|
|
College of Engineering Highlights |
Summer 2009
- A total of 112 students were eligible to graduate at the end of the summer semester: 49 bachelor’s, 100 master’s and 13 doctorates.
- Dean of Engineering Dr. Bill Carroll announced the selection of Professor Jonathan Bredow to lead the Electrical Engineering Department. Dr. Bredow had served as interim chair of the department since August 2008.
- Professor Wen Chan of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department received notification that he will be promoted to the rank of Fellow of the American Society for Composites (ASC), the premier society for composite research, practice and education worldwide. An official presentation will be made at the ASC’s 24th Annual Technical Conference on September 16. Professor Chan is also a Fellow of the ASME and an Associate Fellow of the AIAA.
- An interdisciplinary team led by Senior Associate Dean of Engineering Dr. Lynn Peterson developed a program to boost retention rates for first- and second-year STEM students. The program, funded by a $1,995,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, is expected to achieve a 15 percent retention gain for engineering and science majors over the five-year exploratory effort. Dr. James Epperson (mathematics), Dr. Ramon Lopez (physics) and Dr. Kevin Schug (chemistry), all of the College of Science, and Dr. Carter Tiernan, assistant dean of engineering for student affairs, are participating in the effort, as are 14 faculty members in the Colleges of Engineering and Science.
- The National Science Foundation awarded a five-year, $430,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant to Dr. Haiying Huang in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. The grant will allow Dr. Huang to further her development of a revolutionary sensor concept utilizing engineered skins to monitor the condition of structures as varied as airplanes and bridges. CAREER grants are the NSF’s most prestigious awards, given to support early career-development activities by scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.
- Bioengineering Assistant Professor Digant Dave secured two grants totaling almost $614,000 from the National Institutes of Health to complete his development of a novel Multifunctional, Image Guided Surgical (MIGS) platform. The image-guided surgical instrument device will enable surgeons to see tissue more clearly and make incisions with unprecedented precision and accuracy.
- An inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional team led by Bioengineering Assistant Professor Jian Yang developed novel biodegradable fluorescent biomaterials useful for cancer therapy, cellular imaging, biosensing, immunology, drug delivery and tissue engineering. Their discovery was reported in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Dr. Yang later received a two-year, $406,218 grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and BioEngineering to continue studies of his biodegradable photoluminescent polymers.
- Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Dr. Yaowu Hao received a three-year, $310,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to further his development of his proposed sample separation process using a magnetic field instead of the widely-used electrophoresis process that employs an electric field. The process involves the introduction of magnetic nanodisks that attract the various organic molecules in the sample.
- Computer Science and Engineering Drs. Sharma Chakravarthy and Mohan Kumar secured a one-year, $267,000 grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop mechanisms to organize data from several sources into useful information and to efficiently distribute and retrieve information.
- Electrical Engineering Professor Frank Lewis, head of the Advanced Controls and Sensors Group located in the Automation & Robotics Research Institute, is leading a three-year, $250,000 project funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, hoping to create a framework that combines interdisciplinary ideas from control theory and communications and results in a global consensus of trust among a network of individual systems.
- Civil Engineering Assistant Professor Melanie Sattler is coordinating the “Engineering Sustainable Engineers” program, a concerted effort to improve students’ knowledge of and competency in addressing sustainability issues in engineering design and problem solving. The effort is being underwritten by a $150,000 grant by the National Science Foundation. Her collaborators include Drs. Yvette Weatherton and Stephen Mattingly from Civil Engineering, Kambiz Alavi from Electrical Engineering, and Victoria Chen and Jamie Rogers from Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering.
- Three projects conducted by researchers in the Colleges of Engineering and Science received product development funding through the University of Texas System’s Texas Ignition Fund (TIF).
- Dr. Hanli Liu, a professor of bioengineering, received a grant for her “Optically-guided Needle Biopsy System” to improve prostate cancer diagnosis by creating a low-cost, real-time system to guide physicians during needle biopsies.
- Dr. Brian Dennis, an assistant professor of mechanical & aerospace engineering, and Dr. John Priest, a professor of industrial & manufacturing systems engineering, will use their grant to adapt their microreactor process, which currently converts assorted plant life oils into biodiesel fuel and lignite coal into crude oil, to use natural gas to create synthetic transportation fuels such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
- Dr. Digant Dave’, an assistant professor of bioengineering, and Dr. Richard Timmons, a professor of chemistry, are collaborating to develop a biomolecular interaction analysis platform for the screening and molecular profiling of large and small biomolecules.
- Dragos-Stefan Dancila, Ph.D., formerly with the Georgia Institute of Technology, joined the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering as an associate professor. Dr. Dancila’s research is concentrated in the areas of composite and smart materials and structures, inflatable space structures, piezoelectrics, rotorcraft and manned/unmanned airship technologies. He holds three US patents and has applied for another.
- Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Professor Dereje Agonafer received the 2009 American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ InterPACK Achievement Award, presented July 22rd during the organization’s international conference. The award honors individuals who have demonstrated excellence and received international recognition in the area of research and development related to electronic packaging as well as service to the technical community at large.
- Electrical Engineering Drs. Frank Lewis and Dan Popa received a U.S. Patent for their “Systems and Methods for Improved Control of Micro-electrical-mechanical Systems (MEMS) Electrostatic Actuator.”
- The American Society of Civil Engineers has announced the selection of Dr. Mohammad Najafi, assistant professor of civil engineering, as the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice.
- The Batteryless Endoluminal Sensing Telemeter created by Electrical Engineering Professor J.-C. Chiao and associates at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas received an award presented by Well-Tech, an Italian organization dedicated to the research and design of innovative and sustainable systems and technologies and their transfer to the Italian industrial system.
- Computer Science & Engineering Professor Sajal Das, director of the Center for Research in Wireless Mobility and Networking and a program director for the National Science Foundation, was presented with an IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award recognizing his outstanding and innovative contributions to the fields of computer and information science and engineering or computer technology.
- Electrical Engineering Professor K. R. Rao delivered several invited talks during the summer, including one on image processing held July 24-25 at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
- For the second year running, Computer Science & Engineering master’s student Chris McMurrough has won a USAF Summer Fellowship to work with the Siva Banda's Center of Excellence in Control Science at Wright Patterson AFB. McMurrough also won a Multicore Graphical Design Achievement Award at the 2009 National Instruments Week competition for his paper “Real-Time MAV Flight Control System Testbed.”
- Computer Science & Engineering master’s student Matt Middleton was invited to visit this summer the Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in Warren, MI.
|
|
