Fall/Winter 2010, Vol. 7 No. 1
Look Inside…
Formula Hybrid Places
Third in International Race
Student Turn Bridge Into
Living Laboratory
Smart House Unveils
New Plans
A Message from the Dean
CoE has reached the most exciting time of the year,
National Engineers Week. This year, we’ll celebrate
with a series of events February 15-19 held on
Drexel's campus and in Philadelphia. We take great
pride in celebrating the hard work of our students,
faculty, staff and alumni. CoE believes it’s important
to recognize the efforts engineers are making to
create a better tomorrow. It’s not only a way of
saying thank you for your dedication; it’s a way of
raising awareness of the contributions made to the
sciences and technology. During our week-long
activities, we'll have the pleasure of honoring
one of the finest leaders in engineering, Dr.
Charles M. Vest, as our 2010 Engineer
of the Year. As president of the
National Academy of Engineering
and president emeritus of the
Massachusettes Institute of
Technology (MIT), Dr. Vest is
a role model to our
community. We hope
you'll join us in celebrating
Engineering Week as we
recognize the
accomplishments of our
invaluable engineers.
President of National Academy
of Engineering Named Drexel’s
Engineer of the Year
Dr. Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of
Engineering and President Emeritus of Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, will be honored as Drexel
University’s 2010 Engineer of the Year.
“Dr.Vest is among one of the great leaders in engineering. We’re humbled
we have the opportunity to honor him for his advances in science and technology
during our Engineers Week celebration,” said Dr. Selçuk Güçeri, dean of the
College of Engineering.
Dr.Vest served as president of MIT from 1990-2004. During his tenure, he forged
partnerships with academia, government and industry and advocated for open,
global scientific communication, travel and sharing of intellectual resources. In
addition to his accomplishments in education, Dr.Vest has served on the Board of
Directors at DuPont and IBM, was vice chair of the U.S. Council on
Competitiveness and served on various federal committees and commissions. In
2006, he received the 2006 National Medal of Technology from President Bush for
his “visionary leadership in advancing America's technological workforce and
capacity for innovation through revitalizing the national partnership among
academia, government and industry.”
Dr.Vest is a pioneer in holographic interferometry, a field that takes holographic
images of two similar scenes in order to display slight differences between those
scenes. This is used for a variety of real-time, non-invasive engineering functions,
including vibration and structural analysis and stress evaluation. As a faculty member
at the University of Michigan, Dr.Vest and his graduate students used holographic
interferometry to develop quantitative measurements of properties and motions.
In honor of Dr.Vest’s contributions to engineering, he will be recognized at a
ceremony on February 19, 2010 at the Rittenhouse Hotel that will conclude
Drexel’s celebration of National Engineers Week. For more information about
Drexel’s 2010 Engineers Week, please visit app.coe.drexel.edu/eweek
— Dean Selçuk Güçeri
A Newsletter for Students, Parents and Friends of Drexel University’s College of Engineering
CoE Welcomes New Faculty
In preparation for another successful year, CoE is excited to announce 10 new faculty members are joining us. The new faculty members bring
innovative and exciting ideas in a wide range of technological areas and seek to inspire Drexel students in many unique fields of engineering.
Welcome new faculty!
Priscilla Fonseca (CAEE)
Dr. Fonseca joined the CAEE department as an
assistant professor. She received her PhD from
Northwestern University. Dr. Fonseca concentrates
on modeling and characterizing the nanostructure of
cement-based materials and developing links to
macro-scale properties.
Mark Hempstead (ECE)
Hempstead joined the ECE department as the
Junior Colehower Chair assistant professor. He
received his PhD degree from Harvard University.
He is interested in reducing the energy consumed by
computing devices through power aware computer
architecture and VLSI design.
Jin Kang (MEM)
Dr. Kang joined the MEM department as a lecturer.
He received his PhD from Korea Aerospace
University in satellite systems. His main research area
is in space systems engineering. He is currently
working to develop Drexel’s first satellite.
Antonios Kontsos (MEM)
Dr. Kontsos joined the MEM department as an
assistant professor. He received his PhD degree from
Rice University of Houston in MEM. His research
interests are in the area of engineering mechanics
with an emphasis on theoretical, computational and
probabilistic methods in modeling advanced materials
and their implementation in a variety of engineering
applications.
Emin Kumbur (MEM)
Dr. Kumbur joined the MEM department as
an assistant professor. He received his PhD
degree from Pennsylvania State University. His
research concentrates on next generation energy
technologies and thermal-fluid systems. Dr. Kumbar is
particularly interested in the design and development
of fuel cell systems for portable, automotive and
stationary applications.
Steven May (MSE)
Dr. May joined the MSE department as an
assistant professor. He received his PhD from
Northwestern University. He joins us from
Argonne National Laboratory where he
worked on improving the properties of
magnetic materials by controlling their atomic
structure. At Drexel, he will focus on using
similar synthesis strategies to develop materials
for energy conversion and storage applications.
Anu Raj Pradhan (CAEE)
Dr. Pradhan joined the CAEE department as an
assistant professor. He received his PhD degree
from Carnegie Mellon University. His research
interests span the areas of infrastructure
management and construction engineering.
He's particularly interested in leveraging
computer-aided tools and sensing technologies
to support the construction and maintenance of critical
infrastructure systems such as buildings, bridges and highways.
Kurt Sjoblom (CAEE)
Dr. Sjoblom joined the CAEE department as an
associate teaching professor. He received his PhD
from MIT specializing in experimental
geomechanics. He has an interest in laboratory
testing of geotechnical materials. Dr. Sjoblom will be
teaching soil mechanics and foundation engineering.
Ying Sun (MEM)
Dr. Sun joined the MEM department as an
assistant professor. She received her PhD from the
University of Iowa. Dr. Sun is a recipient of the
NSF CAREER award. Her research interests
include multiscale modeling and in-situ
observation of transport phenomena in materials
processing, energy and biological systems.
Michael Waring (CAEE)
Dr.Waring joined the CAEE department as
an assistant professor. He received his PhD in
civil engineering from the University of Texas
at Austin. His research on indoor air quality
focuses on the liquid-phase nano and fine
particles that form in buildings due to ozone
reactions with organic compounds. He’s
currently interested in secondary effects of
particle control devices and using smart mixture
design and passive removal characteristics of
building materials to reduce human exposure to indoor pollutants.
Drexel’s Formula Hybrid Team Places
Third in International Competition
Smart House
Unveils New Plans
Drexel students unleashed the plans for their
environmental-friendly home, the Smart House,
on November 18. The Smart House design plan
includes daylight simulation lighting, reflective
roof coatings, a lightweight green roof, biomass
air filtration and other student-developed
products.
“We’re revolutionizing homes of the future,”
said Cody Ray ’11 (ECE), President of Drexel
Smart House.
With over 100 students working on the project
through multidisciplinary research, the team is
developing smart designs and technologies to
ensure an improved living style for the future.
The Smart House will officially open in 2011
and it will function as a home for students
and a living laboratory in which they can
hatch new ideas for the building. For more
information on the Smart House, please visit
http://www.drexelsmarthouse.com/.
Did You Know?
CoE is on both Facebook and
Twitter. To become a fan of CoE’s
Facebook page, find us by searching
Drexel University’s College of Engineering.
To follow us on Twitter, please visit
twitter.com/coedrexel.
Drexel’s formula hybrid team took
green racing to a new level in Rome,
Italy October 7-9, at the Formula
Electric and Hybrid 2009
competition earning the third place
title. Despite the car being held in
transit for two extra days and missing
the first round of events, the team
managed to place first for design
presentation, second for acceleration
races and third for performance. The
Drexel team was the first United
States team to compete in the Italy
Formula Electric and Hybrid
Competition with 15 other teams
from around the world.
The formula hybrid team managed
to take the third place title despite
missing the first round of events.
“Overall,we were all extremely proud of our
accomplishments, especially considering the
odds we faced coming into this competition,”
says Joshua Verdieck ’09 (ECE).
The Drexel team faced a strange obstacle before
Race Day. Customs' agents found what they
thought was a dead animal in the race car's crate,
holding up the release of the car. However, after
further investigation, the dead animal was
revealed to be sausage casings, and with the
support of the U.S. Congress, the car was
quickly pushed through customs.
After pulling an all-nighter to get the car
reassembled, the Drexel team was able to
compete in Rome’s Fiat facility.
The car was judged in a series of static
and dynamic events that included
technical inspection, presentation and
engineering design, solo performance
trials and high performance track
endurance. For more information on
Drexel’s formula hybrid team and the
competition, please visit
www.ece.drexel.edu/.
A Newsletter for Students, Parents and Friends of Drexel University’s College of Engineering
Students Turn Bridge into Living Laboratory
CAEE students are gaining real-world experience with their latest
experiment, the Learning Bridge Project. Students will use more than
100 sensors installed on their living laboratory, the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge,
to learn how bridges operate.
“The learning bridge will be a way of integrating the academic world with
the real world,” says Jeffrey Dowgala ’10 (CAEE).
The team, made up of undergraduate and graduate students, will use $200,000
worth of monitoring equipment to capture real-time data from the bridge
span and approach highways. This National Science
Foundation funded collaborative research project is
creating a new form of engineering education,
designed to enhance safety by exposing future
engineers to live, real-world data. The students will
use the sensors on the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge to
capture traffic levels, temperature and overall stress.
Information collected from the bridge, which has
50,000 users daily, will be streamed to students and
researchers in the classroom for review and discussion.
For more information on the Learning Bridge Project,
please visit www.di3.drexel.edu .
EWB Journeys to Jamaica for Bridge Project
Drexel's chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) traveled to Middleton,
Jamaica over fall break. The team assessed the redesign and rebuild for a series of
footbridges.The footbridges were damaged after Hurricane Gustav hit the
region in 2008, causing destruction to bridges that connect schools,
farmlands,markets, workplaces, health care facilities and commercial centers.
EWB will be working on the redesign and reconstruction of the bridges to
benefit the community.
“One of the bridges we assessed
completely collapsed. People had
to walk over fallen trees and
river rocks to reach the other
side,” says Prineha Narang
(MSE)’13, President of EWB.
Upcoming Events
Engineers Week
February 15-19, 2010
For more information about
Engineers Week, please visit
app.coe.drexel.edu/eWeek/index.html.
FIRST Robotics
The trip to Middleton is the
first of a series of trips EWB
will be making to Jamaica;
however, their mission for the
first trip to Jamaica was to
evaluate the damage of the
footbridges. EWB observed and surveyed the bridge sites and met with
the Middleton community to understand what they need built for easy
transportation routes. The Jamaica project is in addition to EWB's Miramar
water project. For more information on EWB and the Jamaica project, please
visit www.drexelewb.org/projects.htm.
March 25-27, 2010
Daskalakis Athletic Center
For more information about
FIRST Robotics, please visit
www.usfirst.org/default.aspx.
Sea Perch
April 24, 2010
Daskalakis Athletic Center
For more information on
Sea Perch, please visit
www.coe.drexel.edu/seaperch/.
Faculty Profile:
Michel Barsoum
Dr. Selçuk Güçeri Named
2010 Delaware Valley
Engineer of the Year
Dr. Selçuk Güçeri, dean of Drexel
University’s CoE, has been named the 2010
Delaware Valley Engineer of the Year. Dr.
Güçeri was unanimously selected by the
engineering and technical societies of the
Delaware Valley, through the Engineers’
Club of Philadelphia.
“This is a great honor and I’m humbled by this recognition. I look forward to
promoting the sciences and engineering with the support of the societies in
the Delaware Valley” said Dr. Güçeri.
Dr. Güçeri received the award for his outstanding leadership and remarkable
contributions to the engineering profession and engineering education.
During his 10 years at CoE, Dr. Guceri has established extensive outreach
projects to promote science and engineering and forged coalitions with
corporations, government agencies, universities and engineering societies. Dr.
Güçeri will recieve his award at the Delaware Valley Engineers Week 2010
Proclamation Luncheon on Friday, February 12, 2010 at Loews Hotel. For
more information on Dr. Güçeri being named the 2010 Delaware Valley
Engineer of the Year, please visit www.drexel.edu/coe.
Moshe Kam Named 2010
President-Elect of IEEE
Dr. Moshe Kam, department head and Robert
Quinn Professor (ECE), was elected by the
membership of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to serve as the
organization's president-elect in 2010.
Dr. Kam leads Drexel's Center for Excellence in Information
Assurance Education and he directs the Data Fusion Laboratory - a research
laboratory founded 20 years ago to investigate radar target classification. His
professional interests are in wireless communications, dynamic systems,
robotics and navigation, detection and estimation and engineering education.
His research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation
(NSF), The National Institute for Justice (NIJ), DARPA, ONR, NSWC, US
Army - CERDEC, Lockheed Martin and GlaxoSmithKline.
As President of IEEE, Dr. Kam will be leading the largest professional society
in the world, advancing innovation and technological excellence for the
benefit of humanity, with about 375,000 members in 160 countries. Dr.
Bruce Eisenstein (ECE), held the IEEE presidency in 2000. For more
information on Dr. Kam and IEEE, please visit
http://www.ece.drexel.edu/.
The Great Pyramids of Giza,
one of the Seven Wonders
of the Ancient World, has
become a leading research
and concrete technology
project for Dr. Michel
Barsoum, A.W. Grosvenor
Professor in the Department
of Materials Science and
Engineering (MSE). Dr.
Barsoum’s research has
provided evidence to unravel the age-old myth of the
construction of the pyramids from cut limestone blocks
alone. Scientific evidence discovered by Dr. Barsoum and
his team proves that parts of the Great Pyramid of Giza
were built using an early form of concrete.
Dr. Barsoum and his team unveiled their findings in
2006. They analyzed the mineralogy of samples from
several parts of Khufu’s pyramid and discovered that
mineral ratios did not exist in any of the likely known
limestone sources. The team concluded that the
geochemical mix of lime, diatomaceous earth and clay
were cast concrete. They have taken their research a step
further by proving that some of the pyramid blocks are
synthetic and that one of the primary components is lime
that has re-carbonated in the intervening years. If the
evidence proves this theory to be true, Egyptians would
have been the first to use concrete technology, some
1,500 years before the Romans. Dr. Barsoum is writing a
book on his pyramid discoveries and will have a paper
published on the latest research in February 2010.
While Dr. Barsoum and his team are busy uncovering the
mysteries of the pyramids, they‘re using their research to
develop an improved, modern version of this ancient
building material. The modernized version of cementmaking could lead to a cheaper building material with the
potential to be used in developing countries. Another
advantage of the newly developed cement is that it
produces significantly less – in some cases zero - carbon
dioxide than Portland cement. Dr. Barsoum has founded
a company, Greenstone, to market the technology.
Solving the mysteries of the pyramids is Dr. Barsoum’s
part-time job. His day-job is his research on ternary
carbide and nitride materials. In 1996, Dr. Barsoum and
his team were the first to fabricate and fully characterize
a class of machinable ternary carbides and nitrides. The
materials discovered are capable of remaining strong in
temperatures in excess of 1,300 degrees C in air. The
material has uses in industrial applications. Since then,
Dr. Barsoum and his team have discovered more than 50
closely related compounds which are now known as the
“MAX” phases because of their composition. For more
information on Dr. Barsoum, please visit
www.materials.drexel.edu/Faculty/Barsoum/.
Dragonotes
College of Engineering
Drexel University
3141 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
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Did You Know?
CoE’s Department of Computer Science (CS) celebrated
the first ever National Computer Science Week declared by
Congress. CS celebrated the week December 7-11, 2009.
For more details, please visit www.cs.drexel.edu/.
Interested in Letting CoE
Know What You Think?
Meet Student Robert Patterson (CBE)
Why did you choose Drexel University?
RP: I chose Drexel University because of its high
ranking engineering program. The Honors College,
along with a remarkable research team, allowed me
to work in a lab last summer studying drug delivery
for cancer treatment. Also, Drexel’s co-op program
is unique, giving students the opportunity to gain
up to 18 months of work experience.
Why did you choose your current major?
RP: I was always fascinated by molecules-how atoms
bonded together and all the physics and math
behind it. Learning to manipulate these things on
such a small scale was a huge interest of mine. I
feel a Chemical Engineering degree prepares me
for whatever field I end up pursuing, whether it be
in advanced polymers, energy and the
environment, biological engineering, or something
maybe not related at all.
What type of research are you working on?
RP: I am working in the Biological Colloids
Laboratory at CoE. The lab as a whole applies
principles of colloid science to the study of human
diseases; my project specifically deals with drug
delivery for treatment of disease. The best part-I don’t
know too many sophomore college students who can
say they worked on curing cancer this summer!
What are your future plans?
RP: I learned a lot this summer conducting research
in a graduate lab and it has stimulated the idea of
pursuing a PhD in Chemical Engineering. I love to
learn about advanced science and engineering topics.
What better way to facilitate than to take graduate
courses coupled with conducting research that may
get published, put in a textbook, or even change the
way we all live for the better?
What have you enjoyed most about your
experience at Drexel?
RP: The opportunities I’ve had at Drexel this early
on I don’t believe I could have received at any
other university. I completed almost 60 credits of
coursework, I’m on a friendly basis with many
professors, I’ve completed 400 hours of research
working on treatment of diseases and I’m now
working for a specialty chemical company on co-op
gaining industry work experience. I’ve done all this
by the time I was a sophomore.
CoE is looking for feedback on the best
ways to share the latest CoE news.If
you’re interested in providing feedback
or have ideas, please let us know by
emailing Elizabeth Brachelli at
[email protected].
Published by
Office of the Dean
College of Engineering
Drexel University
3141 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
215-895-2210
www.drexel.edu/coe
Editors
Elizabeth Brachelli
Christine Haas
Design Services
Jill Glodek
Jelesiewicz Design
Contributing Writers
Elizabeth Brachelli
Noah Cohen
Christine Haas
Katie Ikonomou
Contributing Photographers
Elizabeth Brachelli
Ben Cohen
Christine Haas
Katie Ikonomou
Katie Morrison
Massa Photography
Bruce Pinchbeck Jr.
Joshua Verdieck
Jessica Ward