Yang Ye
Northeastern University, MA·Education Research
Offshore wind energy is an emerging, safety-critical industry that struggles to build and keep a skilled workforce. Students rarely get early exposure to real offshore work environments, site visits are costly and risky, career pathways are unclear, and digital and automation technologies change quickly.
- Fields
Education Research
Engineering
- Topics
offshore wind energy
renewable energy
workforce development
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Pilot a multi-phase offshore wind experiential learning framework that gives community college and engineering students low-cost, immersive at-home training with personalized coaching powered by artificial intelligence.
- Build a modular, industry-aligned curriculum with micro-credentials and a supplemental certificate program that channels interested students into co-op or internship opportunities with partner organizations.
- Track participants' readiness, learning outcomes and retention across cohorts and use those data in a participatory co-design process with partners to refine the training modules and credentials.
More about the research
Together these barriers reduce interest, slow skill development, and make workers harder to retain.
Why it matters
A shortage of prepared workers could slow U.S. offshore wind deployment. By giving community college and engineering students scalable, low-cost early exposure to offshore wind careers, technical skills and worksite challenges, plus routes into internships, the project aims to broaden participation in the sector. The same training model and shared resources could be adapted to other maritime and emerging-technology fields with similar workforce gaps.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Camille Crittenden
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Education Research
Place undergraduates from four University of California campuses as NanoLab Fellows in the Berkeley Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory for an academic year plus summer, giving early hands-on semiconductor fabrication experience.
The school
Northeastern University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $347M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
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