Science and Engineering Professionalism Seminars
The goal of The Science and Engineering Professionalism Seminar Series is to help students become industry-ready. In addition to technical expertise, new scientists and engineers need to know how to communicate ideas, work in teams, make ethical decisions and manage people. And in the 21st century, they must be ready to function in an organizational culture that is increasingly global and diverse.
This seminar series offers five consecutive three-hour workshops facilitated by professionals from the science and engineering sectors. Students attending this workshop series will be better prepared to succeed as professionals upon entering the workforce and may find they are inclined to seek leadership and management opportunities while in school and in the workplace.
Click here to download the PDF flier for these seminars.
This event co-sponsored by the Career Center, College of Engineering & Computer Science, the College of Natural Sciences and Math and University Enterprises, Inc.
List of Seminars
- How to Thrive as a Scientist or Engineer in the 21st Century
Judith A. Kjelstrom, PhD, UC Davis and
Barbara L. Zimmer, Ph.D., Director, USA-West, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics
Date: March 20th
Summit Room (Third Floor)
University Union
9am - noon
more...
- Global Team Development
Guy Hall, Global Approaches
Date: March 27th
Summit Room (Third Floor)
University Union
9am - noon
more...
- The Business of Engineering for Engineers and Technical Professionals
Kishore Rao, Intel
Date: April 17th
Summit Room (Third Floor)
University Union
9am - noon
more...
- Effective Communication for Technical Professionals
Desiree Galenti (and others), Northrop Grumman
Date: April 24th
Summit Room (Third Floor)
University Union
9am - noon
more...
- Making Good Choices: Ethics for Engineering and Science Professions
Christina Bellon , Ph.D. Center for Practical and Professional Ethics, Sacramento State, and
John Gisla, UCD Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering. Formerly US District Attorney
Date: May 1st
Hinde Auditorium
University Union
9am - noon
more...
How to Thrive as a Scientist or Engineer in the 21st Century
Presenter: Judith A. Kjelstrom, PhD, University of California, Davis and
Barbara L. Zimmer, Ph.D., Director, USA-West, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics
Date: March 20th
A scientist or engineer needs more that cutting edge technical skills to thrive in the 21st industry. Business skills, people skills and knowledge of the global landscape are also needed. Academic–Industry partnerships will be required to translate ideas into reality. In order to develop these types of partnerships, leadership skills and professional networking are a must. Cross disciplinary teams are the norm in both academic research centers and industry, so effective communication skills must be developed. The Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology (DEB) graduate program at UC Davis (www.deb.ucdavis.edu) is a successful model for developing PhD students.
About Dr. Judith A. Kjelstrom
Dr. Kjelstrom is the Director of the UC Davis Biotechnology Program, which encompasses both the Designated
Emphasis in Biotechnology (DEB) and the Advance Degree Program (ADP) graduate programs. The DEB program
strives to supplement a student’s Ph.D. program with cross-disciplinary training in critical areas of
biomolecular technology and includes a student internship in a biotechnology company. The DEB currently
has close to 180 graduate students from 27 disciplines across the campus, so new internship locations
are always welcome. For corporate employees, the ADP enables scientists and engineers of regional
bioscience corporations to purse a doctoral degree at UC Davis without quitting their jobs. The
Biotechnology Program works to link academia to biotechnology industries and government agencies
through involvement in many other activities. Dr. Kjelstrom serves as:
- Co-founder and member of the advisory board for BioTech SYSTEM, a regional biotech consortium and home of the Teen Biotech Challenge (TBC) www.biotechsystem.ucdavis.edu.
- Program coordinator for the NIH graduate training program in Biomolecular Technology and the DEB www.deb.ucdavis.edu.
- Co-director for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s IMBS (Integrating Medicine into Basic Science) Graduate Training Program. http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/imbs/
- Senior Personnel for the NSF CREATE (Collaborative Research & Education in Agricultural Technologies & Engineering)-IGERT Graduate Training Program. create-igert.ucdavis.edu
- Co-instructor for two graduate seminars: MCB 294 (Current Progress in Biotechnology) and MIC 292 (From Discovery to Product: an Introduction to Biotechnology at the Industrial Level).
- Co-PI on several joint projects with American River College involving applied biotechnology for high school teachers and community college faculty.
- Board member of SARTA (Sacramento Regional Technology Alliance). www.sarta.org
- Graduate of Leadership California’s California Issue and Trends (CIT) Program and currently serves as the co-chair of the Sacramento Regional Council. www.leadershipcalifornia.org
- Consultant for Velocity Venture Capital – focus on life sciences companies. www.velocityvc.com
Dr. Kjelstrom earned a B.S. in Biological Sciences with a concentration in Clinical Laboratory Sciences from California State University, Sacramento, and a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of California, Davis. For further discussions with Dr. Kjelstrom, please contact her directly at jakjelstrom@ucdavis.edu. The Program website can be viewed at www.biotech.ucdavis.edu .
Global Team Development
Presenter: Guy Hall, Global Approaches
Date: March 27th
Work now follows the sun as team members hand off tasks in process to colleagues on different continents. Instant messaging, VoIP, conference lines, video meetings and other collaboration tools are enabling these teams, but what individual and team skills are necessary for success in this new world? Without certain skill sets, team members should be afraid. Actually, they should be very afraid, as success cannot be assumed, and even near death incidences may follow, as I illustrate with some personal experiences.
My focus, and what is often missing in university training, is globalization and global teams. I use globalization to refer to economic globalization, integration of trade and supply chains across the world and worldwide customer bases. These drive the formation of global teams with team members possessing tremendous diversity in culture, perceptions and communication.
Most hires into US corporations will find themselves being a member of the global team. Even local businesses find they now have to work globally. Their effectiveness and degree of success will be gated by how well they can work with a diverse set of individuals, both locally and remotely on these global teams. What is not often understood in educational institutions is that successfully working in global teams is hard, very hard, and the students are not trained for it. However, multinational hiring managers are very aware of the challenges.
As Thomas Friedman pointed out in his book The World is Flat, ‘flattening’ of the world has changed the workforce permanently. The pace of globalization is quickening and will continue to have a growing impact. 52% of engineering alone is being moved around the world – in all directions. Let’s make sure students are prepared.
I present and attack this subject from a practical standpoint, far from the theoretical, based on 25 years of global team experience.
About Mr. Guy Hall
Guy Hall has 30 years of product development leadership with Hewlett Packard and holds several patents
in networking and data warehousing. Using his experiences in building and managing teams around the
world including Russia, India, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Hungary and Slovenia, Hall has provided talks
on global teams to universities and conferences in and outside the US. Most recently Guy Hall founded
Global Approaches, a consulting firm providing resourcing guidance and support to corporate clients and
emerging technology companies.
The Business of Engineering for Engineers
Presenter: Kishore Rao, Intel and Dr. Pramod Parihar, Numonyx Inc.
Date: April 17th
This course will instruct the student to understand the Business aspects of Engineering including but not limited to:
- Gain business acumen by handing conflicting engineering priorities and understanding tradeoffs affecting
time-to-market decisions
- How to work within a team to solve product development problems when business requirements change
- Effective Intra Team Communicate under pressure of deadlines and project changes
- Effective report out of Project Status to management to get decisions including Executive Summary and
an "Elevator Pitch"
- Summarizing key product points and customer value
- Market research fundamentals, Project financial evaluations, Competitive analysis
About Mr. Kishore Rao
Kishore has over 15 years of experience in the Technology and Computer Industry having worked in the area of
Flash memory as applied to PC Computing, Mobile Phones and Embedded Deigns. He is currently with Intel
Corporation at their Folsom Campus in the position of a Product Line Manager for High Performance Solid
State Drives. In this role he works to incorporate innovative ways of using Flash Memory in Intel Platforms
to enhance PC user experience. In addition, at Intel he has held several Technical and Business positions
in S/W Engr, Test/Product Engr, and Marketing including organizational ownership of the Intel’s $1.6B,
Cellular Marketing Segment for NOR Flash Memory. Prior to this he worked for Caltrans as an Electrical
Engineer in their Advanced Highway Maintenance Technology Program, in co-operation with UC Davis, developing
and implementing technology to make Highway Maintenance safer for Employees and the Public. He also has
vast experience traveling worldwide, working with customers, Press/Analysts and at Industry Events.
Kishore has published papers and his most recent one was “A NAND Flash PC Platform Read Write Cache, presented at the NVSMW, 2007. Kishore Rao has an MSEE from Sac State (California State University Sacramento) and a BSEE from Bangalore University, India. He has been active with the IEEE Sacramento Sections of the Vehicular Technology and Computer Societies and is currently serving on the Industry Advisory Committee for the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Sac State.
About Dr. Pramod Parihar
Pramod Parihar: Has 13 years of industrial experience covering Electrical Power, Clean Energy, Semiconductors,
and Information Technology. He currently is Manager Strategic Finance and Planning with Numonyx Inc. where he
leads Numonyx strategic competitive intelligence efforts. Numonyx was part of Intel before it was spun
off, in April 2008, as an independent company.
Before Intel/Numonyx, Pramod worked as an independent management consultant and was responsible for successfully guiding startup companies in their early days. Earlier he was a project manager for Bechtel, working on projects in Africa, Asia, and Europe.
Pramod has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State, and an MBA from UC Davis.
Effective Communication for Technical Professionals
Presenter: Desiree Galenti, Northrop Grumman
Date: April 24th
Topics to be addressed
- Communication styles (know yourself and your audience)
- How to communicate with coworkers
- How to effectively communicate with supervisors
- How do you make yourself standout/market yourself?
- How do you talk to a supervisor about promotional opportunities or getting a new assignment?
- How to have the difficult conversations (voicing concerns)
- Email and phone etiquette, including grammar and professionalism (e.g. texting)
Making Good Choices: Ethics for Engineering and Science Professions
Presenter: Christina Bellon and John P. Gisla
Date: May 1st
This session will introduce students to some of the major ethical issues in the engineering and science professions, provide them with some practical ethical decision making skills, and provide an opportunity to practice these skills with a sequence of cases to resolve.
About Dr. Christina M. Bellon
Christina M. Bellon is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Practical and
Professional Ethics at California State University, Sacramento. Her teaching and research interests lie
broadly in practical and theoretical ethics, with special interest in human rights, rights theories,
and theories of justice. Her current projects include: an examination of the development of children’s
rights in the human rights tradition and their potential to function as cross-cultural standards of
justice for children; the application of human rights theory to justify appeals to humanitarian
violations as a limiting factor on nation state sovereignty; and a contextual and relational analysis of
rights. She is the editor of the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter on Feminism and P
hilosophy, and she is area editor in Feminist Philosophy for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
About Mr. John Gisla
Mr. John Gisla has both a Bachelors degree in civil engineering and a degree in law. He has served as the
Agency Attorney for the US Army Corp of Engineers (1975-83) and as Assistant US Attorney, US Attorney's
Office, Sacramento (1983-2007). He has been appointed as a Lecturer at UC Davis Dept of Mechanical and
Aeronautical Engineering, teaching their course, Professional Responsibilities of Engineers (1975-present).
