In its first ever appearance in the national finals of the Chem-E-Car Competition, sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), our UMass Amherst team finished a very credible 10th in a field of 34. The team of chemical engineering students pulled off the feat with a shoebox-sized vehicle whimsically called the “Green Rock Eating Monster” during the competition at the 2009 AIChE National Student Conference, November 6 through 9, at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville.
The Chem-E-Car Competition requires each team to build a self-propelled model car that, driven by a chemical reaction alone, travels a pre-set distance while carrying a pre-determined weight. Our students also won an award for their poster presentation.
The UMass Amherst team was composed of chemical engineering students Niva Ran, Jonathan Rayla, Sean Paradiso, Gregory Su, Ben Novello, and Elli Schmidt, and the team’s faculty advisor was Professor W. Curtis Conner form the Chemical Engineering Department.
As the AIChE website explains: "Team members design and construct a chemically powered vehicle within certain size constraints. This vehicle must also be designed to carry a specified cargo. The teams will be told at the time of the competition the distance that the car must travel and the specified cargo that the vehicle will carry. Entries deemed unsafe by the judges will be disqualified. The winner will be determined by a combined score, for traveling the correct distance, and for creativity. Teams compete at the regional conferences, and the winners of each regional conference will compete at the national conference." (November 2009)
Wiley-Blackwell Publishes Second Edition of "Wind Energy Explained"
The Wiley-Blackwell publishing house has just issued the second edition of the bestselling text book, “Wind Energy Explained: Theory, Design and Application,” by James. F. Manwell and Jon G. McGowan of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department and former MIE Senior Research Fellow Anthony. L. Rogers.
“We are very excited about this!” says Manwell. “The second edition is a substantial expansion and upgrade over the first edition, and has taken a long time to complete.”
This second edition includes up-to-date data, diagrams, illustrations, and thorough new material on: the fundamentals of wind turbine aerodynamics; wind turbine testing and modeling; wind turbine design standards; offshore wind energy; and special purpose applications, such as energy storage and fuel production.
Fifty additional homework problems and a new appendix on data processing make the new edition perfect for engineering students. The book offers a complete examination of one of the most promising sources of renewable energy and is a great introduction to this cross-disciplinary field for practicing engineers.
Among many other positive reviews of the first edition, IEEE Power & EnergyMagazine noted that it "provides a wealth of information and is an excellent reference book for people interested in the subject of wind energy." The International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education said that it "deserves a place in the library of every university and college where renewable energy is taught." Choice called it "a very comprehensive and well-organized treatment of the current status of wind power." (November 2009)
Salthouse to Give First Gupta Lecture on November 19
Chistopher Salthouse, the new Dev and Linda Gupta Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will deliver the first Gupta Lecture at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 19, in the Massachusetts Room of the Mullins Center on campus. A reception will follow the talk at approximately 5:00 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. The title of the lecture is “How to Implant a Fluorescence Microscope.”
The talk will explain the key medical role played by fluorescence microscopy and will describe how implantable fluorescence microscopes could expand that role even more. Dr. Salthouse will also explain how the integrated circuits that have revolutionized computation will solve the biomedical problems related to developing implantable fluorescence microscopes.
Dr. Salthouse received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his time at MIT, he developed integrated circuits for cochlear implants, devices that give hearing to the deaf. After finishing his Ph.D., Salthouse moved to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he worked as a research fellow for three years while developing novel fluorescence imaging instruments. In August of 2009, he joined the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UMass Amherst, where he has founded the Biomedical Electronics Laboratory.
The Dev and Linda Gupta Professorship is an endowment funded through the generosity of Dev and Linda Gupta that supports a new faculty member who brings fresh ideas and areas of inquiry to the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. The support is specifically intended to encourage risk-taking and entrepreneurial pursuits.
Dev Gupta, who earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UMass Amherst in 1977, is an adjunct professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He has built a reputation as an expert in broadband and network access infrastructure technology. His company, NewLANS, is working on the development of high speed wireless data transmission. Previously he founded Narad Networks, a privately held provider of broadband IP infrastructure services. (November 2009)
Martin Scholarship Supports Chemical Engineering Students
Lawrence Martin, a 1967 graduate of the college with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, and his wife Deborah Martin have committed to a five-year pledge, providing two annual $1250 scholarships to students in the Chemical Engineering Department. The fund is called the “Lawrence S. and Deborah A. Martin Scholarship Fund.” Toward that end, the Martins will donate $2800 per year to the college for the next five years. Twenty-five years ago, Mr. Martin started a company called Cycles Inc, a world-class custom injection molder of precision plastic components with plants in Sterling, Massachusetts, and Tijuana, Mexico. Martin sold the company three years ago and is now retired.
The Martin Scholarship is especially timely and compelling because the College of Engineering is seeing increasingly urgent financial need in its student body due to rising costs and challenged family circumstances.
More than 59 percent of our engineering students qualify for need-based aid. The average loan debt upon graduation is more than $21,500. The number of applications for scholarship assistance from the college’s private donor funded scholarship program has doubled from last year, rising to almost 400 students now. Half our students have a gap between their college expenses and the amount of their financial aid, which is often referred to as unmet need. The average unmet need is $4,452.
To help ease monetary pressure, the College of Engineering has made financial support for students an immediate priority. In light of the current economic downturn, we especially need current philanthropic gifts to ensure that scholarships cover our commitment to students in the near term. Investing in our students today is an investment in all of our futures. (November 2009)
Raytheon Donates $13,000 to Diversity Programs
The Diversity Programs Office (DPO) has received a $13,000 check from the Raytheon Company in support of the office’s tutoring program, its annual Women in Engineering Career Day, and the campus chapters of three engineering societies that act on behalf of underrepresented students in the profession. Two Raytheon employees who are alumnae of the college helped secure the donation: Ellen Ferraro, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems deputy director of system validation, test, and analysis; and Robert Smith, the Integrated Defense Systems engineering director for strategic development, Raytheon Six Sigma, and processes. Both employees are also members of the College of Engineering Advisory Board and its Diversity Committee.
The Raytheon donation designates $5,000 toward the DPO tutoring program, $5,000 toward Career Day, and $1,000 each toward the campus chapters of the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers.
“This donation from Raytheon is especially timely and welcome,” says Director of Diversity Programs Shelly Perdomo, “because we have significantly expanded our tutoring program, and because our popular Career Day is very expensive.”
The three engineering societies will use the Raytheon support for sending their members to annual conferences and for other needs.
Throughout its more than 80-year history, Raytheon Company has been a leader in developing defense technologies and in converting those technologies for use in commercial markets. From its early days as a maker of radio tubes, its adaptation of World War II radar technology to invent microwave cooking, and its development of the first guided missile, Raytheon has successfully built upon its pioneering tradition to become a global technology leader. (November 2009)
CASA Makes Big Splash with Weather Research
The Engineering Research Center for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) is making big waves in the short-wavelength world and beyond. An article co-authored by several CASA researchers, led by CASA Director David McLaughlin and entitled “Short-Wavelength Technology and the Potential for Distributed Networks of Small Radar Systems,” will be the cover story in the influential Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) in December, 2009. CASA was also featured prominently in a recent article about weather research in the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education, the number one source of news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty members and administrators. The newspaper is subscribed to by more than 70,000 academics and has a total readership of 350,000.
Founded in 1919, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) has a membership of more than 14,000 professionals, professors, students, and weather enthusiasts. AMS publishes nine atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic journals — in print and online — sponsors more than 12 conferences annually, and offers numerous programs and services.
Here is an excerpt about CASA from the Chronicle of Higher Education article.
“The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is leading the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, a consortium of universities and industry and government bodies whose ambitious project of networked Doppler radar is delving into complex "mesoscale" phenomena like cloud systems and front formation.
Mesoscale refers to midrange weather systems, between large "synoptic" weather systems and microclimate phenomena such as storms. In one mesoscale project, researchers are figuring out how a type of radar used on naval ships for protection from missiles, the phased-array radar, can help them to detect such events as sharp wind shifts that predict storms.
In another, Vortex2, participants are deploying armadas of cutting-edge detectors to surround tornadoes and the supercell thunderstorms that form them, to gain a far more complete picture of the phenomena than is currently available.” (November 2009)
Smith Part of "Best Paper" Team
James MacGregor Smith of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department was part of a research team that just won this year’s “Best Paper Award,” as chosen by the Computational Optimization and Applications (COAP) editorial board from the journal’s previous year’s (2008) articles. Smith shares the honor with co-authors Peter Hahn, Bum-Jin Kim, Monique Guignard-Spielberg, and Yi-Rong Zhu at the University of Pennsylvania for their paper "An algorithm for the generalized quadratic assignment problem," published in Volume 40, Issue 3, pages 351-372, of 2008. COAP is a peer reviewed journal that is committed to timely publication of research and tutorial papers on the analysis and development of computational algorithms and modeling technology for optimization. It examines algorithms either for general classes of optimization problems or for more specific applied problems, stochastic algorithms, as well as deterministic algorithms. (November 2009)
MIE Researchers Featured in Physics Today
The October 2009 Physics Today cover story looks at the work on superhydrophobic surfaces being done by several researchers in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department. As the story notes, “Researchers led by Jonathan Rothstein at the University of Massachusetts Amherst now offer a proof-of-principle demonstration of a new, passive option for reducing drag in a turbulent flow. They tailored the microscale structure of a hydrophobic material—polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), akin to the rubbery polymer used to caulk bathtubs—to create air pockets that allow the flow to “slip” (shear free) at the liquid–air interface. The greater the area covered by air pockets, the greater the overall reduction in shear stress—up to 50%, the researchers estimate.”
Besides Rothstein, the other MIE researches cited in the article were Blair Perot, R. J. Daniello, N. E. Waterhouse, J. Ou, and Michael Martell. Link to article.
Turbulent flows of a liquid along a wall, the article explains, experience frictional drag, a macroscopic phenomenon that strongly affects the efficiency, costs, and other parameters of countless engineering systems—from marine vessels to oil pipelines. The drag arises from shear stress, the rate per unit area of momentum transfer from the flow to the wall. To reduce the shear stress, engineers could add polymers to the flow, inject bubbles against the surface, or combine the two methods. But those approaches bear their own costs. (November 2009)
Breaking the Bottleneck in Hydrogen Storage
Hydrogen fuel, because its only byproduct is steam, should be the ultimate in green alternatives to fossil fuels, but it hasn’t delivered on its promise yet because of one enormous stumbling block, storage. Now a team of chemical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has developed a computational model which shows that carbon nanotubes may offer a surprising solution. Results are presented in the current issue of the journal, Applied Physics Letters.
“If this works as we expect, it’s perhaps no longer science fiction to hope for a briefcase-sized hydrogen battery to run a bus or car,” says UMass Amherst chemical engineering professor Dimitrios Maroudas. “Hydrogen storage has been a huge problem in the energy field for the past 10 years because no one has been able to demonstrate a truly viable storage medium.
“We’ve shown that it’s possible to achieve hydrogen storage capacity up to 8 weight percent using carbon nanotubes. This is an outstanding level, higher by 1 wt percent than the 2010 United States Department of Energy target for on-board hydrogen storage systems. The method we propose may lead to breaking the bottleneck.”
The UMass Amherst computational model strongly lends itself to verification in laboratory experiments, say Maroudas and colleagues, and it provides ample testable hypotheses for future experimental research.
“People had been losing faith, but I think our predictions show that hydrogen should be back on the table and in a most promising way,” he notes. "We come up with modeling predictions for technologically relevant problems every day, but this cute model is special.”
Specifically, Maroudas, his graduate student Andre Muniz, and their collaborator M. Meyyappan, chief scientist for exploration technology at the Center for Nanotechnology at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., show that proper arrangement of carbon nanotubes can overcome hydrogen transport limitations in nanotube bundles. It should also prevent ineffective and nonuniform hydrogenation, which is caused by nanotube swelling due to chemisorption of hydrogen atoms on the nanotube walls.
If one were to think of carbon nanotube bundles like a toothbrush, what Maroudas and colleagues recommend is that, to hold hydrogen atoms most efficiently, the brush arrangement should not be too dense. If the arrangement is too dense when the tubules swell, they’ll block efficient passage and diffusion of the hydrogen, Maroudas explains.
Following this advice should result in one hydrogen atom being able to chemisorb onto—form a chemical bond with—each carbon atom of the nanotubes, leading to 100 percent (atomically) storage capacity. This chemisorbed hydrogen can be easily released using heat.
Maroudas says, “We propose recipes that will be very easy for others to try, by which carbon nanotubes can be arranged to accomplish practically 100 percent storage atomically, which is nearly 8 percent by weight. You can’t get any greener than hydrogen as fuel, and if the experiments we envision lead to new technology that’s economically viable, that’s as good as it gets.”
This work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant and a Fulbright/CAPES scholarship to Muniz. (November 2009)
Swift to Receive Special Award from American Meteorological Society
Calvin Swift, an emeritus professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will receive the Special Award from the American Meteorological Society at its Awards Banquet, to be held on Wednesday, January 20, 2010, at 7:00 p.m. in Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center during the society’s 90th annual meeting. The citation will read, "for sustaining over 30 years an exceptional, interdisciplinary project, resulting in continuous operational monitoring of hurricane surface winds, improved hurricane intensity advisories, and saving countless lives."
Dr. Swift earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the College of William and Mary in 1969. Among other positions, he was an aerospace technologist and group leader at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, from 1962 to 1981. He was a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1981 until 2001, and has been an emeritus professor since then.
He is the originator of the concept of using the Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometer to remotely measure rain rate and ocean wind speed in hurricanes. He developed with students an L-Band Synthetic Aperture Microwave Radiometer to remotely measure soil moisture and ocean temperature. His research on the dielectric constant of sea water provided the technical basis for the development of the Aquarius Satellite to remotely measure ocean salinity.
Among other honors, Dr. Swift was elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1983. He also received the IEEE Centennial Award in 1984. In 1994, he received the Distinguished Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, and he was presented with the Distinguished Service Award from the IEEE Council on Oceanic Engineering in 1977.
The American Meteorological Society promotes the development and dissemination of information and education on the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences and the advancement of their professional applications. Founded in 1919, AMS has a membership of more than 14,000 professionals, professors, students, and weather enthusiasts. (October 2009)
Making a "Recipe" for Nanodiamonds
A four-person team of researchers led by Professor Dimitrios Maroudas of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has used atomic-scale computer modeling to analyze the formation of diamond nanocrystals, an important first step toward developing a “recipe” for creating nanodiamonds in the laboratory. Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, the researchers have explained for the first time how rolled-up sheets of carbon called “nanotubes” can convert to diamonds and turn a lab into a diamond factory.
Their computational studies, published on October 8 in Physical Review B (80, 144105), show that it is possible for carbon atoms from adjacent walls of multi-walled carbon nanotubes to bond to each other and form nanocrystals featuring the structures of the two known phases of diamond; namely, cubic and hexagonal diamond.
The work of the Maroudas team was also written about in the October 2 edition of Physical Review Focus, where it was stated that “While such nano-carat diamonds won’t appear at the jeweler's anytime soon, researchers think that their strength and hardness may make them useful components of nanoscale machines.”
As the Physical Review Focus story explained, natural diamonds are forged in the high temperatures and crushing pressures of the earth’s interior. But to produce man-made nanoscale diamond crystals without resorting to such extremes of temperature and pressure, “researchers have used their own tricks, including recipes involving carbon nanotubes.”
To picture a nanotube, imagine a one-atom-thick layer of graphite, the most stable configuration of pure carbon, rolled into a seamless cylinder. Then do the same thing with several sheets of graphite, as if rolling up several sheets of paper together. This is the kind of multiwalled nanotube the Maroudas team has been studying.
To investigate the formation of nanodiamonds, Maroudas and his colleagues used computer models to analyze the structures that can be generated from these rolled-up graphite sheets. The goal was to categorize the kinds of crystals that would result if chemical bonds could form between carbon atoms on adjacent sheets. Such chemical bonding can be induced as a result of chemical reactions between carbon atoms on the nanotube walls with hydrogen atoms that originate from a hydrogen plasma.
The researchers found that if two graphite sheets were perfectly aligned, the atoms would be arranged at just the right distances and angles to produce hexagonal diamonds. Offsetting the two sheets slightly would cause the carbon bonds to make cubic diamond crystals instead.
The alignment of these rolls determines the tube's "chirality," which can be different for each layer of a multiwalled tube. Controlling nanotube chirality is viewed as the “Holy Grail” of nanotube research, because it determines the nanotube properties, including mechanical and electronic properties. The work of the Maroudas team has demonstrated that nanodiamonds can form for the broadest range of nanotube chiralities and diameters; however, the difference between the chiralities of adjacent nanotubes determines the sizes of the resulting diamond nanocrystals.
Because of their remarkable mechanical and other properties, these tiny diamond crystals can be used for biomedical applications such as transport vehicles for delivering anti-cancer drugs to tumors, enhancing CAT and MRI imaging, and conducting gene therapy. Nanodiamonds can also be used for dozens of other applications, including hard protective coatings on contact lenses, ceramics, or ball bearings, as well as for many uses in nano-electronics.
The title of the Physical Review B article is, "Analysis of Diamond Nanocrystal Formation from Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes." It was co-authored by Maroudas, his Ph.D. students Andre R. Muniz and Tejinder Singh, and their collaborator, Professor Eray S. Aydil at the University of Minnesota.
In addition to being featured in Physical Review Focus, which chooses three-to-four articles published in Physical Review Letters and the five journals of the Physical Review series, the article was also selected for the October 19 issue of Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science & Technology, an edited compilation of links to articles from participating publishers (such as the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society), covering a focused area of frontier research. (October 2009)
Career Day Inspires Young Women to Become Engineers
On October 29th at 8:30 a.m., more than 250 female students, teachers, and guidance counselors from high schools representing more than 50 towns and cities throughout Massachusetts will gather in the Lincoln Campus Center Auditorium at UMass Amherst for the annual Women in Engineering Career Day Conference. The program is designed to be fun, entertaining, eye-opening, and instructive. The aim of this program is to excite, inspire, and encourage young women to pursue engineering as an academic track and career path. This year’s keynote address will be presented by College of Engineering alumna Gemma Baró Montes, who is a consulting engineer and environmental specialist with Tighe & Bond.
Ms. Baró-Montes received an M.S. degree from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UMass Amherst in 2007. She will speak on “The Global Connection” and discuss her involvement with Engineers Without Borders at 9:15 a.m.
Immediately after the keynote address, at 10:15 a.m., Thea Sahr, the star of the PBS TV Show "Design Squad"and the associate director of educational outreach at WGBH, will assist students with two entertaining exercises, devised to show them what engineers do. One exercise involves the "Kicking Machine," a device that kicks a ping-pong ball into a cup lying on its side 12 inches away. Building from this first exercise, students will proceed to construct an “Extreme Kicking Machine” in groups. UMass Amherst Engineering students will also be sharing their research projects with the high school students.
Representatives from Abbott Labs, the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Raytheon, the Shaw Group Inc., and Verizon will also bring interactive displays to Career Day. Among the pieces of equipment on display at past events of this kind were infrared cameras, radar systems, and space suits.
The towns and cities whose high schools will be represented at Career Day include Amherst, Northampton, Greenfield, Springfield, Holyoke, Pittsfield, Worcester, and Boston and its suburbs.
This year’s Women in Engineering Career Day Conference is sponsored by the College of Engineering, the Graduate School, and the Polymer Science and Engineering Department at UMass Amherst, by the Commonwealth Alliance for Informational Technology Education, by Abbott Labs, the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Raytheon, the Shaw Group Inc., and Verizon, and by the Collegiate Chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. (October 2009)
ECE Paper Wins Dasher Award
A paper based on the teaching innovations of Professor William J. Leonard, a former lecturer in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the 2009 College of Engineering Outstanding Teacher, has won the Benjamin J. Dasher Best Paper Award at the annual Frontiers in Education Conference, sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The winning paper was entitled “Mastering Circuit Analysis: An Innovative Approach to a Foundational Sequence,” co-authored by Leonard, ECE Department Head Christopher Hollot, and W. J. Gerace.
“This paper was based on Bill’s innovative pedagogue in UMass Amherst’s ECE introductory circuits courses,” explains Hollot.
As the paper explains: “The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has dramatically changed how Circuit Analysis is learned. Combining a traditional lecture/recitation format with secure, online tests, we have raised our expectations for students and improved student performance, while increasing the fraction of students who succeed, especially underrepresented minorities and women. We call the instructional approach ‘Mastery’ because students continue to work on a topic until they earn a perfect score on the corresponding test. Further, it shows great promise for transforming undergraduate education, especially those courses that provide foundational skills and prepare students for future learning.”
This year’s Frontiers in Education Conference theme was “Imagining and Engineering Future Computer Science, Engineering, and Technology (CSET) Education” and featured 81 sessions related to it. The conference was held in San Antonio, Texas. (October 2009)
Alumnus Inducted into Academy of Arts and Sciences
On October 10, College of Engineering alumnus Edwin Thomas, Department Head and Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was among the luminaries inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 229th class of new members. The program celebrated pioneering research and scholarship, artistic achievement, and exemplary service to society.
Thomas received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from UMass Amherst in 1969 and the Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1974. Later he was a faculty member at UMass Amherst and head of the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering. Thomas is a noted materials scientist and engineer, with specific expertise in polymer physics and engineering, phase transformations and microstructure, and electron microscopy and X-ray scattering.
Among other accomplishments, Thomas has made important contributions to understanding the structure and properties of block copolymers and to developing quantitative methods for characterizing the microstructure of polymeric materials. He has also developed both new experimental methods and theoretical models to guide valid interpretation of the vast range of microstructures in crystalline, liquid crystalline, and non-crystalline polymers.
Thomas has held several administrative positions at MIT. He is the founding director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and previously served as associate head for the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and as the director of the Program in Polymer Science and Technology. He came to MIT from UMass Amherst, where he founded and served as co-director of the Institute for Interface Science during his time in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering.
The 212 new Fellows and 19 Foreign Honorary Members of the Academy of Arts and Sciences are leaders in research, scholarship, business, the arts, and public affairs. They come from 28 states and 11 countries and range in age from 33 to 83. They represent universities, museums, national laboratories, research institutes, businesses, and foundations. This year’s group includes Nobel laureates and recipients of the Pulitzer and Pritzker prizes, MacArthur Fellowships, Academy, Grammy, and Tony awards.
Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. With headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the academy has 4,600 elected members from around the world. (October 2009)
New Scholarship Shows off Power of Matching Gifts
A new scholarship endowment aimed primarily at women in the Chemical Engineering Department demonstrates how generous matching-gift programs at many companies allow their employees to leverage their investment. Thanks to a three-to-one Educational Matching Gift Program at the ExxonMobil Corporation, alumnae Stephanie Raimondeau and Joseph Watson of Bethesda, Maryland, have created an approximately $50,000 scholarship fund for undergraduates in the Chemical Engineering Department. Stephanie Raimondeau graduated with a Ph.D. in 2002 from the department and is currently employed by ExxonMobil Corporation in Fairfax, Virginia. Joseph Watson received his M.S. in 2000 from the department and is currently employed by Eastern Research Group in Chantilly, Virginia.
“Gifts of all amounts for student support are so important to our students,” says Paula Sakey, the director of development for the College of Engineering. “However, it is thrilling when your gift can leverage such signicant funding from your employer. We are grateful to Dr. Raimondeau and Mr. Watson for making such a meaningful commitment to the College of Engineering’s chemical engineering students.”
The “Stephanie Raimondeau and Joseph Watson Scholarship in Chemical Engineering” will be awarded to a junior or senior student, with strong preference given to women. Additional consideration will be given based on financial need and merit, as documented by the College of Engineering. Dr. Raimondeau and Mr. Watson had been supporting a scholarship with an annual gift but decided to make the funding permanent by creating the endowment.
“We believe that math and science have been, and will continue to be, critical tools to face the world’s ongoing technical challenges,” say the donors. “We feel fortunate that we can be so generous to future generations of engineers by leveraging ExxonMobil’s strong support of math and science education.”
Last year, ExxonMobil and its employees, retirees, surviving spouses, and directors donated more than $35.2 million to 930 U.S. colleges and universities through the ExxonMobil’s 2008 Educational Matching Gift Program, started in 1962. (October 2009)
"Double Whammy" Zaps Cancer Tumors
Three Researchers have engineered a non-pathogenic kind of Salmonella bacteria that can use its own self-propulsion system to venture deep into tumors and manufacture a powerful anti-cancer drug. The team includes Neil Forbes of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Sabha Ganai and Richard Arenas from the Department of Surgery at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. In laboratory testing, the new therapy, when combined with radiation treatment, delivered what Forbes called a “double whammy” that swelled the 30-day survival rate of mice with breast cancer from 0 percent to 100 percent. An article about the landmark research has been accepted by the British Journal of Cancer.
The importance of the paper is that it describes laboratory testing on the first bacterial delivery system ever used to transport and manufacture the anti-cancer drug murine TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand, or TRAIL.
The article also shows that the researchers can regulate precisely when the bacteria begin producing TRAIL, a key factor known as “spatiotemporal control.” Forbes and his colleagues engineered Salmonella typhimurium with a genetic “switch” that responds to radiation. What this switch means for chemotherapy is that medics can wait until Salmonella have been introduced into a patient and have entrenched themselves in the cancer tumor before using radiation to trigger the production of TRAIL by the bacteria. Irradiation makes an excellent switch because it can penetrate human tissue like nothing else, it is available at most cancer centers, and at low doses is completely harmless. This control mechanism will dramatically reduce the bad side effects of any cancer drug by limiting its production only to the tumor site.
“It sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it?” says Forbes. “But Salmonella bacteria, in effect, are each little robots that can swim wherever they want. They have propellers in the form of flagella, they have sensors so they can tell where they’re going, and they’re also little chemical factories. So what we’re doing as engineers is controlling where they go, what chemical we want them to make, and when they make it.”
Using Salmonella to attack cancer tumors is a technique that has been tried with only moderate success since the sixties. But Forbes’ work with Salmonella is introducing a radical improvement called “targeted intra-tumoral therapeutic delivery,” or sending the bacteria into parts of the tumor that are currently beyond the reach of conventional cancer therapies.
As a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal noted shortly after Forbes received a million-dollar grant from the National Cancer Institute, his method involves “arming the toxin to burrow itself into tumors and zap cancer cells. His work, and others like it, highlights the intense search for treatments that target cancer cells without causing debilitating side effects such as weight and hair loss, excessive bleeding, and fatigue that are common with radiation and chemotherapy.”
Salmonella naturally accumulate in tumors because the bacteria have insatiable appetites, and tumors are an ideal source of food for them. Salmonella tend to collect in tumors with a thousand times the concentration they do in other organs, a characteristic that greatly reduces toxicity in non-cancerous tissues. Forbes has found a way to drive the Salmonella, which swim like sperm, into quiescent sections of tumors where chemotherapy is generally ineffective.
“Our system targets only tumors and almost completely cuts out the bad side effects in patients,” says Forbes. “It concentrates in the places where you want it. So our system potentially cuts down on morbidity, or bad side effects, at the same time as it boosts survival rates.”
Although the current study relied on repeat doses of radiation and TRAIL, as delivered by the Salmonella, Forbes plans to refine his method in coming months so that only one dose will do the trick.
“To reach that goal we’re still investigating different drugs, beyond TRAIL, to see what does the best job,” explains Forbes. “We might have to adapt the treatment to administer two drugs simultaneously, one delivered intravenously to the tumor via the bloodstream, and the other delivered via the Salmonella and produced by the bacteria within the tumor. My hope is that this double dose can actually kill the tumor.”
Forbes’ research, done in collaboration with the Pioneer Valley Life Sciences Institute and the Baystate Medical Center, is funded by the National Cancer Institute and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. (October 2009)
New Consortium Works on Taxol™ Production
Susan Roberts (Chemical Engineering), Elsbeth Walker (Biology), and Jennifer Normanly (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) have established a Taxol™ consortium, funded through the National Institutes of Health, that applies molecular biology approaches to characterizing and manipulating Taxus metabolism for production of the important anti-cancer agent paclitaxel (Taxol™).
Taxol™ was first extracted in the 1960s from the bark of the yew tree (Taxus brevifolia), considered by ancient Druids as their emblem for immortality and known as “the tree of life.” In the yew tree, Taxol® serves as a defense mechanism against insects and other invaders. In medicine, Taxol™ serves as one of the leading cancer treatments in the world, approved by the FDA to treat breast, ovarian, and lung cancers, as well as an AIDS-related cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma.
The long term goal of the consortium is to understand the gene networks that plant cells use to produce chemicals useful as pharmaceuticals.
With this knowledge, cost-effective and environmentally friendly plant cell culture processes can be established for production of large quantities of plant-derived drugs. Current emphasis is directed towards the identification and characterization of genes that play a role in controlling pacltiaxel synthesis. New technology has been developed to sort plant cells according to the amount of paclitaxel they accumulate, and differences in gene expression between sorted cell populations will be established. The ability to profile gene expression in a subpopulation of cells is a new approach that will identify genes for which expression is masked in a heterogeneous population of cells.
To complete this project, the group will establish new resources for gene discovery in Taxus. Currently, only a handful of Taxus sequences are publicly available. 20,000 ‘ESTs’ – genes that are expressed in cultures that produce paclitaxel – will be created to provide an extensive new resource for the plant biotechnology community. Identifying novel genes and regulators of paclitaxel accumulation, and secondary metabolism in general, will significantly advance commercial plant cell culture technology processes for supply of paclitaxel and other important plant-derived pharmaceuticals used to treat a variety of human ailments such as cancer and AIDS. Because production of paclitaxel in the U.S. and the world depends on plant cell culture technology, this research will directly impact future paclitaxel supply for both current and emerging applications. (October 2009)
Alum Appointed ASCE Region 1 Governor
Alumnus Shawn P. Kelley, Ph.D., an associate with GeoDesign Inc., has been named a Governor of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Region 1. Region 1 covers all of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico. Founded in 1852, ASCE represents more than 146,000 members of the civil engineering profession worldwide and is America's oldest national engineering society.
Dr. Kelley, a firm shareholder who works out of GeoDesign’s Windsor, Vermont, office, manages civil engineering projects related to geotechnical engineering. Kelley holds a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Kelley specializes in earth retention and slope stabilization projects, deep and shallow foundation design, geotechnical instrumentation, and in-situ soil testing. He also manages GeoDesign’s soil testing laboratory in the company’s Vermont office. He has served on the Board of the Directors for the Vermont Section of ASCE for several years, including a two-year term as president from 2007-2009. Kelley also serves on the ASCE national Web Advisory Task Committee.
Established in 1995, GeoDesign, with offices in Vermont, Connecticut, and New York, is a privately held engineering consulting firm that completes environmental investigation and remediation projects, geotechnical projects, and construction engineering services throughout the Northeast for private clients, industry, developers, contractors, and municipalities. (October 2009)
Celebrating the Hluchyjs
On Friday, October 2, a group of people involved intimately with the Hluchyj Fellowship program took advantage of the Skinner Hall dedication ceremonies to get together and celebrate the two donors, Dr. Michael Hluchyj (’76 B.S. Electrical Engineering) and Mrs. Theresa Hluchyj (B.S. School of Nursing).
The Hluchyjs are supporting annual stipends of $25,000 each for one graduate student in the College of Engineering and one graduate student in the School of Nursing. Present on October 2 to thank the Hluchyjs were Dean Theodore Djaferis from the College of Engineering, Dean Jean Swinney from the School of Nursing, faculty advisors from both the College of Engineering and School of Nursing, and the Hluchyj Fellows for this academic year and last.
Dr. and Mrs. Hluchyj, who live in Wellesley, Massachusetts, funded the fellowships with key healthcare issues in mind. “We are excited to be funding these new fellowships to support cross-disciplinary research in clinical healthcare,” said Theresa Hluchyj at the time. “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.”
“Fellows will work on research projects from both disciplines,” the fellowship stipulates, “seeking solutions to real problems in the clinical setting using engineering-based approaches.”
The two Hluchyj Fellows for the 2009-2010 academic year are He (Jack) Ze, an incoming doctoral student in electrical engineering from Hangzhou, China, and doctoral nursing student Shoshana Gladstone of Pelham, Massachusetts. Last year’s Hluchyj Fellows were industrial engineering doctoral student Yi You Mei and doctoral nursing student Kavita Radhakrishnan. (October 2009)
Abbott Presents $12,000 Check to College
Abbott Laboratories has renewed its financial contribution to six College of Engineering student organizations as part of its recruitment and funding initiative. On September 30, Abbott representatives visited the campus and presented a check of $12,000 to the student chapters of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineering, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, the Society of Women Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers, and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.
Abbott Laboratories is a global, broad-based healthcare company with more than 72,000 employees devoted to discovering new medicines, new technologies, and new ways to manage health. Its products span the continuum of care, from nutritional products and laboratory diagnostics, through medical devices and pharmaceutical therapies.
As the company states, “Throughout our 120-year-plus history, Abbott people have been driven by a constant goal: to advance medical science to help people live healthier lives.”
Among the people from the College of Engineering who accepted the check were Cheryl Brooks, the director of career planning and student development, Eduardo Manta from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, Laura Gangne representing the Society of Women Engineers, and Mmelichukwu Ifeobu from the National Society of Black Engineers. (October 2009)
Schlanger to Deliver Tang Lecture
On Thursday, October 8, Marvin O. Schlanger ('72 MS ChE), former president and chief executive officer of the ARCO Chemical Company, will deliver the 10th annual Tang Lecture, presented by the College of Engineering. The lecture will take place at 4:00 p.m. in Campus Center Room 1009 on the UMass Amherst campus. Mr. Schlanger’s theme will be, “Can You Read with the Lights Out? The Case for Energy Security.” A reception will take place after the talk at approximately 5:00 p.m.
As Mr. Schlanger will discuss in his talk, “Today the United States imports 60 percent of its oil. Much of this comes from state controlled entities which have their own national objectives. Energy demand from China and elsewhere is growing while US domestic production is declining. This dependence on imported energy represents a threat to US economic and national security.”
He observes that the solution is to reduce demand through conservation and increase supply of conventional and alternative energy. Renewable sources such as wind and solar are growing rapidly. Nevertheless, as he believes, conventional energy sources (oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) will remain important and must expand to meet the nation’s needs. Adequate technology exists today, but additional R&D is necessary to reduce the economic burden and facilitate the transition. Government has a key role to play.
“We are going to have to make trade-offs between competing special interests,” Mr. Schlanger explains. “This is primarily a question of our national will.”
Mr. Schlanger is principal in the firm of Cherry Hill Chemical Investments, LLC, which provides management services and capital to the chemical and allied industries. He also serves as director and vice chairman of the board of directors at Hexion Specialty Chemicals, Inc and chairman of the board of CEVA Group, PLC. From 2000 until the Hexion formation in May of 2005, Mr. Schlanger served as chairman and chief executive officer of Resolution Performance Products, LLC. From 2004 until 2005, Mr. Schlanger also served as chairman of Resolution Specialty Materials, LLC, which was also merged into Hexion..
From 1988 to 1998, Mr. Schlanger held various positions with ARCO, serving most recently as president and CEO. Mr. Schlanger served as the chairman of Covalence Specialty Materials Corp from February of 2006 to April of 2007. Mr. Schlanger also currently serves on the board of directors of UGI Corporation and UGI Utilities Inc., Momentive Performance Materials Inc., and AmeriGas Partners, LP and CEVA Group, plc.
The Shirley and Ting-wei Tang Endowment Lecture Series brings leaders of engineering-based companies to campus to interact with students and faculty and present a major talk. Shirley Tang is a retired academic advisor for the United Asia Learning Resource Center. Emeritus Professor Ting-wei Tang recently completed a remarkable and distinguished career of 38 years at UMass Amherst. An internationally recognized expert in numerical modeling of semiconductor devices, Professor Tang was elected as an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow in 1999. Last spring, he received the 2009 Distinguished Faculty Award from UMass Amherst. (October 2009)
Two Degrees Are Better Than One
An innovative, seven-year-old, dual-degree program between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mount Holyoke College is proving that two undergraduate degrees are much better than one. Eight Mount Holyoke students will soon parlay five years of undergraduate work into a topnotch liberal arts degree from that college and first-class professional degree from the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst. And all this for only four years of tuition.
When asked about this last aspect, one of the better deals in higher education, Tolulope Ogunbekun, a mechanical engineering major from Nigeria in the dual-degree program, responded in a decidedly all-American way. “Pretty awesome!” she exclaimed.
The five-year program allows students working toward a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics or science at Mount Holyoke to also earn a bachelor of science degree in chemical, industrial, mechanical, civil, electrical, or computer systems engineering from UMass. Through this program, students experience both the intimacy of a liberal arts college and the resources of a huge research university.
“Mt. Holyoke is a small school, you know, and everybody knows everybody there. It’s like home schooling,” joked Farhana Momin, a chemical engineering major from Bangladesh. “And I love that part. But when I got a chance to come to UMass, I received the best of both worlds.”
The dual-degree students agreed that at Mt. Holyoke they had a gained an incredible background in science. But they also appreciated what Ogunbekun called “the problem-solving, action-pack education” at the College of Engineering. “It was very nice for me to come to UMass and experience a real-life engineering atmosphere.”
“When we come here, we apply things,” added Moureen Kemei, an electrical engineering major from Kenya. “We see the application of all this knowledge. That’s really eye-opening.”
As part of the dual-degree program, a Mount Holyoke student normally commits to residence at UMass in her junior year. She returns to Mount Holyoke for her senior year and graduates with her class upon completion of all the college’s academic requirements. Then she then spends a fifth year at UMass completing the requirements for her B.S. in one of the engineering majors.
Most of the dual-degree students also do engineering-related internships as part of their education.
“One of my goals right now is to go back home and do river restoration programs,” explained Jacinta Edebeli, a civil engineering major from Nigeria. "So this last summer I worked with the Nature Conservancy on a ‘Flood Plain Forest’ study along the Connecticut River. This study is to inform a river flow model for dam owners, especially the Army Corps of Engineers, and also for flood plain forest management. If I want to fulfill my ambitions to do river restoration back home, I have to know both the ecological part I studied at Mount Holyoke and the engineering technology I’m studying at UMass.”
Besides marrying an education in liberal-arts to one in professional engineering, the dual-degree program also applies technological tools to solving overarching social problems around the world.
My experience at UMass has given me a really good balance between the chemistry I majored in at Mt. Holyoke and the chemical engineering I’m taking here,” noted Beatrice Ani-Asamoah from Ghana. “I want to put all that learning to work in the future in my home country when I return there and work in education to try and bridge the gap.”
“They desperately need engineers in Kenya, so I’ll probably go to graduate school here and then go back home,” commented Kenyan electrical engineering major Jackline Koech. “This dual degree program allows me to do all that without starting undergraduate school all over again.”
Kindred Kenyan Kemei noted that she had taken engineering courses at Jomo Kenyatta University there before coming to college in Massachusetts.
“There all my instructors and 95 percent of the students were male,” she said. “So I’d like to go back and help close that gender gap and also answer some of the needs in our society.”
The dual-degree program was created in 2002 by then Dean Joseph Goldstein and Assistant Dean Kathy Rubin of the College of Engineering, and by Dr. Donal O'Shea, the Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Faculty/Vice President for Academic Affairs at Mount Holyoke. Dr. Harriet Pollatsek, a professor of mathematics there, is the current Mount Holyoke coordinator for the program. (October 2009)
Organizing Chaos and Saving Lives During Disasters
On September 26, 1998, a charter bus lost control in mountainous terrain in rural California, resulting in two deaths and many serious injuries. The initial report from emergency personnel reaching the scene exclaimed that "I have a bus on its side and bodies everywhere!" Now an electronic system created by Professor Aura Ganz of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst can quickly make sense of such chaotic disasters, while saving many lives in the process.
Her DIORAMA system, based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, can rapidly map out the exact location of the most severely injured victims, as identified by the first-response triage team, so ambulance personnel can find and evacuate critical cases ASAP. Soon DIORAMA will be able determine all the emergency resources in the area and classify local hospitals according to how many ER patients they can handle and what kind of injuries they are capable of treating. Moreover, it will also be able to route ambulances to the right hospitals by steering them around traffic snarls.
“There are so many large-scale disasters that happen with buses overturning, trains colliding, multi-car pileups, air crashes,” Ganz explains. “And it is very cumbersome for medical personnel to arrive at a scene filled with chaos and debris and the victims spread all over the place and carry out a fast and effective triage operation to save as many people as possible.”
Professor Ganz has developed and field-tested DIORAMA through a $400,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and with the help of several medical doctors and emergency management experts from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
“The first problem is the issue of immediate response,” says Ganz. “What is happening in the critical minutes just after a disaster occurs, when every second is crucial to whether or not victims survive? This is the most challenging issue in emergency management of a mass-casualty disaster, and this is the problem NIH is funding me to solve. The aim of the project is to streamline the triage process and significantly reduce the time it takes to rescue victims.”
The term “diorama” usually denotes a replica or scale model of a landscape or some other scene, such as a battle. In this case, the actual DIORAMA model is a map of the disaster scene, pinpointing the location of all the medics and victims and accessible on the computer screen of the incident commander coordinating the whole emergency response operation.
RFID technology allows the storage and retrieval of data through electromagnetic interaction with a radio frequency compatible integrated circuit. An RFID system consists of RFID readers and RFID tags. Such systems are currently being deployed by numerous companies, the government, the military, the medical community, and other users as a radical new means of tracking and identifying products and people.
In DIORAMA, emergency vehicles will carry “emergency locators” (which, in effect, function as “readers”) that will track location and status information from various RFID tags worn by emergency personnel and attached to accident victims during the initial triage. These components create a mobile tool that can be speedily deployed at a disaster scene to enable an offsite incident commander to visualize the location and condition of the casualties as well as all the available resources.
DIORAMA gives the incident commander the small picture at the scene of the accident by pinpointing all the victims. Soon DIORAMA will also provide the large picture by mapping out rescue routes and identifying available emergency resources and nearby hospitals, their capacity, and their capabilities for dealing with specific kinds of injuries.
“Currently the incident commander has to find out most of this information by phone, if it’s available at all,” relates Ganz. “The incident commander is flying blind.”
To create this life-saving tool, Professor Ganz is collaborating with some real heavyweights in the medical emergency management field: Doctors Larry Nathanson, Jonathan Burstein, and Gregory Ciottone from BIDMC. Dr. Nathanson is the Director of Emergency Medicine Informatics at BIDMC and a faculty member of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Burstein is the Medical Director of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Program at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Massachusetts State EMS Medical Director. He is the co-editor of Disaster Medicine, and an editor of the text Medical Response to Terrorism. Dr. Ciottone is the Director of the Division of Disaster Medicine at BIDMC and has served as the commander of a federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team.
“Our next step in developing the DIORAMA will also include dynamic traffic data,” says Ganz. “I am working with the UMass Transportation Center on this part of the concept. At that point, DIORAMA would take into consideration the up-to-the-minute traffic pattern when mapping out routes for ambulances taking victims to hospitals.”
A prototype for the user-friendly DIORAMA system has already been validated during a half-dozen field tests at UMass Amherst, UMass Medical School, and BIDMC this summer, but Ganz is currently applying for further NIH support to make the system even better. Given that the second round of R01 NIH funding is approved, she predicts that her system could be ready for testing in real disasters in as little as a year. (September 2009)
Roberts and Bhatia Chosen for NAE Forum
Associate Professors of Chemical Engineering Susan Roberts and Surita Bhatia are two of approximately 40 engineering faculty members nationwide selected for the inaugural 2009 Frontiers of Engineering Education symposium, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Faculty participating in the symposium were selected based on the creativity and impact of their educational innovations.
Professor Roberts was chosen for her contributions to the design of interdisciplinary training at the interface of engineering and the life sciences. Professor Bhatia's nomination was based on her efforts in the areas of professional development and diversity training of engineering students.
The symposium – to be held in Washington, D.C., from November 16 to 18 with support from the O’Donnell Foundation – is intended “to become a major force in identifying, recognizing, and promulgating advances and innovations in order to build a strong intellectual infrastructure and commitment to 21st-century engineering education.”
The NAE invited engineering deans across the country to nominate faculty members in the early stages of their careers who could share and explore interesting and effective innovations in engineering education at the symposium. By “frontiers of engineering education,” the NAE means to encompass new fields, projects, experiential learning, ways of organizing knowledge, uses of information technology and simulation, ways of engaging and personalizing individual learning, studio approaches, subjects, trans-disciplinary teaching, materials or formats, cognitive science results in the classroom, telepresence in laboratory instruction, ways of using rapid prototyping, ways of bringing societal challenges into the classroom, ways of developing entrepreneurial capabilities, ways of reaching underserved communities in new ways, and any other topics worth sharing and analyzing together.
The NAE’s mission is “to promote the technological welfare of the nation by marshaling the knowledge and insights of eminent members of the engineering profession.” (September 2009)
Muriel Wins Moving Spirit Award
Ana Muriel, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, is the 2009 winner of the Moving Spirit Award, as chosen by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The award was established to recognize outstanding INFORMS volunteers who have been "moving spirits" in their respective forums within the organization. INFORMS is the largest professional society in the world for academics and industrial personnel in the field of operations research. It was established in 1995 with the merger of the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. Dr. Muriel was the president of the Women in Operations Research/Management Sciences (WORMS) forum of INFORMS in 2008-2009 and presided over the WORMS meetings at the national conference of INFORMS, held last October in Washington, D.C.
“Our goal in the forum is to understand the issues of women in the profession and then communicate those issues to the INFORMS Board,” said Dr. Muriel at the time. “That is our role. We had three sessions aimed basically at creating a supportive environment for women in the field.”
Established in 1995, WORMS has a threefold purpose : to encourage interest in the field of operations research and the management sciences; to encourage discussion and interaction among individuals having interest in the issues facing women and their relationship to the profession of operations research and the management sciences; to advise the INFORMS Board on issues facing women in the profession of operations research and the management sciences and to keep the INFORMS Board apprised of developments in this area. (September 2009)
Ozdarski Honored with Dean's Award
Jodi Ozdarski, the academic assistant in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, is the 2009 recipient of the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award. Since arriving at UMass Amherst as a typist in 1985, she rose through the ranks to become the CEE’s academic assistant in 2001. In that capacity she supports the department’s complex efforts during the ABET reviews, maintains student files, produces the undergraduate handbook and faculty advising guide, advises graduate students, works with the graduate program directors, coordinates the department’s semiannual Career Fairs, and helps with the CEE Open House. As one of her award recommendation letters comments, “Jodi performs all these tasks with a level of professionalism, sense of obligation, and joyful spirit that is beyond admirable.”
Other remarks in the sheaf of recommendation letters from colleagues and faculty members back up this statement 100 percent. They variously refer to Ozdarski as “an indispensable staff member,” “knowledgeable, efficient, yet patient and extremely well-liked,” and “positive, insightful, and responsive.” Her commitment is also referred to as “legendary,” and she is noted for her “personal interest in all the students.”
One telling comment sums up the scores of compliments heaped upon her in the recommendation letters: “Jodi is that rare individual who continues to grow in her job, finds every day exciting, and discovers new and welcomed ways to make the lives of others better.”
The list of other college award winners, honored earlier in the year, is as follows: Cheryl Brooks, Director of Career Planning and Student Development, Chancellor’s Citation; William Leonard, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Outstanding Teaching Award; Hossein Pishro-Nik, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award; Massimo Fischetti, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and Dimitrios Maroudas, Chemical Engineering Department, Senior Faculty Awards. (September 2009)
Collura Serves as Keynote Speaker
Professor John Collura of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was a keynote speaker at the International Intelligent Transportation and Environmental Symposium held July 16-18 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Collura’s remarks focused on the research advancements made in the U.S. and abroad in the areas of: transportation electronic payment systems on toll roads and public transit; dissemination of traveler information; innovative parking management services; and the deployment of freight management systems. The meeting was sponsored by the Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association. (September 2009)
"Blueprint Brigade" Going Full-bore in Kenya
The Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has reached an historic landmark in its four-year-old Kenya Water Project. The EWB chapter is about to start drilling a $20,000 borehole for a new well that the organization has been raising money for since 2006. What’s more, a nine-person team from the UMass chapter recently returned from Kenya, after working on two water-bearing spring boxes and educating several hundred people about water sanitation. The group even managed to squeeze in some hot and heavy soccer games with several dozen local children.
The deep-drilled well, about to be installed at the Machakha Polytechnic School in western Kenya, is the culmination of a hard-fought, four-year-long, fund-raising effort to raise the necessary $20,000. Along with the momentous deep-water well, spring boxes will create clean drinking water for several thousand people in the rural Namawanga area in the East Bungoma District of Western Province in Kenya, near where President Barack Obama’s ancestors lived.
Dubbed the “Blueprint Brigade” by Time Magazine, the international Engineers Without Borders organization, headquartered in Colorado, now runs over 350 water, renewable energy, sanitation, and other engineering projects in more than 45 developing countries. These projects are completed in partnership with local communities and non-governmental organizations. The organization has over 12,000 members in 250 geographically-based chapters, including the one at UMass Amherst.
A spring box is a concrete retaining wall that collects clean, underground water from a natural spring and makes it easily accessible through metal piping. During four trips to Kenya, the UMass Amherst EWB chapter has analyzed the water quality in 15 pre-existing spring boxes, fenced in six of those boxes to protect them from animal contamination, and built two new boxes.
“We are told that between 100 and 300 people use each spring box,” reports Professor John Tobiason, an EWB faculty advisor from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. “Before we built these two new spring boxes, people were getting water from two natural springs, but not very easily at all. They would scoop water out of open pools that were easily contaminated by people and animals.”
Namawanga – a community that raises sugar cane, sweet potatoes, and corn, among other crops – relies on water sometimes located a mile away. Villagers must fetch their water on foot from sources often contaminated with animal waste or running dry during part of the year. Each household spends several hours per day gathering water.
“The idea of spring boxes is that they get clean water coming out of the box,” explains Tobiason. “They approach the pipe, rinse out their buckets, they rinse their hands, then they collect their clean water as it comes directly out of the earth. There’s no standing water.”
In addition to the actual engineering work on spring boxes over the past four years, EWB teams have also visited many schools and community groups to talk about the importance of sanitized water, especially since diarrhea from contaminated water is one of Africa’s most critical health problems.
“We teach them how to make sure their water is clean,” says project manager Christina Stauber, who recently earned her master’s degree in environmental engineering and has just started a new job at the Tighe & Bond engineering firm in Westfield, Mass. “And we educate them about spring boxes and how to maintain them and use them properly.”
Besides Tobiason and Stauber, the other team members from UMass Amherst on the recent trip were civil engineering undergraduate students Ben Taylor, Patrick Border, Patricia Fox, and Matthew Ross, as well as 2009 mechanical engineering graduate Molly Cronin. Two people from off campus also participated: Barbara McAlister, a junior at Mount Holyoke College; and John Pepe, an environmental engineer from a professional EWB chapter in Alaska.
The fund-raising for the new well has been spearheaded by $11,000 from the Westfield Rotary Club, private contributions from Springfield attorney Robert Rosen, and several lotteries and other events run by the UMass EWB chapter. In addition, a new $25,000 endowment created by alumnus Chuck Machlin (Industrial Engineering ’62) will soon begin paying out about $1000 per year to support the chapter’s efforts.
One decidedly non-engineering activity was a daily soccer game that scored a lot of goals with the local community.
“Ben and Matt went out on the first day to kick the ball around and people began materializing from everywhere,” says Tobiason. “So thereafter, about the time we’d usually get back to our hotel, kids were waiting for them to get out there. Just screaming and waiting for them to come out and play.” (September 2009)
Samuel del Pilar Receives HENAAC Scholarship
University of Massachusetts Amherst mechanical engineering sophomore Samuel del Pilar of Flushing, New York, is one of 75 students nationwide selected for scholarships from the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference (HENAAC). He is the second UMass Amherst engineering student to receive a HENAAC scholarship, the first being Rafael Santana, who graduated in 2004 with a degree in computer systems engineering.
The HENAAC Scholars Program addresses the “immense need” of the United States to produce more domestic engineers and scientists. The goal of the program is to foster college retention of Hispanic undergraduates with a 3.0 grade point average or higher; to encourage their graduation with a technical degree in four-to-five years; and to contribute to Hispanic communities by producing role models for future generations.
HENAAC was established in 1989 as a means of identifying, honoring, and documenting the contributions of outstanding Hispanic-American science, engineering, technology, and math professionals. Corporations, government agencies, academic institutions, the military, and the business community at large have submitted thousands of nominees over the last 19 years for this prestigious recognition.
The HENAAC vision is “keeping America technologically strong by promoting science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers, especially in underserved communities.” (September 2009)
COE Group Chosen as Outstanding Student Chapter
Our College of Engineering chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) has been chosen as the 2009 Outstanding Student Chapter in this international educational and scientific association of transportation professionals. UMass Amherst chapter members David Hurwitz and Sam Gregorio accepted the Outstanding Student Chapter Award at the ITE 2009 Annual Meeting and Exhibit, held August 9 through 12, in San Antonio, Texas. Our student chapter was recognized for its outstanding chapter organization, activities, and efforts to foster the close association of students with practicing professionals. Founded in 1930, the ITE currently has more than 17,000 members, working in more than 90 countries.
Each year the ITE sponsors an awards program to honor outstanding achievement in transportation engineering and distinguished service to ITE. The awards bestow international recognition on the recipients and increase the public's awareness of the role and responsibilities of the transportation professional.
The purpose of the Student Chapter Award is to encourage student chapters to achieve the objectives set forth in their charters and to provide a means for ITE to recognize outstanding accomplishments in such activities.
ITE is an association of transportation professionals who are responsible for meeting mobility and safety needs. ITE facilitates the application of technology and scientific principles to research, planning, functional design, implementation, operation, policy development, and management for any mode of ground transportation. Through its products and services, ITE promotes professional development of its members, supports and encourages education, stimulates research, develops public awareness programs, and serves as a conduit for the exchange of professional information.
ITE members include, but are not limited to, transportation engineers, planners, consultants, educators, and researchers. (September 2009)
Boryssenko Writes Cover Story for High Frequency Electronics
Research Professor Anatoliy Boryssenko of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department has published the cover story for the August 2009 edition of High Frequency Electronics magazine. Dr. Boryssenko’s story, entitled "Taxonomical and Heuristic Studies on UWB Antenna Design Strategies," borrows from biology to develop a method for evaluating wide bandwidth antenna structures and create rules for the discovery of useful new structures. As he writes in his article, “This paper attempts to assist in navigation through the realm of reported designs on ultrawideband (UWB) antennas through systemization of key design principles and ideas using two methodologies proven in other science and engineering fields.” The magazine’s Editorial Director, Gary Breed, puts the article in perspective during a long editorial on Boryssenko’s article: “These techniques provide an orderly, rules-based approach to discovering potential new antenna structures. We should expect it to work – engineering is inherently orderly and is definitely based on rules.” Link to article: High Frequency Electronics. (September 2009)
Huber Featured in Forbes Video
As part of his continuing coverage by many of the country’s most high-profile media sources, George Huber, the Armstrong Professional Development Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department, is featured in a program called Breakout on the Forbes Video Network. “There might be a new way to make gasoline greener,” the program begins. “A scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst thinks he’s found the answer. His new process uses waste products and minimal energy and water.” Breakout is a weekly video series, carried on Forbes.com, that is produced for the Entrepreneurs channel and showcases budding entrepreneurs, inventors, and business thinkers. Link to video: Forbes (August 2009)
Winter Directs Fluid Dynamics Program at NSF
Henning Winter, the Distinguished University Professor of Chemical Engineering and Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass Amherst, has been appointed as the new Program Director for Fluid Dynamics at the National Science Foundation. His current research areas are the Flow and Structure of Complex Fluids and Soft Nanomaterials; Flow-Induced Polymer Crystallization; Rheo-Optical Methods; and Enabling Cyber Infrastructure for Engineering Research and Teaching. He is the Editor of Rheologica Acta and on the editorial boards for the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid, Journal of Rheology, and Mechanics of Time-Dependent Materials. Among his many awards are the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award, the National Science Foundation Creativity Award, and the Bingham Medal ofthe American Society of Rheology. His degrees are from the University of Stuttgart and Stanford University. (August 2009)
"Green Monster" Makes National Finals
A six-person team of chemical engineering undergraduates has built a shoebox-sized vehicle whimsically called the “Green Rock Eating Monster” that has qualified for the national finals of the Chem-E-Car Competition next November in Nashville, an event sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The UMass Amherst team qualified for Nashville after finishing third at the Northeast regional competition.
This is the first time a UMass Amherst team has qualified for the national finals in the event. The Chem-E-Car Competition requires each team to build a self-propelled model car that, driven by a chemical reaction alone, travels a pre-set distance while carrying a pre-determined weight.
Currently our Chem-E-Car team is raising money to support its trip to the national finals during the 2009 AIChE National Student Conference, from November 6-9 at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville. Anyone wishing to support this worthy cause please call Heather Demers in the College of Engineering development office at 413.577.0231 or email her at demers@ecs.umass.edu. The team has also put together a flier with information about sponsorship opportunities.
The UMass team qualified for the nationals with a heady comeback from a first run worthy of the Keystone Cops, in which some crossed wires caused the vehicle to lurch backward instead of forward.
“Before the competition the car was shown to observers, who came to ask questions, and somewhere along the way, with the commotion and the excitement, the wires connecting the fuel cell to the motor were switched,” explains team member Niva Ran. “So, as we were ready to go on the line, we set the car down, opened all the valves, and the car started going backwards. The kids sitting behind us thought this was hysterical, and our team turned white with embarrassment.”
However, quick-witted team members corrected that problem and others, including a fuel leak, to cruise into the national finals on their second run.
As the AIChE website explains: "Team members design and construct a chemically powered vehicle within certain size constraints. This vehicle must also be designed to carry a specified cargo. The teams will be told at the time of the competition the distance that the car must travel and the specified cargo that the vehicle will carry. Entries deemed unsafe by the judges will be disqualified. The winner will be determined by a combined score, for traveling the correct distance, and for creativity. Teams compete at the regional conferences, and the winners of each regional conference will compete at the national conference."
The UMass Amherst team is composed of chemical engineering students Ran, Jonathan Rayla, Sean Paradiso, Gregory Su, Ben Novello, and Elli Schmidt. This fall the team is looking to add more members, including some electrical engineering students. The faculty advisor is Professor W. Curtis Conner form the Chemical Engineering Department.
For the regional competition, the Green Rock Eating Monster was composed of a green reaction chamber (where calcium hydride and water react to produce hydrogen as fuel), a pressure gauge, a flow valve to keep the hydrogen within the chamber until needed, a pressure regulator, and a hydrogen fuel cell connected to an electric motor.
“For the national competition we are looking to replace the tubing (which caused the fuel leak), the fuel cell, and the hydrogen-production mechanism,” says Ran. “We are currently investigating the use of wind energy to produce the hydrogen, making our car entirely green and free of waste products. Seeing as we did alright in regionals, despite everything that went wrong (which was nearly everything), we're going for the tip top at nationals.” (August 2009)
Vestas Scholars Turn Wind Scholarship into Windfall
Two mechanical engineering students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have literally taken advantage of a windfall from a prominent wind power company and used it to propel their futures. Jacque Heger and Samuel Deptula each received $5,000 scholarships for the 2008-2009 academic year from Vestas Americas, the leading supplier of wind power solutions with over 35,000 wind turbines installed. As part of this Vestas Scholarship Program, they also received $8,000 apiece this summer to do wind-related research for the Wind Energy Center at UMass Amherst. Heger used her research funding for making key physical improvements to wind turbine blades, while Deptula employed his Vestas support to help reboot a wind tunnel on campus that had been abandoned for more than a decade.
Their research, done under the watchful eyes of Professors Robert Hyers and James Manwell of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, was part of the UMass Amherst Research Experience for Undergraduates. Both research projects promise to create significant progress for wind energy in general, and the Wind Energy Center in particular.
Heger’s research, done with Professor Hyers and mechanical engineering undergraduate John Gabour, involves a phenomenon known as “bend-twist coupling,” which describes the behavior of a wind turbine blade in the field under stress from wind forces.
“The blade will deflect according to the amount of aerodynamic pressure the wind applies to it,” notes Heger. “The blade will both bend against the oncoming wind and twist towards or away from it.”
Though extreme blade deformation is counterproductive, some deformation can be useful because it will slow down the rotor speed (called “passive furling”) and allow the wind turbine to operate safely in high winds that might normally cause a turbine to be shut down to avoid damage.
Heger’s research involves altering the blade geometry through a newly designed proprietary internal structure. She also looked at the shell and spar material. By creating a turbine blade that is capable of greater twist under load, the angle of attack is reduced, resulting in lower rotor velocity
Along with analyzing the twisting mechanics of the blade geometry, the researchers also revamped the blade’s material properties.
“The desired material must have high bending stiffness and low torsional stiffness,” says Heger.
Woven fiberglass and carbon fiber are typically used in industry because they are strong, durable, and lightweight. However, these materials do not provide the desired torsional flexibility. That’s why Heger and her colleagues researched new composites for the bend-twist application.
Meanwhile, Deptula, with Professor Manwell as his advisor, was at work testing and retrofitting a low-speed wind tunnel that had been built on campus in the 1960s but had been “in mothballs” for many years. The Wind Energy Center and other research units on campus can make plenty of use out of the wind tunnel, if serviceable, by using it to conduct fluid and heat transfer experiments, instrument calibrations, and other functions. So Deptula’s job this summer was to perform modeling, analysis, and validation-of-flow-quality tests on the old wind tunnel.
“Aging equipment and the installation of a new building (Agricultural Annex B) 10 feet from the exhaust outlet of the tunnel required that flow quality within the test section be evaluated,” says Deptula. “The lack of a fan motor voltage controller also created the possibility of varying wind speeds, which would undermine the value of experimental results and calibration accuracy. It was also important to investigate how the proximity of the annex building to the exhaust of the tunnel affects velocity, pressure, and turbulence in the test section.”
To determine this last factor, the proximity of the annex to the exhaust, Deptula used CAD software to model the major features of the wind tunnel and the agricultural annex, and then he simulated the behavior of air flow exiting the wind tunnel. These plots revealed that the annex had almost no effect on the flow characteristics.
The computer simulations did not take into account many variables that could potentially alter flow characteristics.
“These included varying fan motor speed due to voltage fluctuations, air currents outside the wind tunnel laboratory as a result of natural winds, and variable weather conditions such as temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure,” comments Deptula.
To characterize these factors, Deptula began constructing an apparatus that could measure total and static pressure across the entire three-dimensional test section of the wind tunnel, while simultaneously collecting temperature, fan motor speed, and barometric pressure data.
The work of both Heger and Deptula will go a long way toward driving both of their careers in engineering.
“It’s obvious from the 2008 presidential campaign that renewable energies are going to be important in the near future,” says Heger. “Right now I’m focusing on wind. Now that I know I want to specialize in renewable energy, I get so excited every time I talk about it.” (August 2009)
Huber Makes More News
George Huber is the star of a five-minute video entitled “Green Gasoline,” which was produced by Jon Baime of the National Science Foundation’s Science Nation, the “online magazine that’s all about science for the people.”
As Huber comments in the video, "The beauty of green gasoline is you don't need to change the existing infrastructure. We're going to make the same gasoline from biomass that you make from petroleum oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel, home heating oil, jet fuel, and chemicals. So anything you can make from crude oil, we believe, in the next 10 to 20 years, you'll be making from biomass." You can watch the video here: science nation.
In the video, Huber finds all the cellulose he needs in a pile of discarded wood chips near the back of a lumber yard. He collects a few handfuls in a plastic bag. Where one might just see a tall pile of wood chips, Huber sees something else--stored energy, and plenty of it.
"Cellulose is basically stored solar energy that's found in all plant material," he tells us.
With the help of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Huber is working to unlock the solar energy that's stored in cellulose. He says cellulose happens to be the most common organic compound on Earth.
"Look at the abundance of it. We have enough biomass in the U.S. ... that has the energy content of 60 percent of how much petroleum we use in this country, so it's both cheap and abundant."
The NSF video comments that, as petroleum oil becomes less cheap and less abundant, our dependence on it poses a danger, not only to our national security, but to our environmental security as well. Finding an alternative to oil is critical.
Huber is also appearing on local PBS station WGBY’s “Eco-Exchange” program this Wednesday, August 12, at 7:30 p.m. (August 2009)
College Remembers Prominent Donor Elizabeth Washburn
The College of Engineering fondly remembers Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper Washburn, who passed away on March 13 after leaving a lasting legacy to our students with the establishment of The Paul C. Washburn Scholarship Endowment. Mrs. Washburn left a very meaningful estate gift of $25,000 to the endowment— funding that will continue to benefit industrial engineering students at UMass Amherst for the foreseeable future.
Mrs. Washburn created the scholarship endowment in 1989 with her father and her son in order to support industrial engineering students and give back to the university. Mrs. Washburn was quite devoted to education because of her background. A resident of Massachusetts for 56 years and a graduate of Wellesley College, she had worked for many years in the Worcester Public Schools as a teacher's aide at Nelson Place Elementary School and later as a guidance aide at North High School.
Mrs. Washburn established an enduring legacy at UMass Amherst with The Paul C. Washburn Scholarship Endowment. Each academic year, between one and three deserving industrial engineering students receive a Washburn Scholarship to assist them with their college costs.
The family requested that memorial donations should be sent to the Washburn Scholarship Fund, UMass Amherst, Records and Gifts Processing, Memorial Hall, Amherst, MA 01003.
Djaferis Chosen as Interim Dean
The College of Engineering has announced that the college’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Theodore Djaferis, will take over as its interim dean, effective August 17. Professor Djaferis will replace Dean Michael Malone, who last month was named vice chancellor for research and engagement by Chancellor Robert C. Holub. Malone has served as dean at the College of Engineering since 2004 and the Ronnie and Eugene M. Isenberg Distinguished Professor of Engineering since 2003. Professor Djaferis took over as associate dean in 2003.
“The college has undergone a fundamental transformation in the nearly forty years I have been associated with it and is now poised to achieve even more going forward,” said Djaferis. “We have excellent faculty, dedicated staff, and engaged students and alumni. I am honored to be leading the college at this time, mindful of the current challenging financial situation, but really excited about the opportunities that lie ahead.”
Djaferis has had a long and distinguished career at the College of Engineering. He earned his B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in 1974 from UMass Amherst, and his M.S. (1977), E.E. (1978), and Ph.D. (1979) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of the UMass Amherst ECE Department in 1979. He received the Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Professor Award from the ECE Department in 1982, 1988, and 1990, and the college’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 2001.
Djaferis is the author or co-author of more than 100 technical publications in the area of systems and control, and the author of a research monograph, Robust Control Design: A Polynomial Approach, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1995. He is co-editor of a research volume, System Theory: Modeling Analysis and Control, also published by Kluwer in 1999. He is also the author of a textbook for first-year engineering students entitled Automatic Control: The Power of Feedback, published by PWS in 1998 (revised printing by Brooks/Cole in 2000). In addition, he is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which recognized him “for contributions to robust control and algebraic system theory.”
For more than a quarter century he has been heavily involved with the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), and his professional service contributions include: Member of the Linear Systems Committee for Reviewing Technical Notes/Correspondence Items for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 1983-84; Finance Chairman American Control Conference 1985; Program Vice-Chair IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 1991; Publications Chairman IEEE CDC 1995; Associate Editor Conference Editorial Board IEEE CSS 1994-96; Program Chairman IEEE CDC 1997; Member Board of Governors IEEE CSS, 1996-1999, 2001-2008; Chair Conference Publications Committee IEEE CSS 1998-2001; General Chairman IEEE CDC 2001; Vice-President Member Activities, IEEE CSS, 2002-2003; Vice-President Conference Activities IEEE CSS, 2004-2005; President-Elect IEEE CSS, 2006; President IEEE CSS, 2007; Past-President IEEE CSS, 2008; Awards Committee Chair IEEE CSS, 2009. (August 2009)
MIRSL Makes Cover of IEEE Journal
A paper based on the thesis research of former graduate student Dragana Perkovic, working with the Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory (MIRSL), was chosen for the cover article of a prestigious journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The article is titled "Longshore Surface Currents Measured by Doppler Radar and Video PIV Techniques." It can be found in the August 2009 issue (Vol. 47, Issue 8, Part 2, Page 2787) of the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing journal. The authors are Perkovic, T. C. Lippmann of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire, and Stephen Frasier, the director of MIRSL and a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
The main thrust of the article is to compare, contrast, and test two innovative techniques for measuring the all-important currents that flow and churn along shorelines while transporting sediments and pollutants in the surf zone.
As the article notes, “These flows are affected by local bathymetry, as well as spatial and temporal changes in incident-wave energy and direction. The ability to capture the spatial and temporal variations in mean flows in the surf zone is key to predicting the morphological change of the near-shore topography and shoreline.”
The article explains that much of the field research in the nearshore zone is done with in situ measurement techniques, using instruments such as pressure sensors and current meters that are fixed on pipes jetted into the sandy bottom or instruments that are mounted on moving platforms such as drifters. But these techniques are difficult to employ because of the large number of instruments required, and because they present a hazard to recreational swimmers, surfers, or boaters. These instruments are also difficult to install and maintain in the harsh nearshore environment for a given length of time.
Recently, remote sensing technology has been applied to studies of nearshore processes. Remote sensors are less invasive, are generally easier to deploy and maintain, and offer wider areal coverage than typical arrays of in situ instruments. However, because the remote measurements are indirectly related to the quantity of interest, field verification is required to establish the validity of the measurements and to understand their limitations.
In this research, mean longshore surface currents within the surf zone were measured using two remote sensing techniques: microwave Doppler radar and optical video. Doppler radar relies on small-scale surface roughness that scatters the incident electromagnetic radiation so that velocities are obtained from the Doppler shift of the backscattered radiation. Video relies on texture and contrast of scattered sunlight from the sea surface, and velocity estimates are determined using particle imaging velocimetry (PIV). This paper compares video PIV and Doppler radar surface velocities over a 1-kilometer by .5-kilometer area in the surf zone of a natural beach.
“The good spatial and temporal agreement between the two remote measurement techniques, which rely on very different mechanisms,” as the article concludes, “suggests that both are reasonably approximating the true mean longshore surface velocity.” (August 2009)
College Mourns Andy Knowles
The College of Engineering and UMass Amherst lost a dear friend on July 24, when alumnus Andrew (Andy) C. Knowles III ('57) passed away due to complications from a stroke. As the person for whom the Knowles Engineering Building was named, Andy Knowles served the University of Massachusetts in numerous capacities, including trustee from 1980 through 1989, Chairman of the Board of Trustees from 1986 to 1988, and member of the Board of Governors for the UMass Foundation. He was also the recipient of an honorary University of Massachusetts Amherst Doctorate of Engineering degree in 1982. In addition, he was chairman of the first capital campaign for the College of Engineering in the early 1980s.
He and his wife, UMass Amherst alumna Mary (Skip) A. Knowles ( '57), were married for 51 years. Born in Springfield and graduated from UMass Amherst with a B.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering, Mr. Knowles was a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force. His passion was golf, computers, his cat (Max), UMass Amherst, and especially his family and many friends.
Andy and Skip Knowles were lifetime members of the 1863 Society Founders Circle and established many funds at UMass Amherst, including the Frederick “Barney” S. Troy Visiting Professorship in English and the Earl S. Lorden Scholarship Fund. Andy Knowles was instrumental in bringing more than $500,000 in equipment donations from Digital Equipment to support the UMass Amherst campus in the early 1990s. He also actively supported the fund-raising efforts of the UMass Medical Center. The UMass Amherst Knowles Engineering Building was named in his honor and dedicated in 1991.
Andy and Skip Knowles have been residents of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, and spent most winters in Naples, Florida.
His career spanned over 30 years in the computer and communications field. He retired in 1992 from Artel Communications Corp as president and CEO of the company, a manufacturer of high-speed, fiber-optic communications systems. Knowles also served as chairman of the CAD/CAM and Workstation Group for Prime Computer, Inc., directing that company’s efforts in CAD/CAM artificial intelligence. He joined Prime from the Lexidata Corporation, a manufacturer of high-resolution graphics terminals, where he was president, CEO, and director. Prior to that, he spent 14 years at the Digital Equipment Corporation, holding such key senior management positions as vice president for corporate marketing, vice president/group manager of the Technology Group, and vice president/group manager of the Small Systems Group. (August 2009)
announced that the college’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Theodore Djaferis, will take over as its interim dean, effective August 17. Professor Djaferis will replace Dean Michael Malone, who last month was named vice chancellor for research and engagement by Chancellor Robert C. Holub. Malone has served as dean at the College of Engineering since 2004 and the Ronnie and Eugene M. Isenberg Distinguished Professor of Engineering since 2003. Professor Djaferis took over as associate dean in 2003.
