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Chemical Engineering Celebrates 100 Years at Ohio State
Faculty, students
and alumni of the Department of Chemical Engineering commemorated 100
years of chemical engineering at Ohio State at the
Chemical Engineering
Centennial Symposium, April 24 and 25. The Ohio State Department of Chemistry
was established in 1902. The first bachelor’s degree in chemical
engineering was awarded in 1904.
Guzzella is First Honda Visiting Scholar
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Guzzella |
Lino Guzzella was named the first Honda Visiting Scholar, a position established as part of the ongoing College of Engineering and Honda partnership. Guzzella, whose research interests include the modeling, control, and model-based optimization of mechatronic and energy systems using nonlinear and hybrid approaches, is currently the chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Technical University.
During his one year stay, Guzzella will interact with faculty, students
and researchers in the College of Engineering, and in particular in the
departments
of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering and the Center for Automotive
Research. He will teach courses in the departments of mechanical and
electrical engineering
as well as CAR’s industrial short course program. Guzzella will also
co-advise Ohio State’s Future Truck program.
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Kevin McAllister, general manager, GE Aircraft Engines, presents a check to Audeen Fentiman, civil and environmental engineering, Ohio State. |
Engineering and General Electric join forces to improve skills in mathematics
Officials from the General Electric Fund presented $500,000 to the College
of Engineering to support its Partnership for Math Excellence, a collaboration
between Ohio State and two Cincinnati public schools. The five-year program
intends to prepare and encourage students to go on to college and to
pursue careers in quantitative fields, such as engineering, by strengthening
the
math skills of high-school and junior-high students through a rigorous
math curriculum
featuring hands-on problem-solving experiences. The College of Engineering
will eventually expand the program to include other schools.
Yedavalli Elected Fellow of IEEE
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Rama Yedavalli |
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has elected Rama Yedavalli, Aerospace Engineering and Aviation, to the rank of Fellow. IEEE recognizes individuals whose “contributions to the art and science of electro- and information technologies world-wide have improved the quality of daily life.”
Among his accomplishments, Yedavalli
recently revitalized a dormant area in engineering research: the stability
analysis of uncertain systems.
This
research
has far-reaching implications for the design of control systems in applications
such as aircraft and spacecraft control, as well as control of other
mechanical, electrical, and chemical systems.
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Robert S. Brodkey Photo: Geoff Hulse |
Brodkey Elected Fellow of AAM
Robert S. Brodkey, Chemical Engineering, was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Mechanics, on November 20, 2002, “for pioneering research on the existence of coherent structures in turbulence using imaginative visualization techniques.”
His research in the field of fluid
mechanics includes specialization in fundamental turbulent fluid flow,
mixing, rheology, two-phase
flow, and
imaging for flow
measurements. He is well known for his graduate and undergraduate texts,
The Phenomena of Fluid Motions and Transport Phenomena: A Unified
Approach (with
H.C. Hershey), respectively.
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Aldemir |
Tunc Aldemir, Nuclear
Engineering, was elected Fellow of the American Nuclear Society in
recognition of his groundbreaking research in
dynamic methodology
development for system reliability and safety assessment, including
the development of a Markovian approach to system reliability and
safety assessment.
Ohio State Research Funding Breaks New Record
Research funding at Ohio State
has nearly doubled over the last five years, reaching a level of $426
million for the 2001-2002
fiscal
year. According
to Brad Moore, vice president of research at Ohio State, the
increase can be traced to Ohio State faculty who have been writing
more and
bigger proposals
and enjoying a higher success rate. In the 2001-2002 fiscal
year, 3,782 university research proposals were selected for funding,
an 8% increase
over the prior
year.
Valkenburgh is the Herb and Dee Dee Glimcher Distiguished Visiting Professor
Michael Van Valkenburgh has been appointed the Herb and Dee
Dee Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professor in Landscape
Architecture.
Van
Valkenburgh formed Michael
Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. in 1982, and currently
is a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University.
Ozkan Receives Society of Women Engineers Award
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Ozkan |
Umit Ozkan, Associate Dean for Research and professor of chemical engineering, received the 2002 Society of Women Engineers Award in October, the highest award presented by the society. The award is given annually to a woman who has made an outstanding contribution over a significant period of time in a field of engineering.
Ozkan was recognized for her
outstanding accomplishments as an internationally recognized and highly
respected researcher in heterogeneous catalysis,
as an excellent engineering educator, and as a dedicated leader in
higher education and in professional societies.
National Academy of Engineering Elects Fenton
Pioneer of Autonomous Vehicle Research Reflects on Career
If you’ve ever whiled away a sleepy morning trip to the office with fantasies of your car driving itself, then Robert Fenton is your man.
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) recently elected Fenton to its membership, citing his pioneering work on autonomous vehicle technology in the 1960s and ‘70s.
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Robert Fenton |
Though self-driving cars aren’t on the market yet, many of today’s cars feature technologies that were employed earlier in Fenton’s research. For instance, some new luxury cars use radar or ultrasound to detect objects near the car, warn drivers of collisions, and automatically adjust cruise control to maintain a safe distance from other cars.
It’s a fitting legacy for Fenton, who began his career searching for ways technology could improve the way people drive. He earned his doctorate in electrical engineering with an emphasis on ergonomics from Ohio State in 1965, and never left the University. He briefly explored new designs for car control -- including one that replaced a steering wheel with a joystick -- until his interests changed.
“Instead of trying to make drivers perform like an automated system, I decided to just develop the automated system,” he said.
No researcher truly pursued automated vehicle technology for the highway before Fenton did. Ohio State, he said, was the only place in the world that took a broad view on the subject.
Now a professor emeritus of electrical engineering, Fenton recalls a time when government money for automotive research -- and the jobs it would bring to Ohio -- ran flush. Ohio State transportation researchers convinced then governor James Rhodes to build the Transportation Research Center (TRC) northwest of Columbus in 1972. The 8,000-acre facility helped to attract automaker Honda to open a plant in nearby Marysville, and still provides a high-tech home for the University to collaborate with industry.
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It was a step up from some of Fenton’s other testing grounds -- including the parking lot of St. John Arena, and I-270 while it was under construction. The Ohio Department of Transportation gave him permission to run cars along isolated sections of the newly paved outer belt between the suburbs of Hilliard and Dublin. The arrangement worked fine until one night, when police mistook his equipment for the refuse of teenage drag racers. They hacked everything to pieces with axes -- including a long strip of wire the researchers had carefully taped to the road.
Back then, Fenton’s self-driving cars needed to follow the wire to stay on course. A large protuberance stuck out from the bumper of those early models, like a trailer hitch in reverse, packed with electronics to sense the current in the wire. Later, microelectronic technology brought the control equipment back inside the vehicle, so an automated car could look like any other car.
The cars usually ran caravan style, the lightning-fast computer control allowing them to execute maneuvers beyond the capability of the average human driver. They could, for instance, automatically steer within two inches of lane center at speeds approaching 80 mph.
At the height of his work, in 1980, Fenton had planned to coordinate the movement of 250 vehicles around the TRC facility -- three real cars that were programmed to move as if they were surrounded by 247 computer-generated cars. But just then, lack of funding forced him to abandon the autonomous vehicle program.
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Fenton did as much research as he could with pencil, paper, and computer. He continued his teaching career and assumed various administrative duties within the electrical engineering department.
Other autonomous vehicle labs sprang up around the country, most notably at the University of California, Berkeley, and Fenton saw a resurgence of interest in his work shortly before he retired in 1995.
Because of California’s massive traffic problems, that state’s department of transportation, Caltrans, studied whether self-driving cars would improve the capacity of its roadways. In 1997, Fenton had the honor of riding in a late-model autonomous car for a Caltrans demonstration in San Diego, where the assembled engineers hailed him as the pioneer of the automated highway.
“That was the pinnacle of my career,” he recalls.
Though Caltrans had to greatly scale back its autonomous vehicle project -- again, because of lack of government funding -- Fenton sees a time in the not-too-distant future when this kind of work is going to be critical to United States infrastructure.
“This is a great time to be a transportation engineer,” he said. “We’re needed more than ever. Right now, cities like L.A. have the worst traffic problems, but with urban growth, soon there will be L.A.s all over the country.”
To new engineers just entering the field, he says they should “expect that the funding is going to go up and down, and ride with the tide. You have to be able to shift goals and change as the funds change.”
With his election to the NAE, Fenton may be able to indirectly influence transportation funding, as the National Academies’ principal job is to advise the government on science and technology policy.
One of the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer, NAE membership honors those who have made important contributions to engineering theory and practice -- including significant contributions to the scientific literature of engineering theory and practice -- and those who have demonstrated unusual accomplishment in the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology.
With the addition of Fenton, Ohio State now boasts nine NAE
members.
Hojjat Adeli, Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been appointed to the editorial board of Communications in Numerical Methods in Engineering, International Journal of High-Performance Computing Applications, Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, Industrial Robot, and Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Systems.
Sheikh Akbar, Materials Science and Engineering, received the 2002 W. E. Cramer Award from the Central Ohio Section of the American Ceramic Society in December 2002, in recognition to his outstanding service to the section as well as to the ceramic industry.
Beth Blostein and Lisa Tilder, Architecture, were awarded the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Creative Achievement Award for conducting the 2002 Herbert Baumer Symposium, "Meta Media, Hyper Culture," at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Brooks Breeden, Landscape Architecture, received the 2002 Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) Award of Distinction for his “important long-term contributions to both the discipline of landscape architecture and to educators in landscape architecture.”
Dorota Brzezinska, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science and Jacques Zakin, Chemical Engineering, received an award from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization in Tokyo, Japan, for an international collaborative research project titled "Development of Practical Drag reduction Systems for District Cooling Systems."
Ann D. Christy, Food, Agricultural, and Biological Engineering, received the 2003 Teaching Award of Merit by the Ohio State Chapter of Gamma Sigma Delta (the Honor Society of Agriculture), February, 2003.
Jose B. Cruz, Electrical Engineering, was recognized for “his pioneering contributions to many areas in control theory and game theory both as a researcher and an educator,” with the dedication of the December 2002 special issue of the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications.
James Davis, Computer and Information Science, along with his graduate students Hui Gao and Vignesh Kannappan received a best paper award for their paper entitled "A Three-Mode Expressive Feature Model for Analysis and Recognition of Action Effort"at the IEEE Workshop on Motion and Video Computing.
Jennifer Evans-Cowley, City and Regional Planning, was elected to the Ohio Planning Conference Board and the Clintonville Area Commission.
Audeen Fentiman, Nuclear Engineering, was elected to the board of directors of the American Nuclear Society.
Somnath Ghosh, Mechanical Engineering, presented a keynote lecture on “Multi-Scale Computational Modeling of Failure in Heterogenous Structures” at the Polish National Congress of Solid Mechanics in Zakopane, Poland, September 2002. Ghosh also presented a plenary talk at the Multi-Scale Computational Mechanics for Materials and Structures, Cachan, France, in September and at the 2nd Symposium on Computational Modeling of Multi-Scale Phenomena, in August in Petropolis, Brazil.
Kay Bea Jones, Architecture, had her paper, “Seeing Through Franco Albini: Domestic Modernity in Rationalist Italy,” chosen as a "best paper" in the ACSA Regional Conferences.
Dr. Rongxing (Ron) Li, Civil Engineering, and his co-author Zhuowen Tu tied for Second Honorable Mention for the 2003 Talbert Abrams Award from the American Society for Photogrammetry & Remote Sensing for "A Framework for Automatic Recognition of Spatial Features from Mobile Mapping Imagery."
M.J. Moran, Mechanical Engineering, received a "Doctor Honoris Causa " (honorary doctorate) for achievement in engineering thermodynamics from the University of Galati, Romania, May 2002.
Bart Overly, Architecture, received a merit award from Entablature.com's "Best Architecture Web Sites of 2002" competition for the Knowlton School’s web site.
Umit Ozkan, Chemical Engineering and assistant dean for research in engineering, was named “Technical Person of the Year” by the Columbus Technical Council (CTC) for her outstanding accomplishments as an internationally recognized researcher in heterogeneous catalysis, excellence as an engineering educator, and leader and trailblazer in higher education.
D.K. Panda, Computer and Information Science, along with former students Vinod Tipparaju and Jarek Nieplocha of Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL), had their paper, entitled "Fast Collective Operations Using Shared and Remote Memory Access Protocols on Clusters," selected as best paper in the software track of 17th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, April 2003, Nice, France.
Robert Parker, Mechanical Engineering, has been named associate editor of the Journal of Vibration and Acoustics, a journal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, for a term of three years.
Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Computer and Information Science, and his graduate student, Matt Coatney, won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM '02) in Maebashi City, Gumma Prefecture, Japan for their paper entitled "Efficient Discovery of Common Substructures in Macromolecules."
Robert Rapp, Materials Science and Engineering, received The Mining, Metals and Materials Society Educator's Award at the March 2003 Annual Meeting in San Diego. TMS recognized Rapp for his contributions to teaching and advising students during 40 years as a faculty member in the Materials Science and Engineering Department.
Rajendra Singh, Mechanical Engineering and Center for Automotive Research, was elected president of the Institute of Noise Control Engineering (INCE/USA).
Carolyn M. Sommerich, Industrial and Systems Engineering, was elected to a three-year term as an At-Large Member of the Executive Council of The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
Lisa Tilder, Architecture, was awarded the 2002 Far Eastern International Digital Design Award (FEIDAD) Design Merit Award for her project, "Simulacra Server Chapel."
Charles Toth, Center for Mapping, received the Best Presentation Award, at the International Technical Meeting of the Institute of Navigation (ION GPS), Portland, Oregon, September 2002 for their paper, “Modern Remote Sensing Techniques Supporting Traffic Flow Estimates.”
Steve Turk, Architecture, had his “A House for Durer” exhibited in Sibiu, Romania and at the Kuturgeschichtliches Museum in Osnabrueck, Germany.
Dave Woods, Industrial and Systems Engineering, delivered the plenary address, "Laws that Govern Cognitive Work," at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Fairfax, VA, August 10, 2002.
Stuart Zweben, Computer and
Information Science, was named the Outstanding Educator Advancing Technology
by the Columbus Technology Council at
the annual Top CAT Award (Top Contributors to the Advancement of Technology)
banquet. The award is given "to the educator in a public, private,
corporate or non-profit organization demonstrating outstanding contributions
in the advancement of technology through training, teaching and/or
research."
Mireille Battikha joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Battikha, whose expertise includes construction engineering and management, is the designer of several multimillion dollar construction projects and the inventor of cutting edge software for managing quality in construction. Battikha earned her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.
Donna Byron joined the Department of Computer and Information Science as an assistant professor in the area of artificial intelligence. Byron, whose expertise includes automated natural language understanding, conducts research on building software interfaces that employ conversational speech. Byron completed a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Rochester in 2002.
Patrick J. Fox joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science as an associate professor in the area of geotechnical engineering. His areas of expertise include flow through porous media, large strain consolidation, soft soils, geosynthetics, solid waste landfills, advanced soil testing, retaining structures, and computational methods. Prior to joining Ohio State, Fox was an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Fox earned a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992.
John J. Lenhart joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science as an assistant professor in environmental engineering. Hired through the cross-university Program of Excellence in Environmental Molecular Surface Science, Lenhart will be performing research in physical/chemical processes. Prior to joining Ohio State, Lenhart was employed at Yale University. Lenhart received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the Colorado School of Mines.
Antanas (Nasko) Rountev joined the Computer and Information Science department as an assistant professor. Rountev, whose research interests include software engineering and program languages, received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2002.