meeting prompted her seemingly spontaneous comment that she did not like the acronym and thought it should be changed to STEM. It was the first public meeting where she or anyone else is known to have suggested STEM as the acronym of science, technology, engineering and math.

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Since it was funded in 2004 as an ATE regional center, the Convergence Technology Center (CTC) has used a Business and Industry Leadership Team (BILT) to identify new technologies and economic trends that influence what technicians need to know.

Ann Beheler, executive director of Emerging Technology Grants at Collin College, calls the BILT process the "secret sauce" of CTC's up-to-date curriculum and faculty development programs.

"That is integral," she said. "If you pick one thing that absolutely has to be there to keep up with curriculum that changes as much as our does, the BILT leadership has to be there."

The CTC's BILT has taken on a national flavor since 2012, when it received funding as a national Advanced Technological Education center. That same year, Collin College in Frisco, Texas, where CTC is based, received a $19.9 million Department of Labor grant for the National Information, Security, and Geospatial Technologies Consortium (NISGTC). The large Department of Labor grant program is known as TAACCCT for Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training.

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The education of building technicians—people who operate the electrical and mechanical systems within skyscrapers and industrial facilities—is critical for long-term energy conservation and efforts to reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels. Forty percent of the nation's energy use and 40 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions come from buildings.

The energy efficiency of buildings depends largely on the skills of building technicians, because even new buildings will not run efficiently if technicians do not operate their systems properly.

For this reason the Building Efficiency for a Sustainable Tomorrow (BEST) Center at Laney College, in Oakland, California, has developed close partnerships with scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. These partnerships add the latest energy efficiency research to the working knowledge of technicians who operate large commercial buildings and the community college instructors who teach building technicians.

In the photo, Andrea Mercado, a senior research associate in the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, shares her research on energy-usage benchmarking with instructors at a BEST Center workshop in June.

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The Laboratory Science Program at Northern Essex Community College was a long-awaited “perfect” fit for Lindsey Curole.

Curole always wanted to work in a laboratory. But when Hurricane Katrina destroyed her New Orleans apartment, it forced a several-year delay in her education plans as she relocated with relatives in different parts of the country and worked to get back on track financially. Six months after settling in Massachusetts with her boyfriend and getting a job as a hardware store cashier, Curole was able to enroll as an in-state student at Northern Essex Community College.

She chose NECC’s Laboratory Science program, after looking at several community colleges, because of the versatile skills it teaches. “We spent a lot of time in the lab and working on projects. I liked it that it was more hands-on,” Curole said.

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As space exploration becomes more of a commercial enterprise in the U.S., the need for well-qualified aerospace technicians may be even greater than it was when NASA and its contractors were the primary employers in this field.

Working as an aerospace technician requires "a broad skill set, a particular level of attention to detail and a thorough understanding of safety,” said Steve Kane, managing director and program manager for SpaceTEC^?. Kane explained that aerospace technicians must be constantly aware of the fact they deal with things that can harm them and that the products they build must work properly to avoid endangering the public.

The SpaceTEC ATE National Resource Center links community and technical college aerospace technician education programs together in a national infrastructure. Its partners, since it was first funded by NSF in 2002, include NASA, the large companies with which NASA has contracted, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the U.S. military.