With the
start of the new year (happy new year to all), FLATE Focus continues with
discussion of our "Work to do for
Future Technician Preparation theme".
The National Science Foundation is extremely interested in what
technician education should "look-like" because new and near future
advancements in science, engineering, and technology are changing American
industry. As suggested in the December
FLATE Focus, math is the heart and soul of STEM. It is imbedded in every significant achievement
in science, engineering, and technology.
Thus, mathematics might have new and future advances to contribute to
new technologies. However, "future
of work" technologies will also demand the technical workforce to have a secure
knowledge of and comfort level with specific subsets of existing STEM connected
math concepts. The National Science Foundation Advanced Technological
Education (NSF-ATE) program involves partnerships between academic institutions
and industry to promote and execute improvement in the education of technicians. The ATE program's focus includes, but
is not limited to, advanced
manufacturing technologies, agricultural
and bio-technologies, energy and
environmental technologies, engineering
technologies, information
technologies, micro- and
nanotechnologies, security technologies, geospatial technologies, and
applied research on technician education.
The "bio-technologies"
part of NSF-ATE agricultural and
bio-technologies technician education mission is another example of what new
specific contributions from science, technology, and engineering combined with
some great new applications of mathematics has and continues to do. Although the agricultural sector (see last
month's Focus for discussion) does at least have bigger and more fancy farm
equipment to suggest the presence of future of work technology, the incredible
changes in the bio-tech sector are not apparent to much of the public. These new technologies have
"borrowed" their innovation from a variety of mathematics, science,
and technology sources to make it even challenging for educators in the field
to pinpoint this STEM contribution and impact. Actually, it is not even clear who is willing
to step up and define biotechnology so that a discussion of future of work
issues on biotechnology can stay focused on that topic.
When all
else fails many of us just default to Webster (now-a-days: Merriam-Webster) for
any definition.
"The manipulation (as through
genetic engineering) of living organisms or their components to produce useful
usually commercial products (such as pest resistant crops, new bacterial
strains, or novel pharmaceuticals) also: any of various applications of
biological science used in such manipulation."
Using this
Webster definition, it is possible to identify the two important segments of the
bio-technology sector; components to produce commercial products and
applications of biological science to accomplish the task. As new technologies become embedded in both
of these segments, technician work expectations change. One mathematics impact example for each
segment is provided as "food for thought" to trigger more in-depth
study of technician education in this sector.
For the laboratory-based technician, the introduction
of more sophisticated metrology tools triggers the need for the tech to
understands statistics beyond result interpretation from the classic visual
(microscope) interrogation of manipulated bacterial strains. New instruments provide data, graphs, and/ or
spectra to report their interrogation of a sample. These information formats inevitably require
statistics to clarify and characterize the reported results. The technicians and advanced operators
assigned to these instruments will need a secure knowledge of at least Gaussian
based statistics to evaluate the significance of the means and variances of the
actual sample and the sample population.
They will be expected to deal much more data and the interpretation of
many data sets. 
For the technician
involved in the commercial manipulation of living organisms or their components,
the new technologies are automating these operations. As with any automation, the technician’s role
morphs to meet the new situation.
Inevitably production automation introduces the mathematics of process
control to the technician and advanced process operators. Even the simplest math concepts in PID
(proportional, integral, and differential) control of a process stream are not
typically presented to today's bio-technology student. Most likely these same future technicians do
not today receive any exposure to the practical mathematics of calculus
associated with integration and differentiation.
Repeating
our mantra for this series of briefings; "The work to do starts with you." What do you think the bio-technician interface
to laboratory and commercial processes should look like? Can both segments of biotechnology be covered
in one A.S. degree program to service the industry? What should mathematics training be for these
technicians and how can it best be done? Will the same future bio-tech technician be
expected to work in the testing lab and the production floor? These are complicated questions with perhaps
convoluted answers. The first step is to just get the discussion going. Please let us know what you think.
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