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A challenge instructors face is developing and accurately assessing technical communication skills to ensure students can apply and transfer the skills from the academic context into the context of engineering practice. By intentionally balancing teaching transferrable communication skills relevant to engineering practice and evaluating student understanding, engineering educators can foster competence and prepare students for the expectations of their professional careers. This study addresses two questions: (1) how can chemical engineering instructors reliably and consistently assess student communication skills, and (2) are instructor expectations aligned with those of practicing engineers? The use of well-designed rubrics is important for setting clear expectations for students, providing constructive feedback, and in team taught courses, grading consistently. This study discusses how a rubric for assessing technical communication skills in senior-level chemical engineering laboratory reports was validated and demonstrated reliability across five chemical engineering instructors. Additionally, five industry partners evaluated student reports for comparison to instructor rubric scores. Expectations and perceptions of the quality of student work align between instructors and practicing engineers, but practicing engineers prioritized safety and abstract clarity, while instructors prioritized the students’ abilities to interpret results and draw conclusions. 

Expansion of an initial population of T cells is essential for cellular immunotherapy. In Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL), expansion is often complicated by lack of T cell proliferation, as these cells frequently show signs of exhaustion. This report seeks to identify specific biomarkers or measures of cell function that capture the proliferative potential of a starting population of cells. Mixed CD4+/CD8+ T cells from healthy donors and individuals previously treated for CLL were characterized on the basis of proliferative potential and in vitro cellular functions. Single-factor analysis found little correlation between the number of populations doublings reached during expansion and either Rai stage (a clinical measure of CLL spread) or PD-1 expression. However, inclusion of in vitro IL-2 secretion and the propensity of cells to align onto micropatterned features of activating proteins as factors identified three distinct groups of donors. Notably, these group assignments provided an elegant separation of donors with regards to proliferative potential. Furthermore, these groups exhibited different motility characteristics, suggesting a mechanism that underlies changes in proliferative potential. This study describes a new set of functional readouts that augment surface marker panels to better predict expansion outcomes and clinical prognosis. 

Rheo-NMR velocimetry was used to study shear banding of a 6 wt.% cetylpyridinium chloride (CPCl) worm-like micelle solution under shear startup conditions with and without pre-shear. 1D velocity profiles across the fluid gap of a concentric cylinder Couette shear cell were measured every 1 s following shear startup for four different applied shear rates within the stress plateau. Fitting of the velocity profiles allowed calculation of the shear banding characteristics (shear rates in the high and low shear band, the interface position and apparent slip at the inner rotating wall) as the flow transitioned from transient to steady state regimes. Characteristic timescales to reach steady state were obtained and found to be similar for all shear banding characteristics. Timescales decreased with increasing applied shear rate. Large temporal fluctuations with time were also observed and Fourier transform of the time and velocity autocorrelation functions quantified the fluctuation frequencies. Frequencies corresponded to the elastically driven hydrodynamic instabilities,i.e.vortices, that are known to occur in the unstable high shear band and were dependent upon both applied shear rate and the pre-shear protocol.