According to the Falmouth Patch, the trailer featuring the Distractology® program, developed by the UMass Amherst College of Engineering and the Arbella Insurance Foundation, visited Falmouth High School on Cape Cod from November 12 to 15. The program shows students the dangers of driving while talking on the phone, texting, or any other common distraction.
News
Anna Goldstein
An opinion piece in The Hill, co-authored by senior research fellow Anna Goldstein of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, says the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is playing a key role in supporting development of technologies that will help ease the transition from reliance on fossil fuels. The authors say this agency needs support and funding to boost the technological advances needed to reshape the energy environment.
Destenie Nock
Alumna Destenie Nock has joined the departments of Engineering & Public Policy (EPP) and Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Carnegie Mellon University this fall. She will begin as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in EPP with an adjunct-faculty appointment to CEE, before starting as a tenure-track assistant professor in both EPP and CEE in the 2020 academic year. She earned her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UMass in 2019, where her research focused broadly on energy systems modelling. She applied optimization and decision analysis to evaluate the reliability and sustainability of electricity grids in New England and Liberia.
Congratulations to the College of Engineering team of graduate students Harshad Kulkarni, Arjun Mohan, Husain Tawawala, and Aashish Yadav, who won the EY (for Ernst & Young Partners In Education Program) Inclusive Leadership Case Competition held on October 18 during the two-day Inclusive Leadership Summit (ILS), hosted by EY and the Isenberg School of Management as the nexus of campus diversity and inclusion efforts. The competition challenged students to better understand the thinking around inclusion and diversity in the workplace.
Jinglei Ping
Jinglei Ping, an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department (MIE) in the College of Engineering as well as in the Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS), has been awarded a prestigious early career award from the Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) in the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) to study “Multiscale Electrical Mapping of Biosystems.” Ping is one of 40 U.S. scientists and engineers chosen to receive the YIP grants for 2020.
Jaydeep Radadiya
Sophomore Jaydeep Radadiya of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department was the recipient of the 2019 Undergraduate Excellence Award presented by the Safety Research Using Simulation (SAFER-SIM) Tier 1 University Transportation Center. The award was based "upon accomplishments in three areas: technical merit and research capability, academic performance, and leadership."
Tingyi “Leo” Liu
A team of researchers from UMass Amherst and UCLA has developed a new, simple method of manipulating small droplets on a hydrophilic surface, an innovative strategy described in a recent paper published in the journal Nature. The team includes Tingyi “Leo” Liu of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department who is head of the Interdisciplinary Interface Engineering Laboratory. Liu says the new method reverses what scientists already know about a phenomenon called electrowetting, in which droplets of liquid are attracted to and spread on a conductive surface in response to an applied voltage. See Science & Technology Research News and News Office release.
Chaitra Gopalappa
A team of researchers headed by Chaitra Gopalappa of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department has been awarded a four-year, $1.2-million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a multi-disease model of interrelated diseases for studying the impact of public health investments on overall health. This multidisciplinary project involves engineering, computer science, and social sciences research aimed at building new decision-analytic models for informing national and global public health decisions. See India New England News and News Office release.
Assistant Professor Wen Chen (MIE) was the co-lead author of a trailblazing paper that describes innovative new research to use computational approaches for optimizing the design of 3D-printed parts. The paper was published in Science Advances and was written in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Lab.
James Manwell
James F. Manwell, director of the UMass Wind Energy Center and a professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, was the primary author of a critical section of a wind-energy article published in the journal Science. The article is entitled "Grand challenges in the science of wind energy." The process that led to this article also generated the theme – the Grand Vision for Wind Energy – of a formative conference, which will take place at UMass Amherst from October 14 to 16.
