Dr Rehan Shah visited Cornell University, USA as part of a week-long collaborative research visit from 30th August to 6th September 2026, supported by a Queen Mary-Cornell Global Research Seed Grant Award, received in conjunction with Dr Alexandra Werth (Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University).

Their proposed funded project titled 'Towards an AI-Motivated Mathematical Skills Inventory for Future Engineers' aims to develops a framework for a skills-based mathematical assessment instrument that bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical AI-oriented, engineering applications. To achieve this goal, Dr Shah and Dr Werth have established a synergistic, firm and lasting collaboration between their research groups at Queen Mary and Cornell respectively to accelerate and translate mathematics and engineering education research.

During the visit, Dr Shah spent valuable time with Dr Werth's group to discuss the scope and progress on their project, the first phase of which will involve piloting an existing Calculus Cognitive Diagnostic (CCD) assessment inventory developed by the LASSO education project across modules from all four years of their respective institution's engineering degree programmes. This cross-institutional, cross-sectional longitudinal study will help gauge and evaluate students' abilities to retain core calculus knowledge acquired through the spectrum of their academic degree studies from Years 1-4. The findings from the project will be shared through global conference presentation proceedings and peer-reviewed journal publications and will spur further applications for larger external grant funding.

In addition to this, Dr Shah also met with a wide variety of STEM academics, education developers, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students at Cornell to share and discuss insights from his varied mathematics and engineering education scholarship research projects. He also delivered an invited research talk for the Cornell Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) seminar on his pioneering co-creation scholarship work titled 'Teaching Ethics and Sustainability in Mathematics? Surely You Must Be Joking!' which discussed findings gathered over three years in conjunction from working with two undergraduate engineering students on embedding ethics and sustainability across the mathematics curricula within the department. The talk, which was extremely well attended with at least 40 people turning up from a wide range of STEM departments and faculties, was very well received and several academics were inspired by Dr Shah's work in this area and posed insightful questions in their keenness to explore it further.

All in all, the visit was immensely successful in establishing capacity for future collaborations through the exchange of ideas between colleagues at both Cornell and Queen Mary focusing on discipline-based STEM education research and demonstrated great potential in improving STEM teaching, learning, and assessment from a cultural, institutional, and disciplinary perspective.