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MIE Undergrads Make Semifinals of Social Venture Challenge

Industrial engineering major Christopher Greene and mechanical engineering major Moijue Kaikai earned a trip to St. Louis in April by qualifying as semifinalists in the Social Venture Challenge, a competition sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative, founded by former President Bill Clinton “to create and implement innovative solutions to the world's most pressing challenges.” At the St. Louis competition, Greene and Kaikai answered questions from judges and presented a poster, which was based on their ambitious proposal to install photovoltaic solar panels at a school in Cape Verde, while also cultivating collaborative efforts between that school and local schools in Western Massachusetts.

UDesign Uses Competition to Inspire Student CAD Design

Last semester, mechanical engineering major Elisabeth Foster had a brainstorm about how to upgrade students from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department and elsewhere in their CAD modeling and design skills. Why not take advantage of their competitive spirit? Foster’s brainchild was UDesign, a UMass registered student organization that uses design contests to drive its students. This semester, in fact, UDesign is also using a design contest to drive golf balls! “Our 40 members are divided up into groups of either four or five, and it’s a competition now,” said Foster, who is president of UDesign. “Who can propel a golf ball the farthest, using only the potential energy of a five-kilogram counterweight?” Link to UDesign Facebook page: facebook.72/

Alumnus Featured in Business West Article

SolaBlock, the brainchild of Patrick Quinlan, a 1982 graduate of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department and a former associate director for the UMass Wind Energy Center, was the subject of a long feature article by Joseph Bednar in the April 9 issue of Business West. SolaBlock is a simple but brilliant concept: Photovoltaic cells are built into cinderblocks, which are then used to build vertical walls — or laid over existing walls — where they generate energy from the sun. Read Business West article: http://businesswest.com/blog/bright-ideas-2/.

Badylak-Reals Blogs Her Way into Conference Spotlight

Senior Industrial Engineering major Jenn Badylak-Reals not only attended the Society for Health Systems (SHS) Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference, held from March 1 to 4 in New Orleans, but she presented a poster, and, beyond that, the conference website highlighted her astute critique of the conference on its homepage. “Fortunately for me,” Badylak-Reals posted, “my phenomenal engineering career center and father have taught me the necessity of networking and to pay forward my effort and work to set myself up for a happier and more successful situation later on. Thus it was a no-brainer for me, an industrial engineering student interested in the healthcare industry, to attend this year’s conference.” Read her entire critique: healthcare-systems-process-improvement-conference-2013/.

More Than 3,600 New Drivers Have Used Distractology 101

The Newton Patch reports that Distractology 101, an interactive driving simulator program developed by the Arbella Insurance Human Performance Laboratory in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, has now trained at least 3,621 new drivers about the dangers of distracted driving since it began touring the Northeast in 2010. Distractology 101 will be visiting Newton for a week beginning on February 26. The technology for Distractology 101 was developed under the leadership of Professor Donald Fisher, head of the MIE department and director of the Arbella Insurance Human Performance Laboratory, for the Arbella Insurance Group.

Hyers Teaches Class on Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Smith College

Robert W. Hyers of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department recently ran a weeklong class that, among other things, taught students at Smith College how to create a business plan and present it to investors. ” As Hyers said about his Smith course, “The class was about intellectual frameworks for evaluating business ideas. Ideas are like photographs; the best way to get a good one is to take a lot of them. Then the faster you can pick out the promising ones, the less time you'll invest in ideas that won't work.” The class was also covered by a feature article in the Hampshire Gazette.

Company of Alum Takes Winner of Winners Competition

The New England Clean Energy Council Institute (NECEC Institute) has announced that Black Island Wind Turbines of Springfield, a startup company founded by alumnus Patrick Quinlan ’82 of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department, has been awarded $50,000 as part of the institute’s Cleantech Innovations New England 2012 Winner of Winners competition. The award is meant to help clean-technology startups move closer to commercialization. Black Island is one of Quinlan’s two recently established companies that have been doing very well in business plan and accelerator competitions lately. Both of Quinlan’s startups are spinoffs of Celadon Innovation, founded by Quinlan to provide consulting services and renewable energy technology development.

Grosse Named Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers

Ian Grosse, the director of The Intelligent Modeling, Analysis, and Design Laboratory and a professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). According to ASME, “The Fellows Grade is the highest elected grade of membership within ASME, the attainment of which recognizes exceptional engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession.”

Engineering Team Uses Armstrong Fund for Science to Develop New Multi-rotor Offshore Wind Turbine

In May of 2012, a team of wind-power specialists from the College of Engineering was awarded a $30,000 grant from the Armstrong Fund for Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which the engineers are now using to help design, analyze, and optimize a new, multi-rotor, offshore wind turbine. For six years now, the Armstrong Fund has annually issued grants of $30,000 apiece over two years to a pair of teams to encourage transformative research that introduces new ways of thinking about pressing scientific or technical challenges. The engineering team, composed of Matthew Lackner and James Manwell from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and Sergio Breña of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, was chosen from among 22 proposals submitted last year.

McCaffrey Featured in the United Kingdom’s Guardian

The work of Anthony McCaffrey, postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for e-Design in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, was the subject of an article in The Guardian, one of the world’s most respected publications.The Guardian article is about how rethinking labels can boost creativity. McCaffrey says that thinking about common items in terms of their component parts and decoupling their names from their uses opens up new ways of thinking and solving problems. The article continued the international coverage for the method developed by McCaffrey to enhance anyone’s problem-solving skills, especially engineers, inventors, and other innovators. Media coverage includes articles in The Atlantic, Psych Central, Red Orbit, Science Daily, Science Codex, and a column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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