STUDENT NEWS
The UW-Madison Hybrid Vehicle Team and its advisor, Faculty Associate Glenn Bower, were featured on the local station WISC-TV 3 in late October. Also known as Team Paradigm, the group builds hybrid electric vehicles for competition and holds three national championships, a fact that was noted in the Channel 3 story. The story highlighted the team’s current challenge, which is to modify a 2005 Chevrolet Equinox sports utility vehicle for higher gas mileage while maintaining its performance. The students are renovating the Equinox for Challenge X, a three-year student design competition, now in its second year, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors.
Kevin Eichinger, an ME undergraduate who is currently doing a co-op at Mercury Marine in Fond du Lac, Wis., competed in Madison’s Ironman Wisconsin Triathlon in early September. At age 20, he was one of the youngest athletes in the event. He finished in 12 hours, 34 minutes, placing 405 out of 1678 finishers and 22nd in his age category. The wind, humidity and 94-degree heat prompted Ironman’s president to call the event “Carnage Man” and one of the most difficult he had witnessed. “It was a grueling event,” said Eichinger. “But there isn’t another feeling like crossing that finish line! Pain is temporary. Quitting is forever.”
Juan Pablo Hernandez, a student of Professor Tim A. Osswald, recently won the Ensinger Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in the field of plastics technology during the last year. The Ensinger Prize is awarded annually by the WAK (Scientific Alliance of Plastics Technology), a group of 25 German university professors in the area of plastics technology. ME’s Polymer Engineering Center is the only U.S. center that is a member of the WAK, and therefore its theses, papers and other publications are considered by the WAK as part of the German plastics technology literature. Hernandez accepted the prize in Chemnitz, Germany on Nov. 11, 2005. The prize carries a 5,000 EUR award.
Among several University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering students named as Academic All-Big Ten athletes for the spring 2005 season were ME sophomore Andrew Kaufman (men’s rowing) and seniors John Dyreby (men’s rowing), Luke Kohtala (men’s hockey), Katie McGaffigan (women’s tennis) and Kevin Tassistro (men’s golf). To qualify, recipients must be letter winners in at least their second year and maintain at least a cumulative 3.0 grade point average.
Madhura Nataraju, a student of Professor Roxann Engelstad, took second place in a competition for best paper at the 25th Annual BACUS Symposium on Photomask Technology, held in Monterey, Calif. in early October. The paper entitled, “Electrostatic chucking and EUVL mask flatness analysis,” includes coauthors Nataraju, Engelstad, Associate Researcher Andrew Mikkelson and Professor Edward Lovell. BACUS is the international technical group of SPIE (the International Society for Optical Engineering) dedicated to the advancement of photomask technology.
