News

Portable Army Tower Wins Senior Capstone Competition

A collapsible, portable, multi-purpose tower made for U.S. Army base camps in the field won first prize in the competition for the best senior capstone design project in the Mechanical and Engineering (MIE) Department this year. The competition was held on May 1, when 15 teams of seniors demonstrated the prototypes of their useful, inventive, and brilliant designs. The winning team of Joseph Boisvert, Michael Covino, Christopher Dinan, Brandon Hicks, and Kyle Pereira conceived, designed, and built the scale model of a mobile tower for the U.S. Army Soldier Research Development & Engineering Center in Natick, Mass. The competition is the peak experience of a course called “MIE 415 Senior Design Project,” taught by MIE Professors Sundar Krishnamurty (spring semester) and Frank Sup (fall semester).

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Many Votes Generated for UMass IGERT Offshore Wind Energy Program

On May 23, the last day to vote on the national IGERT Online Video and Poster Competition, Principal Investigator Erin Baker of the UMass IGERT Offshore Wind Energy Program issued an urgent message for the entire College of Engineering Community: “We are in the top five vote-getters [out of over 200] in the NSF video poster contest. Please watch the video, hit the public choice button, and vote for us. If you have already voted, share this with other people to show the great work happening at UMass!” This year’s IGERT Online Video and Poster Competition allowed anyone to vote on over 200 presenters and co-presenters from 124 NSF funded IGERT projects as they demonstrated their innovative, interdisciplinary, graduate work. The URL for the competition is: http://posterhall.org/igert2013.

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Balasubramanian’s CAREER Award Aims to Improve Primary Care Delivery

Hari Balasubramanian of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been issued a $400,000 grant from the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The award represents the 34th NSF CAREER grant issued to faculty members from the UMass College of Engineering, and the fourth during the 2012-2013 academic year. The title of Balasubramanian’s industrial engineering NSF project is “Stochastic Models for Designing the Patient Centered Medical Home in Primary Care.” In essence, the project will streamline the delivery of primary care to patients.

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