Center-to-Center (C2C) Updates and the Growing Intercultural Global Energy Leaders (GIGEL) program
Center-to-Center (C2C) Update: Visits Between Campuses
Prof. Celma de Oliveira Ribeiro and Prof. Claudio A. Oller Nascimento from the University of São Paulo visited the University of Notre Dame on October 14 - 20, 2022. Each gave a seminar — "Investments Decisions in Product Portfolio: the Brazilian Ethanol Industry” and "Carbon Dioxide Conversion Technologies to Formic Acid and Methanol Promoted by Ionic Liquid” — and participated in the CISTAR Biannual Meeting. The following week, Prof. Alexander Dowling traveled to the São Paulo region to give an invited talk at the Equifase conference and visited the University of São Paulo (USP). While at USP, Prof. Dowling gave a seminar, titled "Multiscale Design, Operations and Control Optimization of Integrated Energy Systems Considering Energy Market Interactions”, Additionally, Prof. Dowling toured the research lab and met with several faculty, students, and campus leaders. At the end of the week, Dr. Pedro Gerber Machado and Prof. Celma de Oliveira Ribeiro gave Prof. Dowling a tour of São Paulo.
CISTAR's Alex Dowling (University of Notre Dame) touring São Paulo with Pedro Gerber Machado (post-doc) and Celma Oliveira Ribeiro (USP professor).
Claudio Oller (USP professor) gave a seminar at the University of Notre Dame during his recent visit in October 2022.
Growing Intercultural Global Energy Leaders (GIGEL)
For the first offering of the program, the modules and live sessions were designed to get graduate students to think about how intercultural development, and one’s primary culture, affects thoughts and actions toward people, such as when one engages in cross-cultural collaborations, as well as toward issues, such as how one approaches the future of energy and one’s research. Thus, the program’s focus was on self-discovery (i.e., learning to be more culturally savvy, and building better intercultural skills with “active listening” and “building empathy” techniques), all in the context of understanding why intercultural skills are critical to being a global energy leader.
In collaboration with Dr. Jones, a Senior Intercultural Learning Specialist at Purdue, 7 modules - with videos, short articles, and guided activities -were created on Brightspace, a learning management system, for students to complete asynchronously before attending a one-hour “live” in-person virtual Zoom session. At these live sessions, the first ½ hour was reserved to discuss the module with the instructors and other graduate students in breakout rooms; the second ½ hour was reserved to listen and ask questions of an invited speaker.