Stanford Engineering
Wind Engineering Lab

Wind Engineering Lab Guidelines

The guidelines outline what is expected from graduate students in the lab. Their goal is to support your learning and research experience, and the operation of the lab. They cover four topics: meetings, publications and conference presentations, seminars, and data sharing and back-up.

Meetings

The following guidelines outline what is expected from graduate students in the lab during individual long-term planning meetings, progress meetings, and group meetings. They also summarize how to preserve material presented at these meetings. 

Individual long-term planning meeting

At the start of each quarter, we will meet to discuss:

  • which courses you plan to take
  • your progress towards taking your GQE
  • your research goals for the quarter, including submission of publications, and participation to conferences

Your plan should be optimized to go TGR as soon as possible. By saving tuition, you’ll reduce the number of quarters you have to TA and you will free up funds for experimental equipment, computational resources, and attending conferences.

Progress meetings

Weekly progress meetings can be individual or in subgroups, and are intended to present updates on your progress and your plans for the next week. You should prepare a few slides that discuss:

  • The objective of what you have been working on the past week
  • New results you obtained, and interpretation of these results:
    • When presenting numerical results, you should include an overview of the simulation set-up (domain description, mesh, numerical schemes, turbulence model, boundary conditions). Even if you have presented this before, include it again.
    • For UQ studies, include the input pdfs of the uncertain variables and the propagation method used
    • You shouldn't have everything figured out, but you should provide a good starting point for discussing the results. Graphs should be clear and correctly labelled to allow meaningful discussion of your interpretation. Don’t present preliminary results that haven’t fully converged or haven’t been double checked for correctness!
  • Any difficulties or problems that are slowing you down; someone else might have solved that problem in the past and help you to quickly move on.
  • Your plans for next week

Weekly group meetings

The general weekly group meeting is intended to keep everyone up to date on the group's research and to encourage discussion and collaboration. In about 20 minutes you should either give a conference style presentation on your research progress, or discuss a relevant paper.

Preserving meeting material

Slides presented at progress and group meetings should be saved in a designated folder on our team drive, label them as follows: NAME_YEARMONTHDAY_*.pptx.

Publications and Presentations

Publications and presentations are the primary mechanism for disseminating our research. Everything we publish or present should be reproducible, precise, and fulfill the highest quality standard. You are expected to scrutinize every sentence, every equation, and every figure you include. 

The following presents important guidelines for publications, conferences, acknowledging funding, and preserving material.

Publications

Your target should be to submit anywhere between 3 and 5 publications during your PhD. These are general guidelines; quality is strongly preferred over quantity, and we will discuss publication plans for your specific project as we go along. We use overleaf for writing papers to facilitate collaboration. You are encouraged to send me weekly reminders if I haven’t provided feedback on your manuscript.

Conferences

The lab usually has a presence at:

  • APS DFD conference
  • SIAM CSE and SIAM UQ conferences
  • Wind Engineering Conferences (CWE, ICWE, ACWE, EACWE, BBAA)
  • The Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference

If your research is more turbulence focused, Turbulence Heat and Mass Transfer, or Turbulent Shear Flow Phenomena are additional options. Feel free to suggest other options.

You are responsible for:

  • Selecting which conferences to attend
  • Keeping track of abstract deadlines: sending me the abstract at least one week before the deadline for review. 
  • Planning presentation rehearsals: present an outline of your talk at your progress meeting at least two weeks before your departure, and plan a formal rehearsal at the weekly group meeting at least one week before your departure.
  • Many conferences have travel grants for graduate students, make sure to look for those. There are other opportunities to apply for travel grants (e.g. NSF) that you should explore and apply for whenever possible.

Acknowledging funding

You are responsible for acknowledging funding for your research on every publication or conference poster/presentation. This also includes any computational resources from e.g. XSEDE. If you’re not sure what language to include, ask.

Preserving published and presented material

Once published, the .tex file, all figures, and the final published .pdf file should be saved in a designated folder on our shared team drive.

Conference material should also be preserved in a designated folder on the team drive. For publications and abstracts, save either the .tex and figure files or the .docx file, and a .pdf file of the final submitted document. For presentations, save either the .tex and figure files or the .pptx file, and a .pdf file of the final presentation.

Seminars

These are the seminar and meeting mailing lists you should sign up for:

  • EFML meeting
  • Fluid Mechanics seminar
  • EES seminar
  • CTR turbulence tea seminar

I strongly encourage you to attend the seminars. Even if they are not directly aligned with your research, you will learn something new that might be very useful one day. Attending (and presenting at) the EFML meeting is required.

Data Sharing, Preservation and Back-Up

Each student will have access to the general WELabTeamDrive and to a designated project team drive to share and preserve data. The drives should be used as follows:

  • WELabTeamDrive:
    • WELABConferencesAndPublications spreadsheet: you should enter the information requested for all conference presentations and publications, including links to the relevant files on your designated project team drive
    • Group Meetings folder: contains a folder for each academic year with the schedule and your presentation files
    • Literature folder: save any papers or links to papers that are relevant to the group's research
  • ​Designated Project Drives have at least three folders:
    • ​ProgressMeetings: save all slides presented at our weekly subgroup or individual meetings as outlined in the guidelines above.
    • Conferences: create a subfolder for each conference you attend to save conference presentations, abstracts and papers as outlined in the guidelines above.
    • Publications: create a subfolder for each of your journal publications to save all data related to journal publications as outlined in the guidelines above:
      • all files used to create the manuscript  (.pdf, .tex, and figure files).
      • all simulation data generated and code developed (e.g. for post-processing of data) for published material should also be documented and preserved. Create a subfolder where you save the files that would be required to reproduce the results in your publication. This is a requirement imposed by many of our funding agencies.

Back-up of other non-published material on your desktops or laptops should be done using available Stanford services.