Undergraduate student Matthew Eden of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department has been selected as one of six finalists for the 2018 Undergraduate O.R. Prize Competition at the annual meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in Phoenix, Arizona, from November 4 to 7. Eden’s research paper is titled "Evolving contact network algorithm: a new simulation method for modeling HIV, a disease with low prevalence but a critical public health issue in the US."
News
Krish Thiagarajan Sharman
On July 19, Professor Krish Thiagarajan Sharman, the newly appointed Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy within the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, made an official visit to the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER) and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center along with College of Engineering Dean Tim Anderson. This meeting was set up with the aim of introducing the endowed chair to the DOER. Dr. Sharman is an expert on marine renewable energy and energy producing offshore structures.
Once again the UMass Amherst College of Engineering ranks among the nation’s top engineering programs, climbing this year to No. 33 public in the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges 2019.
Sierra Magazine, the national magazine of the Sierra Club, has placed the University of Massachusetts Amherst at No. 7 in its 12th annual “Cool Schools” ranking of North America’s greenest colleges and universities (See UMass News Office Story). The College of Engineering certainly must be considered in the forefront of this UMass surge toward the top of greenest schools in North America. A list of just a few recent projects will confirm this fact.
Erin Baker
Erin Baker, the Armstrong Professional Development Professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and the director of the UMass IGERT Offshore Wind Energy Program, has been appointed the new associate dean in the College of Engineering, a key position that includes more than a dozen significant job responsibilities.
Krish Thiagarajan Sharman
Krish Thiagarajan Sharman, an expert on marine renewable energy and energy producing offshore structures, has been appointed to the Endowed Chair in Renewable Energy in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the UMass Amherst College of Engineering. The chair was established in 2014 with $2.5 million in funding from the state Department of Energy Resources (DOER) to attract a preeminent scholar in the field to provide leadership in positioning both the university and the Commonwealth to take advantage of opportunities in emerging areas of renewable energy. Thiagarajan Sharman will collaborate with DOER staff on renewable energy research and projects. (Renewablesnaps.com, 7/24/18; News Office release)
EWB Team Installs Simple, User-friendly, and Effective Water-filtering System in Rural Ghana Village
On August 10th, an eight-person team from the UMass Amherst Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Chapter travelled to Saviefe-Deme in Ghana to implement an inexpensive biosand water filter project. Saviefe-Deme is a small community in the Volta Region, along the southern part of Ghana, which houses a few hundred people. The EWB group tackled a big challenge during its August trip, to implement a low-maintenance and cost-effective strategy for bringing clean water to Saviefe-Deme.
David Schmidt
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Fluids Engineering Division has presented Professor David Schmidt of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and three co-authors with ASME’s prestigious 2018 Lewis F. Moody Award for their paper on "Modeling Sealing in Transient Injector Simulations.” Among other innovations, the award-winning paper described groundbreaking research to create the first simulation of a multiple injection event.
Yubing Sun (r)
A team of researchers including Assistant Professor Yubing Sun of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department has demonstrated that human pluripotent stem cells can be guided to become the precursors of the central nervous system and that mechanical signals play a key role in this process. Sun and his colleagues outlined their findings in a recent paper published in the journal Nature Materials. Sun is a co-first author and co-corresponding author of the paper.
See Science & Technology Research News and News Office release.
Tammy Haut Donahue
The College welcomes Tammy Haut Donahue, Professor/Department Head, BME; Konstantinos Andreadis, Asst. Professor, CEE; Seth Donahue, Professor, BME; Govind Srimathveeravalli, Asst. Professor, MIE; Omar Abdelrahman, Asst. Professor, ChE; Yanfei Xu, Asst. Professor, MIE; Peng Bai, Asst. Professor, ChE; Anuj Pradhan, Asst. Professor, MIE; Jinglei Ping, Asst. Professor, MIE; and Wen Chen, Asst. Professor, MIE.
