Points of Pride Newsletter: March 2013

Dean's Message

It is my pleasure to introduce myself as the new dean at the College of Engineering, where I arrive after spending my entire professional career, since 1978, at the University of Florida. This is an auspicious occasion, not only for me, but for the college itself, which has been without a permanent dean for nearly four years. I feel privileged to assume the deanship of such a wonderful college. Rather than go through the awkward exercise of describing my own background, I'll simply refer you to this link: Anderson Named New Dean at College of Engineering
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CAREER Research into Smart Buildings Can Make Them Cheaper and Greener
David Irwin of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been issued a five-year, $461,434 grant from the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The NSF grant will support Irwin's research for boosting energy efficiency in houses and buildings, which represent the largest segment of society's energy usage. The title of Irwin's project is "Model-based Energy Management for Sustainable Buildings."
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Brack Receives Distinguished Service Award
Business owner and philanthropist Robert B. Brack, a 1960 graduate of UMass Amherst in Civil Engineering, has been announced as the initial recipient of the newly established Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute (CRSI) Distinguished Service Award. According to the CRSI, the award was prompted by "Brack's career-long dedication to both the reinforced concrete industry and the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute." Among Brack's many contributions to his alma mater, he spearheaded the funding campaign for the new Robert B. Brack Structural Testing Facility. He was also the recent recipient of a UMass Amherst Distinguished Achievement Award.
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Roberts to Become Associate Dean of Graduate School
Professor Susan Roberts will assume the half-time position of associate dean of the Graduate School on July 1, according to John McCarthy, vice provost for Graduate Education and dean of the Graduate School. Roberts is a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering and director of the Institute for Cellular Engineering (ICE). In her role as ICE director, Roberts coordinates a National Science Foundation-sponsored Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, which provides funding and training to graduate students to prepare them for a range of careers in the emerging field of cellular engineering.
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Grosse Named Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Ian Grosse, the director of The Intelligent Modeling, Analysis, and Design Laboratory and a professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). According to ASME, "The Fellows Grade is the highest elected grade of membership within ASME, the attainment of which recognizes exceptional engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession."
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DPO Outreach Visits Revere Middle School
Over the winter break, two members of the Diversity Programs Office's outreach team of engineering students, Xuyen Mai and Gabriel Abreu, returned to their former school and staged a user-friendly engineering event for 15 middle-school children at the Rumney Marsh Academy in Revere, Massachusetts. "Our primary goal is to get kids interested in the field of engineering," said outreach leader Mai. "We do so by introducing them to what engineering is through our personal experience with the field and hands-on, age-appropriate engineering projects." The event was also covered by a local newspaper, the Lynn Daily Item: http://m.itemlive.com/articles/2013/01/14/news/news03.txt.
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Polizzi's FEAST Algorithm Included in Intel's Math Kernel Library
The FEAST algorithm proposed in 2009 by Eric Polizzi of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department – an algorithm that represents a radical departure from "textbook approaches" to solving the legendary eigenvalue problem – received a major endorsement in early February when it was integrated into the Intel® Math Kernel Library, one of the world's leading and most used mathematical libraries. Polizzi's FEAST algorithm is now featured as the Intel library's main eigenvalue solver, and it can be found under the name "MKL Extended EigenSolver."
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NSF CAREER Award Supports Pioneering UMass Research to Optimize Biofuel Production
A $400,000 grant from the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Program will support the pioneering research of Paul Dauenhauer in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dauenhauer's project will resolve the top challenge for converting sustainable biomass such as trees, grasses, and non-food plants into green gasoline and hundreds of key products in the chemical industry. The NSF funding will support Dauenhauer's groundbreaking research into his novel experimental technique known as "Pulsed-Film Pyrolysis."
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EWB Returns to Kenya for Eighth Engineering Trip
Jambo! In January, a team of seven students and one faculty member from the campus Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter spent two weeks in Kenya, the eighth trip since EWB's Namawanga project began in March of 2006, providing safe drinking water for several thousand rural Kenyans. The team included five students from UMass Amherst (Tim Light, Jake Palatine, Deidre Ericson, Gene Rush, Alex Light) and two students from Smith College (Natalie Gill, Lindsay Duran), along with faculty and professional mentor John Tobiason, a professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. The focus of the trip was largely to monitor past projects and assess future projects, in addition to replacing parts of the hand pump installed on the EWB-UMass-funded borehole that was drilled in 2009.
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Milestone Paper Hits Coveted 1,000-citation Mark
The Web of Science notes that a landmark paper written by H. Henning Winter, the Distinguished University Professor of Chemical Engineering and director of the Laboratory for Experimental Rheology in the Chemical Engineering (ChE) Department, has reached the celebrated 1,000-citation mark. As ChE Department Head T.J. Lakis Mountziaris notes, "This is a remarkable achievement." Henning's milestone paper is entitled "Analysis of Linear Viscoelasticity of a Crosslinking Polymer at the Gel Point" and was published in 1986 in the Journal of Rheology. Collectively, Henning's papers have now been cited at least 8,581 times. The entire paper can be found here: http://rheology.tripod.com/z04.02.pdf.
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Company of Alum Takes Winner of Winners Competition
The New England Clean Energy Council Institute (NECEC Institute) has announced that Black Island Wind Turbines of Springfield, a startup company founded by alumnus Patrick Quinlan '82 of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, has been awarded $50,000 as part of the institute's Cleantech Innovations New England 2012 Winner of Winners competition. The award is meant to help clean-technology startups move closer to commercialization. Black Island is one of Quinlan's two recently established companies that have been doing very well in business plan and accelerator competitions lately. Both of Quinlan's startups are spinoffs of Celadon Innovation, founded by Quinlan to provide consulting services and renewable energy technology development.
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CASA Grant Promises to Save Lives and Property
The National Science Foundation (NSF), National Weather Service, and the City of Fort Worth have given the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), centered at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a two-year, $1.34-million grant designed to accelerate the application of CASA's revolutionary weather-tracking radar system, now being tested in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The CASA radars provide high-resolution, near-surface views of hazardous weather events such as tornadoes, thunderstorms, and flooding and allow emergency managers to broadcast faster, more accurate, more targeted storm warnings and forecasts to the public.
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Engineering from the Earth to the Moon
What do the U.S. Air Force C5A transport plane, bomb shelters, Chicago's 100-story Hancock Building, moon dust, the UMass Geotechnical Engineering Program, and the entire network of our country's railroad beds all have in common? The answer is Ernest Selig. Selig, an emeritus professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, has worked on projects involving all the above, and he's also done much, much more.
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Gao Selected as ACM Fellow
Professor Lixin Gao of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been selected as a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), an honor achieved by only one percent of that organization. She was cited by the ACM "for contributions to network protocols and internet routing." Gao now becomes the first faculty member in the ECE department to earn selection as a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the ACM.
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Collura Awarded Prestigious S.S. Steinberg Award
On January 14, Professor John Collura of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the director at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Transportation Center was awarded the American Road & Transportation Builders Association's (ARTBA) prestigious "S.S. Steinberg Award." Collura was honored during the ARTBA's annual Research & Education Division (RED) meeting in Washington, D.C. Named after the founding president of the ARTBA's RED, the award recognizes individuals who make remarkable contributions to transportation education.
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NSF CAREER Award Supports Research in Emerging Nanodevice to Go Beyond Moore's Law
Qiangfei Xia of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been issued a five-year, $400,000 grant from the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program to develop emerging nanoelectronic devices. The title of his project is "CAREER: Scaling of Memristive Nanodevices and Arrays." Xia's NSF research addresses the biggest obstacle for the continued operation of Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who first predicted the trend in his 1965 paper.
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