| |
| Home : Volume 31 : Spring 2005 : | |
| College Notes | |
|
Wisconsin Engineer cover, April 2005
|
The 109-year-old student-produced Wisconsin Engineer magazine won five first-place awards, including best magazine and best website, at the 2005 Engineering College Magazines Associated (ECMA) conference. The magazine also won two third-place awards at the conference, held April 7-9 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Martin Grasse (sophomore, BME) was named writer of the year and won third place in the technical writing category for "Icy Answers to Heavenly Questions," which appeared in the September 2004 issue. Aaron Arnold (sophomore, ME) and Alex Long (sophomore, ME) won first place in the photography category for their work in the November 2004 article titled "Knee Deep." Yana Paskova (senior, journalism) won first-place in the feature-writing category for "Deep Sea Exploration," which appeared in the February 2004 edition. The November 2004 issue took third place for best single issue. The advisor for the magazine is Susan Hellstrom of the Technical Communications Program. Currently, the magazine staff includes 80 students, mostly from the College of Engineering.
The college's Master of Engineering in Professional Practice (MEPP) is the 2004 most outstanding online teaching and learning program as chosen by The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), an association of more than 900 institutions and organizations of higher education engaged in online learning. "We are honored," says MEPP Director Wayne Pferdehirt. "Coming from a group of experienced online educators, MEPP's selection for this highly competitive award is a strong affirmation of what our program's faculty, students and staff have achieved together." Sloan-C judges selected MEPP as the most outstanding program based on its demonstrated performance in achieving Sloan's five "pillars of quality" for online learning: learning effectiveness, student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction, cost effectiveness and access. For more information about the MEPP program, see mepp.engr.wisc.edu.
Chemical and Biological Engineering Assistant Professor Manos Mavrikakis will have additional funds for graduate student support in the fall of 2005, thanks to an award from S.C. Johnson & Sons Inc. The Samuel C. Johnson DistinguishedFellowship provides $25,000 for each of three years. Mavrikakis will award the fellowship to a graduate student who will assist in improving low-temperature fuel cells.
The Engineering Career Services office reports a record number of cooperative education arrangements with industry during fall 2004 and spring 2005. During fall 2004, there were 158 students co-oping around the United States and one in Japan. Spring semester also hit a record with 140 students co-oping.
The Vol. 52(1) 2005 edition of IEEE Transactions in Biomedical Engineering published the paper, "Electrocardiographic Motion Artifact Versus Electrode Impedance," by biomedical engineering students Scott Wiese (BS '03, MS '04), Paul Anheier (BS '03), Rafael Connemara (BS '03), Anna Mollner (BS '03), Thomas Neils (BS '03) and Joshua Kahn (BS '02, MS '03). The paper is based on work the group conducted in a biomedical engineering student design project supported by GE Healthcare via the Biomedical Engineering Student Design Consortium. The group's advisor is Biomedical Engineering Professor Emeritus John Webster. Also, Webster, former biomedical engineering students Gabriel Donatell (BS, MS '04), David Meister (BS '03, MS '04), Jeremy O'Brien (BS '03) and John Thurlow (BS '03), and Orthopedics and Rehabilitation Assistant Professor Frank Salvi published the paper, "A Simple Device to Monitor Flexion and Lateral Bending of the Lumbar Spine," in Vol. 13 No. 1 March 2005 IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. The paper describes the development and testing of a low-cost device that patients with lower back pain can use to record and provide real-time biofeedback of lumbar position in certain planes during stabilization exercises. The students completed the design as part of the biomedical engineering undergraduate design course.
U.S. News and World Report has released its 2006 rankings of U.S. graduate programs. The College of Engineering's overall graduate education program was tied for 15th among schools offering a doctoral degree. The following UW-Madison engineering specialties received graduate program rankings in the top 20:
The UW-Madison Clean Snowmobile Team placed third at its national competition held March 14-20 at Michigan Technological University. Competing with an innovative gas-electric hybrid engine, the team also earned the Lotus Engineering, Inc. and Horiba Instruments, Inc. Award for Lowest Emissions. The State University of New York at Buffalo took first place, with Clarkson University placing second. The Clean Snowmobile Challenge is the Society of Automotive Engineers' newest collegiate design competition. Teams of engineering students from participating schools reengineer a stock snowmobile to reduce emissions/noise while maintaining or improving performance.
|
Phoenix (Arizona) Sky Harbor International Airport has deployed the first fully accessible paging and information system, developed by ARINC Inc. The system implements the Trace Research and Development Center's EZ Access technology, which is a set of interface enhancements that can be integrated into the design of almost any electronic product to make the product more accessible for people with disabilities. At Sky Harbor, the paging system will enable visitors to send and receive messages at paging assistance locations using a keyboard or touch screen. There also is an audio version of what is on the screen and an EZ Access keypad that enables visitors to navigate the touch screen via only four buttons. In addition, the information is available through a phone handset and information operator. Names of people being paged are both announced through speakers within the terminal and displayed on monitors throughout the airport, enabling people with vision and hearing impairments to receive pages.
Isabel Tejedor, a senior scientist in the college's Water Science and Engineering Lab, is one of eight recipients of the 2005 UW-Madison Academic Staff Excellence Awards. She came to the university in 1980 as a postdoctoral scientist investigating the nature of interfacial reactions of hydrous oxides in water. Now she is recognized internationally for her research in environmental chemistry — particularly as an expert in attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy. Working with the Environmental Chemistry and Technology Graduate Program and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, she has advanced the careers of many scientists through her role in their education and training. She has made major contributions to both fundamental studies and practical applications of microporous and nanoporous materials and is investigating the use of charge-gated microporous ceramic membranes as nano-filters and reverse osmosis membranes for desalinating sea-water. Tejedor also has been instrumental in developing a co-coupled surface-gas-phase dual FTIR method for studying photocatalytic reactions at the surface and their products in the gas phase.
The college has announced the winners of the 2005 Steuber Writing Prize. The competition honors the best writing by engineering under-graduate students. It is sponsored by alumnus William Steuber, and coordinated by Tom McGlamery of the Technical Communication Program. First prize of $5,000 was for the short story, "From Madison to Memphis," by Materials Science and Engineering major Christopher Mohar. The second prize of $2,000 went to the paper, "Influence and 'Relations': Milne and Poincare on Methods and Mathematics," by Engineering Physics junior Kyle Matthew Oliver.
Polygon, the college's engineering student council, has announced the winners of its annual outstanding instructor and teaching assistant awards. The 2005 winners are:
Engineering students Tim Miller and Joanna Storm have been accepted as new members of the Iron Cross Society, one of UW-Madison's oldest and most prestigious honor societies. Miller is a fourth-year civil and environmental engineering student who is active in the Engineers Without Borders organization. He will be returning to Rwanda this summer with a team of UW students to continue partnering with the community of Muramba to improve the water supply and introduce an alternative energy source. Storm is a fourth-year student in industrial and systems engineering. She has been involved with the Women in Science and Engineering program (WISE) and the Wisconsin Engineer magazine, and has also volunteered at UW Hospital & Clinics. She will be serving as an on-site coordinator for the upcoming LeaderShape Institute in May.
Descendants of the college's first dean, John Butler Johnson, have donated 19th- and early 20th-century books to Wendt Library. Professor Emeritus Edward Daub worked with the family to facilitate the gift. Two of the books are signed copies from Johnson's personal collection. Their titles are "A Practical Treatise on Foundations, Explaining Fully the Principals Involved," c. 1893, www.wisc.edu:4000/wendt/reso/contents/db0002.pdf and "Elements of Precise Surveying and Geodesy," c. 1899, www.wisc.edu:4000/wendt/reso/contents/db0006.pdf. The materials have been added to the Wendt Library Special Collections. The full list is available in MadCat under this phrase heading: J.B. Johnson Family Collection. Johnson served as dean from 1899-1902.
Content by perspective@engr.wisc.edu
Date last modified: 25-May-2005
Date created: 25-May-2005
Thank you for visiting!
