From the Dean

Dear CoE Faculty and Staff,

I trust that the semester is going well. As you have witnessed, we have many new students and faculty in the College this fall! We always are busy recruiting top talent. The last weekend in September, we hosted 1500 prospective students and parents at Tech Day in CoE. I would like to thank everyone who participated, to help communicate the excitement of engineering. This past weekend, our campus was filled with alumni for Homecoming. We appreciated having the Governor attend the CoE Tailgate and interact with our student teams who were representing their projects. I continue to be grateful for the spirit and level of support that our alumni provide us.

I hope you enjoy perusing through this edition of the CoE newsletter. And, take time to enjoy the fall colors, as they begin to appear in earnest.

Best,

Dave

FY13 Research Expenditures

The College has recorded research expenditures of $206.7M in FY13, which represents a growth of 8.5% over FY12 and the first time expenditures have exceeded $200M in a single year. Highlights include major new awards such as the NASA CYGNSS program, the Silicon Research Corporation C-FAR award and significantly expanded collaborations with Ford Motor Company. Congratulations to all!

Campaign Kickoff

On November 7-8, an unprecedented effort to transform the College and position the University for a third century of problem-solving leadership and service will begin. With an ambitious aim to elevate the College to the next level of distinction, we will launch a comprehensive fundraising campaign—transcending any effort in the history of Michigan Engineering. Our campaign will be a major component of a University-wide effort, which will conclude after 2017, following U-M’s bicentennial. Later in October, details will be shared about the College’s plans.

Construction Updates

The GG Brown addition is well underway. The project is in its second year of construction and is approximately 60% complete. During this past winter, the steel framework was erected and the concrete floors were poured. Over the summer, the precast exterior wall panels were hung and work began on the interior walls and installation of the HVAC units, electrical conduit and plumbing systems. The project is on schedule for a May 2014 completion. Move-in will occur over next summer. The addition will open fully by fall 2014.

Design is progressing on the GG Brown renovation project. Currently, it is in the design development stage with a goal of requesting Regental approval for bid in March 2014. Renovation work will begin after the GG Brown addition is completed and continue until late in the summer of 2016.

Also in the design phase is the renovation project for the Nuclear Engineering Laboratories (former Ford Nuclear Reactor building). This project, which will house NERS research labs, offices and conference rooms, is scheduled to begin construction in the spring of 2014, with occupancy by late summer of 2015.

Rankings

The College maintained its #7 overall position in the U.S. News and World Report undergraduate rankings. Nearly every one of our undergraduate programs is among the top ten. As always, although we are delighted to be named consistently as one of the nation’s finest engineering programs, we recognize that this assessment is not the most accurate measure of our quality as an institution.

Student and Educational Programs Updates

Entering Class Statistics

Once again, the College welcomes an incredibly talented group of new undergraduate students: 11,169 applied for admission to the first-year class; 3,332 were accepted. This selectivity rate of just under 30% was significantly lower than last year’s 36%. Of those accepted, 1,267 matriculated; 30% of these are women. They hail from 41 states and 36 countries, with a mean ACT score of 32, mean SAT score of 1410, and mean high-school GPA of 3.9. Additionally, 973 applied as transfer students. Of those, 401 were admitted, and 381 matriculated; 161 of these are international students.

Recognition for Research in Engineering Education

Dr. Cynthia Finelli, Director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in Engineering (CRLT-E), was named a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).

Several members of the University have authored award-winning articles in engineering education. Dr. Shanna Daly (CRLT-E), Prof. Colleen Seifert (Psychology), and Prof. Richard Gonzales (Psychology) received the American Educational Research Association Outstanding Publication Award for their article, “Design heuristics in engineering concept generation.” Dr. Lorelle Meadows (CoE Undergrad Ed) and Prof. Denise Sekaquaptewa (Psychology) received the ASEE Women in Engineering’s Division Best Paper Award for their article, “The Influence of Gender Stereotypes on Role Adoption in Student Teams.” And, Dr. Finelli was an author on the article, “The comprehensive assessment of team member effectiveness: Development of a behaviorally anchored rating scale for self- and peer evaluation,” which was given the 2013 Maryellen Weimer Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award.

Mentors Needed for MDP and UROP Students

The Multidisciplinary Design Program (MDP) is soliciting faculty advisors for design projects. These projects are sponsored by a variety of outside organizations—industrial, governmental, and non-profit—and provide students with a valuable experience in modern, multidisciplinary engineering teams. Each team consists of five to seven upper-division undergraduate and master’s students working on a vetted project over two semesters (winter and fall) for delivery and use by a real customer, with support from a faculty mentor and a partner-sponsor mentor. Faculty mentors are expected to meet weekly with their teams, and also in limited sponsor meetings. MDP pays each faculty sponsor $6,000 plus reimbursement of travel expenses. Interested faculty should contact Gail Hohner, MDP managing director, at ghohner@umich.edu with any questions.

Also, MDP is seeking faculty members interested in hosting a design team. Students deliver project work that may include creating experimental test equipment, implementing research trials and/or creating prototypes. Projects may be as short as one academic year or may be ongoing over multiple years. Design teams incorporate first-year through graduate students and are organized to facilitate student development and long-term engagement.

More project sponsors are needed for the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). Many first- and second-year students have expressed an interest in research. Often, students continue productively for several years, and are among our most promising prospective graduate students. To learn more about UROP opportunities, visit http://www.lsa.umich.edu/urop/researchsponsors/prospectiveuropsponsors or contact Sandra Gregerman, UROP director, at sgreger@umich.edu.

Baja Team Claims Title of Season’s Best

Michigan Baja Racing completed one of its most successful seasons of all time. Earning overall rankings of 6^th (Tennessee), 1^st (Washington), and 4^th (New York) proved enough for the team to claim the ultimate prize: the Mike Schmidt Memorial Iron Team Award. This title is given to the team that accumulates the highest total number of points throughout the competition season. Each year, the Baja Team builds a single-seat, off-road car from the ground up to compete in various categories against up to 200 collegiate engineering teams from around the world.

MRacing Team Visits Detroit Athletic Club

More than 70 alumni headed out to the Motor City on August 20, to meet with Michigan Engineering’s Formula One Racing Team, MRacing. The team, which constructs and races a formula one race car every year, brought two of its vehicles to the Detroit Athletic Club for a tailgating event prior to the Detroit Tigers game. Alumni had an opportunity to see the cars up close—some even climbing in—and talk to student team members. Participants learned more about the MRacing team and program, and networked with other racing enthusiasts.

First-Year Common Reading Experience

In July, each of our incoming first-year students received a copy of The Travels of a T-Shirt in a Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli, as part of the newly created Michigan Engineering Common Reading Experience. Students connected online while reading the book, in preparation for events and discussion groups that will be held during the academic year. While summer reading programs are common at the university level, Michigan Engineering is one of the first to offer this type of program specifically for engineering students. The program emphasizes the importance of intellectual engagement and will facilitate meaningful discussion regarding the role of engineers in the 21st century. All members of the Michigan Engineering community are invited to connect with students by reading this book and attending related events throughout the academic year. If you have questions or your area is interested in sponsoring a related event, please contact Stacie Edington (sjed@umich.edu) in the Honors and Engagement Programs Office.

Office of the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education Updates

Amy Bellas has been appointed director of international relations. Amy will focus on cultivating international partnerships with government agencies, corporations and universities to support research, advancement and other areas of the College. Amy will maintain a dual reporting line in ADRGE and the Office of Advancement.

Tiffany Porties has been named assistant director for graduate education. For the last 10 years, Tiffany led graduate-student recruiting efforts for the Program in Biomedical Sciences (PIBS) in the Medical School. Tiffany’s focus will include College fellowships, graduate-student climate and retention, and CoE recruiting activities.

Effective July 1 of this year, the Center for Engineering Diversity and Outreach (CEDO) became part of the ADRGE office. Previously, CEDO was housed in the Office of the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education. CEDO’s move to the ADRGE office is designed to help strengthen its efforts to support graduate education and outreach.

Center for Entrepreneurship Updates

Faculty Updates

Ron Larson Named Interim BME Chair

Ron Larson has been named interim chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Formerly chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Ron is an experienced and accomplished faculty member. He is the A.H. White Distinguished University Professor of Chemical Engineering; George Granger Brown Professor of Chemical Engineering; and also holds an appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Junior Faculty Awards

Please join me in congratulating the following faculty members:

Eric Johnsen, ME, NSF CAREER Award
Emmanouil Kioupakis, MSE, NSF CAREER Award
Edwin Olson, CSE, DARPA Young Faculty Award
Mina Rais-Zadeh, ECE, ME, US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
Zhengya Zhang, ECE, Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program Award

Aerospace Engineering

Karthik Duraisamy, Assistant Professor
Professor Duraisamy’s primary research interest is in the development and application of numerical methods to simulate problems related to aerospace vehicles and renewable energy systems. Currently his work involves the development of computational algorithms, models and uncertainty quantification approaches with application to the aeromechanics of fixed and rotary wing aircraft, wind turbines and hypersonic cruise vehicles.

James Forbes, Assistant Professor
Professor Forbes is interested in control and estimation techniques for mechanical, aerospace, and robotic systems. In particular, he is interested in vibration control, spacecraft attitude control, the control of (flexible) robotic manipulators, and mobile robot localization.

Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences

Justin Kasper, Associate Professor
Professor Kasper designs sensors for spacecraft that explore extreme environments in space from the surface of the Sun to the outer edges of the solar system. He is interested in understanding the forces that lead to solar flares and the solar wind, a stream of particles heated to millions of degrees in the Sun's atmosphere, or corona. His major results concern heating, instabilities, and helium in the solar corona and solar wind, and the impact of space weather on society.

Gretchen Keppel-Aleks, Assistant Professor
The goal of Professor Keppel-Aleks’s current research is to link interannual and decadal variability in atmospheric CO₂ and other trace species to natural and anthropogenic processes. At Caltech, she studied how total column CO₂ observations can be used to infer robust estimates of large-scale carbon fluxes.

Eric Kort, Assistant Professor
Professor Kort’s research area is the study of greenhouse gases by using a multi-pronged approach through development of new instrumentation, in-situ atmospheric measurements, and data-model studies, all intent on improving our understanding of the atmospheric concentration and distribution of these climate relevant species, along with the key processes driving current trends in these trace gases.

Susan Lepri, Associate Professor
Professor Lepri’s research interests are in statistical, trend, error analysis and interpretation of solar wind composition data and magnetic field data; and magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) model validation of space plasmas with observational data.

Biomedical Engineering

Tim Bruns, Assistant Professor
Professor Bruns’s research focuses on interfacing with the peripheral nervous system. Projects in the lab include developing closed-loop neuroprostheses, examining systems-level neurophysiology in normal and dysfunctional states and designing and testing novel electrodes. Current primary interests include neural interfaces with dorsal root ganglia and restoring bladder function.

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Carol Menassa, Assistant Professor
Professor Menassa’s primary research couples her construction background with her expertise in financial engineering and system dynamics. In the future, she will extend the research beyond buildings to other infrastructure systems. In a second project, she also is studying life-cycle assessments and costs of alternative energy facilities.

Computer Science and Engineering

Jacob Abernethy, Assistant Professor
Professor Abernethy’s primary research interest is in machine learning, with a particular focus in sequential decision making, online learning, online algorithms and adversarial learning models.

Jason Mars, Assistant Professor
Professor Mars’s research interests include cross-layer systems architectures in both software and hardware, datacenter and warehouse scale computer architecture, and hardware / software co-design focused on native application performance, energy efficiency, and system utilization, particularly in the context of the latest innovations in microarchitectural design, runtime systems, and cloud computing.

Rada Mihalcea, Associate Professor
Professor Mihalcea’s research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, graph-based algorithms for natural language processing, and multilingual natural language processing. She currently is involved in a number of research projects, including word sense disambiguation, monolingual and cross-lingual semantic similarity, subjectivity, sentiment, and emotion analysis, multimodal affect analysis, and computational humor.

Barzan Mozafari, Assistant Professor
Professor Mozafari’s research interests include large-scale data-intensive systems, database-as-a-service clouds, data mining, query languages, and crowdsourcing.

Lingjia Tang, Assistant Professor
Professor Tang’s research focuses on compiler and runtime systems, especially such systems for warehouse scale datacenters.

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Necmiye Ozay, Assistant Professor
Professor Ozay’s research interests lie at the broad interface of dynamical systems, control, optimization and formal methods with applications in system identification and validation, autonomy and vision. She is particularly interested in developing novel event detection / information extraction algorithms from sensory data and designing robust cyber-physical systems that can autonomously react to these events and perform complex tasks in dynamic environments.

Becky Peterson, Assistant Professor
Professor Peterson’s research interests include novel electronic materials and their use in thin-film or planar field-effect transistors; micro/nano-fabrication techniques, including solution-processing of inorganic films; mechanical and electrical properties of semiconductor thin films.

Industrial and Operations Engineering

Clive D'Souza, Assistant Professor
Professor D’Souza studies the relationship between people and their environment; he designs products, software, and systems that are safer, more usable, and lead to greater productivity. His specific area of interest (inclusive design) looks at people with disabilities and their environment, in order to help them become more independent.

Materials Science and Engineering

Geeta Mehta, Assistant Professor
Professor Mehta’s research areas include bio-MEMS and microfluidics, biomaterials, molecular and cellular biomechanics, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine.

Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering

Pingsha Dong, Professor
Professor Dong’s research interests include computational modeling of welded structures, welding / joining process simulation, residual stress and distortion mitigation techniques, fatigue and fracture methodologies for welded structures, fitness-for-service assessment procedures, and advanced structural design and analysis methodologies for marine structures.

Matthew Johnson-Roberson, Assistant Professor
Professor Johnson-Roberson works on issues of perception and sensor processing for robotic platforms. He is interested in computer vision, machine learning, and visualization, specifically their applications to real-world problems in challenging unstructured environments.

Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences

Jim Raines, Assistant Research Scientist
Dr. Raines is a space plasma physicist interested in the solar wind and planetary magnetospheres, including that of the Earth. He works very closely with and is part of the operating teams for several Michigan-led plasma ion composition spectrometers on NASA’s MESSENGER, ACE and WIND spacecraft, as well as one under construction for ESA’s Solar Orbiter. His current research focus is on Mercury’s magnetosphere, mostly using data from the Fast Imaging Plasma Spectrometer (FIPS), which was built at Michigan (1998-2003) and has been orbiting Mercury on MESSENGER since 2011.

Chen Zhou, Assistant Research Scientist
Dr. Zhou’s research focus is on cloud and aerosol interactions as well as cloud microphysics, aerosol direct/indirect effects on climate change, and climate model development.

Biomedical Engineering

Aghapi Mordovanakis, Assistant Research Scientist
Dr. Mordovanakis’s research interests focus around the applications of femtosecond lasers in the biomedical sciences and engineering. Specifically, he has been contributing to the development of novel laser-assisted ophthalmic surgeries for the treatment of various eye diseases. Other areas of interest include laser machining of sub-micrometer 3D fluidic devices, as well as laser nanosurgery at the cellular and sub-cellular level.

Computer Science and Engineering

Carl Miller, Assistant Research Scientist
Dr. Miller’s research addresses the use of untrusted quantum devices to perform computational tasks. His primary goal is to develop quantum protocols whose effectiveness can be proven mathematically. Applications of interest include cryptography, random number generation, and communication over noisy channels.

Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences

Peng Zhang, Assistant Research Scientist
Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on the phenomenology of surface and interface science, including electrical and thermal contacts, surface roughness induced heating and field enhancements, surface flashover and discharge; relativistic magnetron, classical and quantum diodes, magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor instability, and laser-solid interaction.