Message from the Chair

Gilbert A. Emmert (50K JPG)

With this issue, we launch our updated alumni newsletter with a new name, EPisode, and a new look. The new name was adopted for simplicity; the former name, Fluence & EMA News, while maintaining a connection to the past, was cumbersome. Webster's dictionary defines episode as "a portion of a narrative that relates an event or a series of connected events and forms a coherent story in itself." That will be the purpose of EPisode--to periodically bring you up to date on how the department is developing, what the faculty and students are doing, what other alumni are doing, changes in the Madison campus, and other news that may be of interest to you. Each issue will be a complete story in itself, but it is also part of a larger story: how your alma mater is changing and adapting in response to a changing world. It seems to me this fits Webster's definition.

In with "EPisode" and out with "Fluence & EMA News"

As you will read in the following pages, the department is getting involved in a broader range of activities. We're developing a partnership with South Carolina State University to expand the number of minority students coming into nuclear engineering; at the same time our engineering mechanics enrollment is growing rapidly.

Faculty research spans from the very small (nano-technology) to the very large (nuclear reactors and the international space station) and from the very cold (liquid helium) to the very hot (fusion plasmas). It covers the fundamental (mechanics of materials and plasma physics) to the applied (nuclear reactor safety), and has broadened to medical applications of mechanics and nuclear technology.

Students, faculty and staff are involved in a broader range of activities, from flying on NASA's "Vomit Comet" to representing the American Nuclear Society at global climate change meetings.

In case you haven't guessed, the "EP" in EPisode stands for engineering physics. When we renamed the department, we chose engineering physics to represent this breadth and to express both the underlying unity between our core disciplines and their wide-ranging applications. We're not lessening our historical commitment to engineering mechanics and nuclear engineering, but instead placing these disciplines in a broader context. We invite you to read further.

Gilbert A. Emmert
811 Engineering Research Building
1500 Engineering Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1687

Tel: 608/262-0764
Fax: 608/263-7451
E-mail: emmert@engr.wisc.edu