Work in Progress: Leveraging the Diverse Backgrounds of Community College Students to Teach Team-based, Multidisciplinary Engineering

Dr. David R. Ely is the Engineering Program Chair at Ivy Tech Community College Lafayette since 2013. He enjoys teaching engineering students at Ivy Tech and advising them on the different engineering career paths that best match their interests and skill sets. Dr. Ely received his B.S. in Physics from Houghton College in 2002 followed by his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutics from Purdue University in 2010, where he researched granular materials. In 2008, he was awarded the Merck Research Laboratories Fellowship in Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Science, Material Science, and Engineering. After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Ely conducted postdoctoral research in Duesseldorf, Germany at the Heinrich-Heine University where he extended current dissolution models to predict nano-particle dissolution kinetics. Upon returning to the States, he worked as a postdoctoral research assistant at the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University where he spent two and one-half years modeling high performance electrochemical systems with complex microstructures including and beyond Li-ion chemistries at the atomistic, mesoscale, and continuum levels in order to develop a comprehensive theoretical and numerical multiscale strategy to accelerate the battery design process. He has presented his work nationally and internationally and has publications in several peer-reviewed journals. Currently, he is investigating the kinetics of nanoparticle dissolution at the mesocontinuum level using the phase field method. The goal is to develop a comprehensive, theoretical and numerical strategy to predict the dissolution kinetics of small particles from experimentally measurable parameters to accelerate the particle engineering process during formulation development. Example applications include researching the effects of engineered particle size distributions in solid dosage forms such as solid crystal suspensions as well as the nucleation and growth of particles during crystallization processes.