The book for this year’s Michigan Engineering Common Reading Experience is once again “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. Due to the success of last year’s program, excitement around William Kamkwamba’s visit to campus, and a student-led service experience in Malawi, the same book is being used for the new incoming first-year class. Every incoming first-year student received a copy of the book over the summer to read in preparation for discussion groups and events this fall. We invite all members of the CoE community to join us in reading the book and discussing it with students. Questions about the program may be directed to Stacie Edington, Honors and Engagement Program Officer, sjed@umich.edu or (734) 647-7015. commonread.engin.umich.edu

The Michigan Engineering social media community continues to grow. We have 51,050 Facebook fans (more than any other engineering college in the country); 14,875 Twitter followers (we’re #2 among our engineering peer schools); 3,217 Instagram friends and a rapidly growing and engaged Snapchat following--a new social media platform for the college. SnapChat is a platform that allows direct one-on-one engagement, and we are seeing a high engagement level with students around events such as Design Immersion and the first week of school that we hope to continue with upcoming large-scale events. If you have suggestions for those, please contact Ben Logan belogan@umich.edu.

A new initiative from the College gives alumni a chance to mentor students, judge design projects – even enhance our curriculum. A recent example of alumni volunteering and helping is seen in this video that will be used in Lisa Grimble’s Technical Communication class this fall. Watch the video here.

If you’d like to find out more about producing videos like the one above or have other ideas for getting alumni re-engaged through volunteering – serving as subject matter experts for projects, judging design projects, mentoring students, speaking on campus, etc., please contact MconneXby emailing coe-volunteers@umich.edu.

The College’s One Cool Thing app is rapidly growing its audience base, expanding by more than 25% with 65,000 screen views this month. It also received an award in the CASE Circle of Excellence competition. Look for version 2.0 of the One Cool Thing app for iPhone, Android and now iPad, too. This version will include new features like ‘shake for random cool thing,’ a dedicated feed for World Solar Challenge coverage, The Michigan Engineer feed (great photos of Ann Arbor, long-form feature stories, news from the college) and more. You can download the app now and get the update automatically. Search “One Cool Thing” in the App Store or Google Play.

Look for the fall issue of The Michigan Engineer magazine, coming out soon. This issue’s feature stories include our future with driverless cars, engineers helping to build a middle class in Ethiopia, Michigan’s role in the history of the Internet and how your thermostat might be a backdoor for cyber attacks. Plus, lots of great photos and news from the College.

We may not know how many football games we’ll win this year, but we DO know that we have the national champion Solar Car Team. Follow our coverage as our team takes on the world in the World Solar Challenge, October 18-25, in Australia.

Click here to go to the Michigan Solar Car Digital Gateway

The Center for Entrepreneurship launched a new undergraduate program this fall called the Entrepreneurs Leadership Program (ELP). ELP will take an elite cohort through a hands-on training experience. The program is designed to transform the group into active, entrepreneurial-minded leaders with increased impact in the classroom and workforce.

Graduate education at the Center for Entrepreneurship is designed to provide engineering graduate students, and other technical-focused students across the University, the opportunity to learn the tenets of innovation and entrepreneurship while supporting their growth and career aspirations. In partnership with the U-M School of Public Health, School of Information, School of Nursing, Medical School, Ross School of Business and Law School, CFE has designed six new graduate courses this semester. More than 180 graduate students already have enrolled. Courses will expose students to fundamentals in intellectual property strategy, interpersonal skills, running multi-disciplinary projects and more. As student demand for these courses continues to grow, the CFE plans to expand its graduate education curriculum into a full certificate and degree program within the next year, with a focus on technology and innovation to complement existing U-M graduate degrees.

While many U-M students were preparing for the first Ann “Arbaugh” home football game on Saturday, September 12, a group of about 1,500 hackers from Michigan and across the country were creating potentially life-changing technologies. At MHacks6, this year’s hackathon hosted by the Center for Entrepreneurship and organized by U-M student group MHacks, 274 “hack” projects were fully developed over 36 quick and exciting hours.

In addition to more than $50,000 in cash and technology prizes, students had the opportunity to impress Fortune500 companies such as Apple, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Delta Airlines. Students hacked-til-they-dropped, creating solutions for real business challenges set by sponsors and bringing their own ideas to life. The event resulted in on-the-spot internship offers, talks of technology licensing and the kick-start of student startups – all in one weekend.

This competition’s three winning teams were:

CFE Executive Director Tom Frank (pictured right) with CFE’s summer intern, U-M engineering student Tyler Laredo (pictured left), who ran record sponsorship engagement at this year’s MHacks.

Henry Sodano, Associate Professor
Professor Sodano received his BS, MS, and PhD in mechanical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He joins Michigan from the University of Florida where he has an associate professor. Previously he served as assistant professor at Arizona State University. Professor Sodano’s area of expertise lies at the boundaries of materials science and engineering, and his current research focuses on energy harvesting, nanotechnology, hybrid composites, and multifunctional materials.

Kelly Arnold, Assistant Professor
Professor Arnold received her BS in bioengineering from Rice University and her PhD in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia. She joins Michigan from MIT where she held a postdoctoral fellow appointment in the Biological Engineering department. Professor Arnold’s research interests are in experimental and computational systems biology applied to generate new insight into the human immune system.

Glen Daigger, Professor of Engineering Practice
Glen Daigger joined the College as Professor of Engineering Practice in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering on July 1, 2015. A recognized expert in wastewater treatment, especially the use of biological processes, Professor Daigger joins Michigan after being employed for more than three decades by CH2MHill, serving most recently as a Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. In CEE, Professor Daigger will contribute to the teaching of practice-oriented courses and provide leadership in the pursuit of center-scale national and international research and education initiatives, while also maintaining strong ties with professional practice.

Xianzhe Jia, Associate Professor
Professor Jia received a BS and MS from the University of Science and Technology of China. He also received a second MS and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously he served as assistant research scientist in the AOSS department at Michigan. Professor Jia’s primary research is in the field of planetary physics, specifically focusing on different planetary bodies’ interaction with the solar wind as well as the moon/planet interaction in a magnetic field and plasma environment.

Shasha Zou, Associate Professor
Professor Zou received her BS from the University of Science and Technology of China and her MS and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously she served as assistant research scientist in the AOSS department at. Professor Zou’s research interests are focused on understanding the coupled system made of the solar wind and of the terrestrial magnetosphere and ionosphere. Her research lies at the heart of Space Weather science.

Ron Dreslinski, Assistant Professor
Professor Dreslinksi received his BS in electrical engineering and computer engineering, MS in computer science and engineering, and PhD in computer science and engineering from the University of Michigan. Previously he served as assistant research scientist in the CSE division at Michigan. Professor Dreslinki’s research interests are in the area of computer architecture, with a focus on novel architectures capable of leveraging the continued scaling of semiconductor processes. He has pioneered the field of near-threshold computer architecture, which has become a key approach in harnessing the computational power of multicore computer systems.

Chad Jenkins, Associate Professor
Professor Jenkins received his BS in computer science and mathematics from Alma College, MS in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California. He joins Michigan from Brown University where he was associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. Professor Jenkins’ research explores methods that enable robots to learn human skills. His work also focuses on the development of robot systems for assisting disabled people.

Danai Koutra, Assistant Professor
Professor Koutra received her Diploma in computer science from the National Technical University of Athens and her MS and PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Koutra’s research interests are in data mining, with a focus on similarity and summarization of big graphs. Professor Koutra has designed scalable algorithms that combine global with local properties to assess the similarity between graphs or nodes, and summarize graphs in terms of their important structures or underlying models.

Walter Lasecki, Assistant Professor
Professor Lasecki received his BS in computer science and mathematics from Virginia Tech and MS in computer science and PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester. He joins Michigan from Carnegie Mellon University where he served as a visiting PhD researcher. Professor Lasecki’s research interests are in the area of human-computer interaction. His work combines human and machine computation to create intelligent systems that can solve problems ranging from accessibility needs for users with disabilities to rapid analysis of large data sets.

Chris Peikert, Associate Professor
Professor Peikert received his BS, ME, and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joins Michigan from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing where he held the rank of associate professor. Professor Peikert’s research interests are in the broader area of security with a focus on cryptography, computational complexity, and algorithms, especially in relation to lattices, error-correcting codes, and number theory.

Cindy Finelli, Associate Professor
Professor Finelli received her BS, MS, and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan. She previously served as research associate professor at Michigan Engineering. Professor Finelli actively engages in engineering education research. Her current funded research includes projects that study faculty motivation to adopt effective teaching practices that change the cultures of teaching and learning and that explore ethical decision-making in undergraduate engineering students. She leads an international initiative to create a keyword outline for the field of engineering education research.

Seth Guikema, Associate Professor
Professor Guikema received his PhD from Stanford University. He joins Michigan from Johns Hopkins University where he was an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. Prior to Johns Hopkins, he was an assistant professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M. Professor Guikema works in the broad area of risk analysis with a focus on (1) data-driven predictive modeling of system reliability in the face of natural hazards, (2) urban and infrastructure sustainability and risk analysis and management, (3) terrorist risk analysis, and (4) the development of risk management decision frameworks. One example of his work is the problem of predicting power outages as a result of hurricanes.

Ruiwei Jiang, Assistant Professor
Professor Jiang received his BS from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and his MS and PhD in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Florida. He joins Michigan from the University of Arizona’s Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering where he served as assistant professor. Professor Jiang’s work is in the broad area of stochastic optimization. In particular, he focuses on methodological issues merging stochastic programming, robust optimization, statistical analysis and data-driven modeling.

Matthew Plumlee, Assistant Professor
Professor Plumlee received his BS from Purdue University and his MS and PhD in industrial engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Professor Plumlee’s research interests lie in the methods for uncertainty quantification and risk management when using deterministic and stochastic simulation models. Professor Plumlee has worked on a variety of applied research topics ranging from biomedical engineering, stochastic simulation modeling, identifying defect patterns in manufacturing systems, weather systems and nano-manufacturing. His multi-faceted background in engineering allows him to develop both valid and realistically implementable approaches to address big-data problems.

Pascal Van Hentenryck, Professor
Professor Van Hentenryck received his BS and PhD in computer science from the University of Namur in Belgium. He joins Michigan from the Australian National University where he served as professor and strategic chair in Data-Intensive Computing. Professor Van Hentenryck is an expert in optimization in general and constraint programming in particular. Through his research, Professor Van Hentenryck manages a team of researchers working on logistic and supply chains, computational disaster management, future energy systems, and the underlying foundations and technology in data science, optimization, simulation, and visualization.

Qian Yu, Assistant Professor
Professor Yu received her BS and MS in materials science and engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University in China and her PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Yu’s research expertise is in the area of high-resolution materials characterization, specifically in situ and 3-D transmission electron microscopy (TEM). She has applied her skills in TEM to study defect phenomena in a variety of metallic materials such as magnesium and titanium that are relevant light-weight structural metals.

Jesse Austin-Breneman, Assistant Professor
Professor Austin-Breneman received his BS, MS, and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joins Michigan from MIT where he was a postdoctoral research associate. Professor Austin-Breneman’s research focuses on system-level approaches to difficult engineering design problems, such as large-scale complex system designs and product design for emerging markets. His work uses empirical studies, practitioner interviews and simulations to gain insight into issues facing multidisciplinary design teams working in these fields.