On January 15th, 2025, AIChE MIT-WPU Student Chapter invited me and Dr Smita Chaturvedi to talk about Learning, Research, and Materials Science.

And I didn’t leave the opportunity to use the LAT System to inculcate those concepts within the learners there.

Let’s explore each step of the LAT System with an example from the event.

Learn Phase

The first step of research is to identify a research question.

How do you do so?

You are exposed to many sources of information.

• Daily Life

• Recent trends

• Discussions with people

• Your interests

From varied sources of a potential research question, deciding on a research question might seem daunting.

However, there are just three steps you must take to come up with a research question.

1. Ask “Why” and “How”

2. Answer those questions

3. Ask follow-up questions and answer them as well

Going down that rabbit hole allows you to reach a point where you reach an unanswered question. That becomes your research question.

Apply Phase

Now that you have a research question, you must apply your knowledge to find answers for it.

You will need to do: -

1. An extensive literature review to understand the state of the art

2. Data acquisition to bridge the research gap

3. Data analysis and interpretation

What skills do you need to apply here?

Of course, you need to have analytical skills, critical thinking, and reasoning to look for research gaps and find and interpret data to fill that in.

Learners during the workshop learnt how to go through existing literature and summarise them as a short literature review.

Test Phase

Within academic research, the best example of a Test Phase will be publishing a research or a review paper.

Within the handout provided to learners, I listed the differences between a research and a review paper.

To write either of them, one must go through the entire process of research methodology and present one’s findings to academia.

One’s knowledge and skills are tested in the best manner here.

Learners during the workshop learnt how to make a research plan and research proposal as their Test Phase.

This workshop was an immense success! We learnt a lot and we hope that the learners learnt something too!

If you are interested in learning more about research methodology and how LC can help you in your research journey, we are hosting a FREE WEBINAR on February 2nd 2025.