A workforce equipped with essential data analytics skills is crucial to maintaining the United States' economic growth and security, especially for nuclear energy industries and non-proliferation. Data analytics skills are in high demand in order to generate data-driven, robust solutions to solve global challenges and support decision-making for stakeholders in nuclear energy and security areas. This paper presents the technical approach that facilitates the integration of fundamental data analytics skills into pipeline building toward a diversified workforce through a suite of well-designed, comprehensive summer enrichment programs for high school, undergraduate and graduate students. The summer programs incorporated lectures, hands-on labs, group projects and/or national lab intern experience. In the last three-year's implementation, the student assessment and project completion result all showed the effectiveness of the approach in enhancing students' ability to understand the science foundation, identify real-world problems, analyze data and develop data-driven solutions in nuclear energy and security areas. The feedback from student surveys is also satisfactory and positive. This research is sponsored by Department of Engergy/NNSA and intends to share the project team's experience and lessons learned with the STEM education community.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Zhao et al. (2024) studied this question.