College of Engineering Highlights

Spring 2007

• Three hundred forty one students received degrees this spring – 162 bachelors, 142 masters and 37 Ph.D.s. Of special note was Satyamangalan Satyamurti, 72, who received a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering. Alumnus R. Byron Pipes (Ph.D., ME, '72) delivered the Charge to Graduates. Over a long and distinguished career in academia, he has served as director of the Center for Composite Materials, dean of the College of Engineering, and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Delaware, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a distinguished visiting scholar at the College of William and Mary. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Engineering Sciences of Sweden.

• Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer, the fourth private explorer to visit space and the first space explorer of Iranian descent, was the featured speaker here during National Engineers Week. Her presentation, featuring videos of her activities aboard the International Space Station, achieved a standing-room-only audience in the Rosebud Theatre.

• Recruiters from 45 local and national companies participated in the Career Day activities during Engineers Week.

• Several awards were presented at the college's annual awards banquet, also in conjunction with Engineers Week: Larry J. Hornbeck, a TI Fellow at Texas Instruments who developed the digital micromirror device that led to DLP projectors and large screen TVs, was inducted into the college's Hall of Achievement; Dr. Roger Goolsby, who holds joint appointments in Materials Science & Engineering and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, received the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Excellence in Teaching Award; Dr. Jean Gao of the Computer Science & Engineering Department received the Young Faculty Award; Dr. Choong-Un Kim of the Materials Science & Engineering Department received the Excellence in Research Award; Sherri Warwick, assistant to the chair of the Computer Science & Engineering Department, received the Fay Van Dam Outstanding Staff Award.

• Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Professor Wen Chan was named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In selecting Dr. Chan, the ASME noted his demonstrated leadership roles in curriculum development, teaching and research; his established international reputation and publication record in teaching and research; and his performance as an outstanding teacher as documented by students and colleagues.

• Mechanical Engineering Professor Bob Woods was elected to the University of Texas at Arlington's Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

• Professor of Electrical Engineering and director of the Energy Systems Research Center Wei-Jen Lee received the University of Texas at Arlington's Outstanding Research Achievement Award.

• The National Academia Advising Association has presented Industrial Engineering Associate Professor Sheik Imrhan with its Outstanding New Advisor Certificate of Merit, recognizing his demonstrated qualities associated with outstanding academic advising of students for a period of three or fewer years. Dr. Imrhan's award was in the Faculty Advising category, saluting i ndividuals whose primary responsibility is teaching and who spend a portion of their time providing academic advising services to students.

• The Office of Naval Research awarded a 12-month, $800,000 grant to researchers at the Automation & Robotics Research Institute to investigate methods leading to the design and manufacture of sensor arrays for health monitoring of rocket motors and other equipment, and packaging microelectromechanical arrays on canards and fins for the steering of projectiles. Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Dan Popa is the principal investigator on the project.

• The National Institutes of Health awarded a three-year, $211,000 grant to a team of biomedical engineers led by Assistant Professor Kytai T. Nguyen to develop methods to reduce unwanted side effects in implanted devices.

• Three departments in the college – CSE, IE and MAE - received a $364,000 grant from the Texas Workforce Commission to develop programs intended to meet the critical workforce needs to Texas' of aerospace and defense industries.

• The Materials Science & Engineering Department and the Automation & Robotics Research Institute conducted their second national workshop on piezoelectric energy harvesting. More than 100 leading researchers in energy harvesting attended the January event.

• The Office of Naval Research has selected Computer Science & Engineering Assistant Professor Gergely Zaruba to participate in its p restigious Summer Faculty Fellowship Program. Dr. Zaruba will conduct research at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

• Sally Hoelke, director of the College of Engineering's Counseling & Advising Center, received a Kalpana Chawla S.T.A.R. (Service, Teaching, Advising, Role Modeling) Award presented by the university's Student Success Programs.

• The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department will see the departure to two long-time professors soon. Drs. Syed Qasim and Max Spindler have chosen to retire after many years of commendable service to the university. Dr. Syed Qasim, P.E., joined the college in 1973. He will retire at the end of May. Dr. Max Spindler, P.E., came to the college in 1970. He was named the 2007 Engineer of the Year by the Mid Cities/DFW Chapter of the Texas Society of Professional Engineers. He will retire at the end of August.

• The college hosted its second Southwest Championship Tournament of the Vex Challenge, part of the world's leading robotics competition, in February. About 120 students and their coaches from the D/FW area, Greenville, Laredo and The Woodlands in Texas, plus Newton, Kansas; Mountain Home, Arkansas; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida participated.

• Generous groups and individuals have established four new endowed scholarship funds to benefit engineering students. Over the past year, seven funds have been established for professorships and scholarships. The values of the professorships are in the $100,000 range; the scholarships from $10,000 to $30,000.

• Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student Ping Zhang received a scholarship from SPIE, the international society advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light. There were only 136 awards presented globally, which recognize individuals with potential for long-range contribution to optics and photonics, or a related discipline.

• Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering doctoral student M. D. Sarder received a prestigious Fellowship from Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society. Tau Beta Pi fellowships are highly valued because of the quality of candidates for consideration; only 37 fellowships were awarded from 208 applicants for the 2007-2008 academic year. Sarder received the only fellowship presented to a student in Texas.

• A team of electrical engineering students is one of five teams selected to compete in the finals of the International Future Energy Challenge conducted by the IEEE Power Electronics Society and the Power Supply Manufacturers Association. The UT Arlington team is the only U.S. team among the five finalists. Teams from Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Germany, Korea, Sri Lanka and the U.S. entered in the competition. The team will compete for the first prize in August.

• Cyril Varghese, a senior biomedical engineering/biology student, was selected from a large pool of superior-performance applicants to participate in the Biomedical Engineering Summer Internship Program conducted by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, a division of the National Institutes of Health. This 10-week program allows rising senior biomedical engineering students to participate in cutting-edge biomedical research projects in NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.

• Asad Khan (BSEE, summa cum laude,'01), the design verification lead engineer for Texas Instruments' Digital Interface Business Unit, and two colleagues recently designed a cutting- edge functional verification environment. Their PCI Express Switch ASIC verification methodology allowed the three engineers to rapidly verify a design with over 3 million gates, including four physical layers.