News

Former MIE Professor Al Russell Passes Away

Former Mechanical Engineering Professor George Albert (Al) Russell of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who taught in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department for 34 years after earning his doctorate in 1968, died April 11 following a brief illness. Professor Russell was born in Steger, Illinois, on August 29, 1936. During his years at UMass Amherst, he was also a consultant for the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Defense, Digital Equipment Corporation, and other agencies and organizations.

Three Chosen for COE Outstanding Faculty Awards

The College of Engineering has chosen Professor Sandip Kundu of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to receive its 2012 Outstanding Senior Faculty Award and Assistant Professor Jenna Marquard of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department to receive its 2012 Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. Associate Professor James Rinderle of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department was previously selected to receive the 2012 Outstanding Teaching Award.

Innovation Challenge Awards More Than $55,000 in Prize Money

On April 17, FACTbase, a team of students, alumni, and faculty entrepreneurs marketing a new technology that will save the oil industry and climate scientists time and money, won the grand prize of $25,000 at the seventh annual University of Massachusetts Innovation Challenge. Plate Technologies, which delivers precision instrumentation for rapid success of biological-cell-culture-based experiments, won $14,000 at the event, while Sweet Seat, pitching a premium bicycle seat that delivers comfort through design, took home $8,000. Not to be outdone, Sneakers for Success, a non-profit organization which uses the so-called “sneaker culture” of urban lifestyle to motivate under-privileged youth toward academic success, won three prizes totaling $8,250.

Five Teams Make Innovation Challenge Finals

On Tuesday afternoon, April 17, come watch five teams of student entrepreneurs pitch business plans based on brilliant innovations to a panel of expert judges. With over $50,000 in prize money available, the gala event is the culmination of the seventh annual University of Massachusetts Innovation Challenge. The competition will be held in the Amherst Room on the 10^th floor of the UMass Amherst Campus Center, starting at 3:30 p.m. The competition is free and open to the public, and the media are cordially invited. Student innovators and entrepreneurs will make investor presentations from 3:30 to approximately 5:30 p.m. that day. Judges must decide which team has the best entrepreneurial plan for taking a new idea to market. The winning team or teams will be announced at about 6:45 p.m.

Alumnus Helps Build Cyborg Walking Machine

Mechanical engineering alumnus Michael McKinley, now a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley, was on a team of engineers that built a machine enabling a paraplegic senior to rise from his wheelchair and stride across the commencement stage for graduation. The story was told in a long and beautifully written feature carried by Popular Science Magazine: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-08/first-steps-cyborg. “Austin Whitney didn’t want to graduate from college in a wheelchair,” as the story began. “So he and the student engineers at U.C. Berkeley’s ‘Kaz Lab’ built a machine that allowed him to stand up and walk across the commencement stage.” As McKinley characterized the event in the story, “This in many ways is like a moon launch.”

First Female African-American MIE Graduate Lectures Here on April 12

Cheryl Snead, the first African-American woman to graduate with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UMass Amherst, will give a public lecture on April 12 on the 10^th floor of the Campus Center from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Ms. Snead is the founder, president, and CEO of Banneker Industries of Smithfield, Rhode Island, and Indianapolis, Indiana. She is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Small Business Leader of the Year as presented by the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, the Woman of Courage Emerging Business Award from the National Federation of Black Women Business Owners, the Labor and Enterprise Award from the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, the New England Minority Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and the Rhode Island Business and Professional Women’s “Women Mean Business” Award.

College Proposes Seminar Series in Materials Science

The College of Engineering is responding to the insatiable demand for new materials in virtually all industries by proposing a Materials Science Seminar Series, which would help to integrate several different materials engineering disciplines and introduce our students to leading materials engineers throughout the country. “Materials engineering is all around us,” says Ashwin Ramasubramaniam of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, who is organizing the effort to establish the seminar series. “From buildings to transportation to the electronic devices we use every day, the materials involved have been designed or chosen carefully for the task.” Anyone interested in supporting this exciting new initiative can contact Paula Sakey, the director of development at the college, at 413-545-6396 or psakey@ecs.umass.edu.

Hyers Chosen for Key Award

The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) has awarded Robert Hyers of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department the 2012 Brimacombe Medal, presented to only three people as chosen from the 12,000 members of TMS. This will be the inaugural presentation of the award. The citation reads, “For sustained excellence and achievements in materials science and engineering through process modeling and experiments on the nature and properties of liquid metals." The award is the society’s new mid-career award. According to the TMS, the Brimacombe award “recognizes an individual with sustained excellence and achievement in business, technology, education, public policy, or science related to materials science and engineering with the intent to recognize professionals in the middle portion of their career.”

Engineering Students Honored by Alumni Association

Five highly accomplished engineering students will be honored on April 1 by the UMass Amherst Alumni Association at its Scholarships & Awards Reception, held at 10:00 a.m. in the Marriott Center on the 11th Floor of the Campus Center on campus. Chemical engineering major Aidan Gilchrist ’13, electrical engineering major Dustin Lagoy ’13, civil engineering major Timothy Light ’13, and mechanical engineering major Natalie Zucker ’13 will receive William F. Field Alumni Scholarships, while mechanical engineering major Andrew Erwin will receive a Senior Leadership Award.

Danai Lectures at United Technologies Research Center on March 22

Professor of Mechanical Engineering Kourosh Danai will give a Fellows Lecture at the United Technologies Research Center on March 22. He will discuss a novel method of Jet Engine Health Monitoring that will be published in the ASME Trans. on Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power. Professor Danai joined the faculty of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department in 1987. His research is focused on development of robust automation solutions. With his students he has devised the pattern classifying fault diagnostic method Multi-Valued Influence Matrix (MVIM) and the Structure-Based Connectionist Network (SBCN) for fault diagnosis of helicopter gearboxes. The MVIM method can assess the “diagnosability” of the system and use that for sensor selection and optimization.

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