News

Collura Awarded Prestigious S.S. Steinberg Award

On January 14, Professor John Collura of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and the director at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Transportation Center was awarded the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s (ARTBA) prestigious “S.S. Steinberg Award.” Collura was honored during the ARTBA’s annual Research & Education Division (RED) meeting in Washington, D.C. Named after the founding president of the ARTBA’s RED, the award recognizes individuals who make remarkable contributions to transportation education.

DPO Girl Scout Day Wins National Award

Girl Scout Exploration Day, an annual event run by the Diversity Programs Office and sponsored by the campus chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and the Women in Engineering Program in the College of Engineering, has won a countrywide award from the national headquarters of SWE. Last year’s Girl Scout Day was planned and staged by three members of the campus SWE, led by president Jenn Badylak-Reals, and attracted 33 participants. The overall objectives of Girl Scouts Day are: to broaden young girls' views about engineering; to show engineering is fun; to introduce role models pursuing careers in engineering; and to introduce engineering as a potential career.

McCaffrey Featured in the United Kingdom’s Guardian

The work of Anthony McCaffrey, postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for e-Design in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, was the subject of an article in The Guardian, one of the world’s most respected publications.The Guardian article is about how rethinking labels can boost creativity. McCaffrey says that thinking about common items in terms of their component parts and decoupling their names from their uses opens up new ways of thinking and solving problems. The article continued the international coverage for the method developed by McCaffrey to enhance anyone’s problem-solving skills, especially engineers, inventors, and other innovators. Media coverage includes articles in The Atlantic, Psych Central, Red Orbit, Science Daily, Science Codex, and a column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Birch Receives Competitive Ciba Travel Award in Green Chemistry

Nathan P. Birch, a Ph.D. candidate in the research lab of Professor Jessica D. Schiffman from the Chemical Engineering Department, was one of four recipients nationally to receive a Ciba Travel Award in Green Chemistry. The award is sponsored by the Ciba Green Chemistry Student Endowment to expand student education in the field of green chemistry. Funding provides students the opportunity to travel to a national meeting in the green chemistry field and present their research. The Award Committee felt that Mr. Birch has “strong potential for a career in green chemistry.”

NSF CAREER Award Supports Research in Emerging Nanodevice to Go Beyond Moore’s Law

Qiangfei Xia of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been issued a five-year, $400,000 grant from the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program to develop emerging nanoelectronic devices. The title of his project is “CAREER: Scaling of Memristive Nanodevices and Arrays." Xia’s NSF research addresses the biggest obstacle for the continued operation of Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who first predicted the trend in his 1965 paper.

Zink Featured in New NSF Video

Michael Zink of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is the featured researcher in a video produced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) about the NSF-funded Global Environment for Networking Innovation (GENI) program. GENI is a fast, programmable "virtual laboratory" that enables university researchers to experiment on so-called future internets. GENI is also a key part of a White House Initiative called US Ignite, which aims to realize the potential of fast, open, next-generation networks. In the video, Zink talks about his team's use of GENI for better weather forecasting. Watch video: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_videos.jsp?cntn_id=124472&media_id=72661&org=NSF

Industrial Sponsors Promote MIE Capstone Course

During the fall 2012 semester, six companies banded together to support the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Senior Capstone Design Course, the penultimate classroom experience for MIE students taught by Professor Frank Sup. The sponsorships are based on a winning formula for all six companies, the students, and the whole MIE department. Sponsorships provide the businesses with key designs to boost their production processes, they give the capstone students real-world projects comparable to professional engineering jobs, and they help support the newly renovated MIE Innovation Shop. Each sponsor donates $3,000, which promotes all these worthy causes.

Baker Talks About Offshore Wind Energy Program on NEPR

In December, Erin Baker of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department appeared on New England Public Radio (NEPR) to discuss her Offshore Wind Energy Program, an interdisciplinary graduate program in offshore wind energy engineering, environmental science, and policy that is now up and running with 25 faculty members from nine departments working with 13 full-time graduate students. The goal of this Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship is to train researchers who understand the technological challenges, environmental implications, and socioeconomic and regulatory hurdles faced by offshore wind farms. The program was started with a $3.2-million grant from the National Science Foundation in August of 2011 and will eventually train 24 doctoral students over five years. Listen to the program here: UMassOFFSHOREwind.wav.

Goldstein’s Team Covered on Scientific Websites

Physorg.com and other scientific websites have posted articles on Joseph Goldstein of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and his research team, which is trying to produce an iron-nickel alloy that is currently only found in meteorites for use in making supermagnets. The goal of the research is to develop bulk quantities of commercially viable, environmentally sound supermagnets, which can be used in electric vehicles, wind-turbine generators, and many other machines. The first phase of the work is funded by an 18-month, $3.3-million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy program. The UMass Amherst share of the grant is approximately $300,000.

Republican Publishes Article on Ganz

On December 26, the Springfield Republican published a feature article on the DIORAMA emergency management software system being perfected by Professor Aura Ganz of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Ganz has been awarded a four-year, $1.6-million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue her research on her computerized disaster-management response system. Ganz says the system is designed to organize chaotic, mass-casualty, disaster scenes, such as airliner, bus, and train wrecks, and cut the evacuation time of survivors in half. For the past several years, Ganz has been developing her DIORAMA I system, funded with the help of a $400,000 exploratory NIH grant.

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