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Dean's Message
Over the last two and a half years, you have heard me frequently comment about the importance of making everyone aware of the excellence that exists in the College of Engineering (e.g., ACE campaign). A key component of such a campaign is to have more accurate and complete knowledge of key college characteristics and accomplishments. If we were facing a technical problem where our interest was to monitor an important variable such as a pressure, temperature, current, or velocity, our engineering instincts would compel us to provide a plot showing the value of this variable as a function of time.
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Intern Works on Fukushima Nuclear Incident
Imagine being a summer intern and being thrust into the cleanup planning for one of the three most famous nuclear events in history. That's what happened last summer, when senior mechanical engineering major Richard Lau was doing an internship for The Shaw Group office in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and suddenly found himself on a team working on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The job of his team was to design vessels for filtering out cesium, one of the byproducts of nuclear fission, in the radioactive cooling water at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, following the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.
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Impact of Hluchyj Fellowship Will Be Felt for Decades
When UMass Amherst alumni Mike and Terry Hluchyj created a fellowship in 2008 to support one graduate student per year from the College of Engineering and one from the School of Nursing, Terry Hluchyj summarized their motivation this way: "Quality healthcare ranks among the most important issues our society faces, and the collaborative research initiatives between nursing and engineering at UMass Amherst can make a real difference." Indeed, during the ensuing four years, the Hluchyj Graduate Fellowship has done just that. The research carried out by Hluchyj Fellows has already generated significant healthcare reforms, beneficial applications, important grants, prestigious journal papers, and key presentations, and it is beginning to earn fellows esteemed professional positions.
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ELITE Program Trains Today's MIE Students to Become Tomorrow's Corporate Leaders
"According to a new study of 36 million Facebook profiles, 3,337 company founders and CEOs across all industries hold an advanced degree in engineering, while 1,016 have advanced business degrees." This news was reported in an article entitled "Move over MBAs: Here Come the Engineers" in the January 31 edition of the Wall Street Journal. That's the kind of reality that motivated the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department to add a powerful leadership component to its curriculum, the brand new Engineering Leadership, Innovation, Teaching, and Entrepreneurship (ELITE) Program. The ELITE Program will equip some of the department's best and brightest students with the leadership, entrepreneurial, and communications skills to expand the pool of engineers who become CEOs, founding officers, supervisors, directors, managers, and teachers.
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CEE Alum Receives Legends of the Industry Award
James E. Walsh, who earned his Doctorate in Civil Engineering from the college in 1977, was recently selected by the Home Builders Association of Massachusetts (HBAM) to receive its Legends of the Industry Award. Dr. Walsh is a partner at Valley Planning, Inc., and the owner of WLC Consultants, Inc. This prestigious award is presented to a member or retired member of the association who has significantly contributed to the progress of both the association and building industry during the course of his or her career. The award is presented to one member from each of the local associations across the state.
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Huber's Research Team Makes International Headlines
The new breakthrough by George Huber and his research team in the Chemical Engineering Department is making headlines around the world. Huber's team, using a catalytic fast pyrolysis process that transforms renewable non-food biomass into petrochemicals, has developed a new catalyst that boosts the yield for five key "building blocks of the chemical industry" by 40 percent compared to previous methods. So far the news has been picked up by Science Daily, Chemistry World, Biofuels Digest, Industrysearch.com, Agro Times, Innovations Report, Physorg.com, Lab Manager magazine, Thecuttingedgenews.com, Biofuelsjournal.com, E! Science News, Green Car Congress, ScienceBlog.com, Processingmagazine.com, Plastemart.com, Automotive World, Webnewswire.com, Agra-new.com, Biofuels Digest and Space Mart.
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Marquard Granted College's 24th NSF CAREER Award
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has notified Dr. Jenna Marquard of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department that she has been awarded a $400,000 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant for a research project entitled "Computational Approaches to Model Physicians' and Patients' Interactions with Health Information Technology." Specifically, her project will focus on computerized health information technology designed to improve the health, clinical care, and cost of management for diabetics and patients with high blood pressure. Her research will upgrade the technology by modeling how doctors and patients interact with these information systems and then engineering more user-friendly computer interfaces for them.
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Dean Djaferis Wins IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award
On December 14, College of Engineering Dean Ted Djaferis was recognized with a 2011 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Control Systems Society (CSS) Distinguished Member Award. This was one of two Distinguished Member Awards given in 2011 and one of only 86 that have been given out since the formation of CSS in 1954. The award was presented during the CSS Awards Ceremony at the 2011 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, held in conjunction with the 2011 European Control Conference in Orlando, Florida.
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Wolf Greenfield Establishes David Wolf Prize for Innovation Challenge
The University of Massachusetts Amherst and the intellectual property law firm of Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C. has announced the establishment of the David Wolf Prize as a new award in support of the UMass Innovation Challenge business plan competition. Wolf Greenfield was a founding sponsor of the competition and continues as a platinum sponsor. The David Wolf Prize will be a cash prize of $5,000 awarded on a competitive basis each spring to the team of innovators who demonstrate the greatest potential in the UMass Innovation Challenge. The prize honors UMass Amherst alumnus David Wolf (pictured), who is entering his sixth decade as an intellectual property lawyer with the firm his father, Ezekiel Wolf, founded in 1927.
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Green Latrine Purifies Human Waste and Turns It into Electricity
Environmental Engineering Professor Caitlyn Butler from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has designed and developed a green pit latrine that can purify domestic waste for a small village of subsistence farmers in Africa, while also churning it into healthy compost for their fields, and turning it into enough carbon-neutral electricity to provide some lighting in the village. The multipurpose new invention is called a Microbial Fuel Cell Pit Latrine. Dr. Butler will travel to Ghana this May to install a pilot latrine in one village. But her long-term goal is the deployment of her inexpensive privies throughout the developing world.
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Xia's Art in Nanoengineering Exhibit Opening at Smith
Professor Qiangfei Xia of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department unveiled his “Art in Nanoengineering” exhibition during an opening on February 16 at the Smith College Campus Center. Professor Xia gave a slide presentation from 6:00 until 6:25 p.m., followed by a reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Nolen Art Lounge, where the art exhibition was held. Ten fantastic pictures that were totally unexpected from his previous research were on display. The purpose of the exhibition was to connect nanoengineering and art, while disproving two of the primary clichés that the two fields hold about each other: Engineering is boring, and art is stupid.
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Dauenhauer's Discovery Covered Widely in Media
The breakthrough reported by Paul Dauenhauer of the Chemical Engineering Department in the January 2012 issue of the journal Energy & Environmental Science and later highlighted in Nature Chemistry has been covered in many scientific websites and magazines, including Ethanol Producer Magazine, Science Daily, Physorg.com, Bio-Medicine, Science Codex, Biofuels Digest, Biofuels-News.com, Bioscience Technology, R&D magazine, Bioenergy News, Web Newswire, Checkbiotech.org, esciencenews.com, Iowa Ag Connection, and The Cutting Edge. Dauenhauer's research team has discovered a small molecule that behaves the same as cellulose when it is converted to biofuel. Studying this "mini-cellulose" molecule reveals for the first time the chemical reactions that take place in wood and prairie grasses during high-temperature conversion to biofuel.
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Sneakers 4 Success Inspires City Kids to Aim High
A feature story in the January 3 Springfield Republican looked at the Sneakers 4 Success program started by mechanical engineering undergrad Samuel Del Pilar at the Renaissance School in Springfield to teach urban children about real-world business through what he calls "sneaker culture." Del Pilar developed Sneakers 4 Success as an educational program that teaches city students real-life marketing, design, and business skills through their affinity for basketball sneakers. Sneakers 4 Success recently won $1,750 in the Executive Summary & Elevator Pitch phase of the University of Massachusetts Innovation Challenge.
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