Department of Engineering / News / Transatlantic trip

Department of Engineering

Transatlantic trip

Transatlantic trip

Undergraduates in the Department have been offered the chance to attend a lecture course at MIT this term - but their trip across the Atlantic will be a virtual one.

The Cambridge students have adapted very well to the virtual lecture course, although they all found it a little strange at first to watch the lecturer on a big screen. So far it has all run pretty smoothly.

Dr Mark Spearing

Dr Mark Spearing from MIT, who is currently visiting CUED, has taken advantage of the Department's video conferencing facilities to enable fourth year students at Cambridge to participate in a program offered by MIT, on which he normally lectures.

Lectures are accessed by video link from MIT through MIT's Singapore MIT Alliance (SMA), by students at Cambridge as well as those in Singapore, and as they are happening in real time, questions and discussion are invited from any of the three participating centres.

The course, 'Materials and Processes for Microelectromechanical Systems' (MEMS) covers the materials and processes commonly used for fabricating MEMS.

Dr Spearing comments: "We are giving a total of 26 lectures, each an hour and a half long. The first 11 lectures form part of a fourth year module here at CUED (4I6), whilst the remainder will be available to all interested undergraduates and graduate students. There are currently about 70 people attending the lecture series, split between the three sites, including a substantial number of students taking the course for credit in each of the academic institutions involved."

"The Cambridge students have adapted very well to the virtual lecture course, although they all found it a little strange at first to watch the lecturer on a big screen. So far it has all run pretty smoothly."

Dr. Spearing's co-instructors are Professor Carl Thompson at MIT and Professor Hejun Du at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. Professor Steven Senturia (pictured on the screen in the picture above) gave a guest lecture in 4I6, and in addition his course on Microsystem Design is being delivered to Cambridge by videotape to serve as a graduate seminar series and the basis for a future fourth year module.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.