News

23 Engineering Students Present in Research Conference

The College of Engineering was well-represented on April 26 during the 19th Annual Statewide Undergraduate Research Conference at the UMass Amherst Campus Center. Some 23 students from chemical, civil, and mechanical engineering were among more than 830 students from campuses across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts giving poster and oral presentations from a wide range of academic disciplines throughout the day. The faculty sponsor for almost half of those engineering projects was Jessica Schiffman of the Chemical Engineering Department who sponsored nine chemical engineering student presentations. Each year undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds from across the Massachusetts Public System of Higher Education gather to present the results of their original work in oral and poster presentations before their peers, faculty, and the public.

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Perrell Receives Distinguished Achievement Award at Commencement

Alumnus Charles F. Perrell, investor and principal in Perrell Ventures, will receive a Distinguished Achievement Award, recognizing high accomplishment in a given field or profession and notable contributions to society, when 5,500 graduating seniors gather at McGuirk Alumni Stadium on May 10 at 5:00 p.m. for Undergraduate Commencement. Now retired, Perrell has been a prominent engineer, businessman, venture capitalist, philanthropist, and recipient of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Distinguished Alumni Award. After stepping down as a fulltime technology executive, Perrell remains energetically active as an angel investor and vineyard operator.  

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Follow-up Study Finds Older Drivers Retain Safe-driver Training

A press release issued by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society spotlights a study by Research Professor Matthew Romoser of the Arbella Human Performance Laboratory in our Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department. His new study shows that healthy older drivers, 70 to 89 years of age, retained safe-driver training two years after taking a driver behavior-modification course at the laboratory in 2009. The 2009 training emphasized safe road-scanning conduct at intersections by retraining older drivers to take secondary looks at the cross traffic coming from both directions. As the release notes, “Two years after their training, older drivers in the trained group still took secondary looks on average 73 percent of the time, more than one and a half times as often as pre-training levels.” Read release: https://www.hfes.org/web/DetailNews.aspx?Id=303.

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