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Alum Wins $3,000 Second Prize in National Competition

Alumna Alaina Hanlon, the president and CEO of the PhenotypeIT company that provides health and wellness software solutions to help individuals and organizations better identify and manage chronic health issues, took home the second-place $3,000 prize at the National Health Promotion Summit, where the Healthy People 2020 Leading Health Indicators App Challenge was staged. Team Community Commons won the $10,000 first prize. PhenotypeIT guides individuals gradually to change behaviors that are putting their health at risk. The company also addresses the need for a better set of behavior modification tools for clinicians and dieticians to use with patients at risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and metabolic syndrome.

EWB Raises $18,800 for Projects in Developing Countries

On April 21, the UMass Amherst student chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) hosted its fifth annual Auction & Social, the high point of the seven-year-old organization’s best year of fundraising to support sustainable engineering projects in Kenya and the Amazon. “We surpassed our goal, raising $22,500, $16,000 from sponsorships and $6,500 from the auction,” explained Elaine Palmer, fundraising advisor for the EWB chapter. “The auction yielded 62 percent of retail value. After expenses and overhead we estimate our net income to be $18,800! With these funds, those traveling on a project will be able to participate regardless of their individual ability to pay for travel.”

Zhao Wins Best Paper Award

The paper of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) graduate student Jia Zhao was selected for the Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Great Lakes Symposium on Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI), which took place in Salt Lake City, Utah from May 3 to 4. Zhao’s faculty advisor, ECE Professor Russell Tessier, and ECE Professor Wayne Burleson were co-authors of the paper, entitled “Distributed Sensor Data Processing for Many-cores.” As Tessier noted, “Jia's paper focuses on the on-chip monitoring of many-core processor chips which contain thousands of processor cores. His approach collects on-chip voltage and temperature information and uses the information to control processor performance. Significant performance and energy benefits result from this technique.”

Russell Receives Honorary Doctorate at Commencement

Alumnus Mark E. Russell, who earned his M.S. degree from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in 1985, received an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering Degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst at its 2012 Commencement ceremonies. Russell is the Raytheon Corporate Vice President of Engineering, Technology, and Mission Assurance. Russell was recently elevated to the honorary status of Fellow by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The prestigious distinction of AIAA Fellow is conferred upon those members of the institute who have made notable and valuable contributions to the arts, sciences, or the technology of aeronautics and astronautics.

Distinguished ChE Alumna Lectures on Campus

Chemical Engineering (ChE) alumna Rena Bizios ’68 recently lectured here on “Strategies to Promote Mammalian Cell Functions Pertinent to New Tissue Formation for Biomedical Applications.” It was a great opportunity for the ChE department to renew old and warm acquaintances with a former student who has excelled in her field. The highly accomplished Dr. Bizios is currently the Peter T. Flawn Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Dr. Bizios is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the International Union of Societies for Biomaterials Science and Engineering, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Faculty Receive Mentoring Grant

A group of female faculty members from the College of Engineering and Department of Computer Science has received a Mellon Mutual Mentoring Team Grant to support women academics in their professional development. The goal of the project is to establish a sustainable network – what the UMass team calls an Engineering and Computing Women Faculty Group (ECWG) – which will provide mutual mentoring among female faculty of all ranks and varied backgrounds. The team leaders of the ECWG are Assistant Professor Mi-Hyun Park of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and Professor Aura Ganz of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. “This [group] will enable the participants to navigate professional development in this competitive world,” as the ECWG proposal explains.

Two Outstanding MIE Projects Share First Place

On May 1, two projects that created a more powerful clutch for John Deere harvesters and an improved method for removing toxic lead paint shared first place after judges presided over the end-of-semester poster presentation for the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department’s crowning course, MIE 415: Senior Design Project. The winning projects, entitled the “Innovative Clutch Design” and the “Autonomous Lead Paint Entrapment and Filtration System,” were chosen after 14 student teams of seniors demonstrated the prototypes of their useful, inventive, and brilliant designs for all to see. The event was the peak experience during the MIE course for seniors, as taught by MIE Professor Sundar Krishnamurty.

Engineering Students Score a Host of Honors

Talented and accomplished students from all four departments at the College of Engineering have won numerous awards, scholarships, fellowships, and other distinctions this semester on the national, regional, and campus level. They range from the prestigious National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship, competing against the best undergraduates in the nation, to a host of awards presented by the chancellor. Chemical engineering undergraduates Kathryn Geldart and Sarena Horava have both received one of the country’s most highly sought-after fellowships, the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship, worth more than $40,000 annually for three years.

Special Needs Students Visit UMass and Test Devices to Make Them More Independent

Brushing our teeth and tuning a radio are activities that most people take for granted, but for some of us being able to do these simple tasks would be the chance of a lifetime. That’s exactly what happened on May 4 when 10 special education students from West Springfield Middle School visited UMass Amherst to test out engineering devices designed to make their lives much easier and more independent. The devices, created in cooperation with West Springfield Middle School special needs teacher Megan Ferrari by undergraduates in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department for their mandatory Senior Design Project, allow disabled students to carry out two of their regular daily functions, tuning a radio and brushing their teeth, for the first time on their own.

ECE Places Two Teams in the National Cornell Cup Competition

The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department has placed two teams of student innovators in the final field of 24 from across the nation that will compete in the Cornell Cup competition on May 4 and 5 at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. One ECE team has designed and built an “Automated Aero-Painting System,” a model “quadrocopter” (helicopter with four propellers) that can spray-paint. The other team has created an “Augmented Reality Head-Up Display,” a wearable augmented-reality system, displayed on the lenses of goggles and capable of creating an immersive 3-D environment. Cornell Cup USA, presented by Intel, is a college-level competition created so student teams can design and invent the newest innovative applications of embedded technology.

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