June 2011

2011 Engineering Alumni Award winners
Front: Edmund R. Steinke; Stephanie Goplin Olsson
Back: Rev. Robert A. Wild, S.J., president of Marquette University; Francis S. Luecke; Dr. Janis M. Orlowski; James H. Grotelueschen; Dr. Robert Bishop, OPUS dean of engineering

Award winners

Each spring, Marquette University sets aside one special weekend to honor distinguished alumni from every college who represent the heart, soul and spirit of Marquette. 

The 2011 All-University award recipients included two distinguished engineering alumni.   OPUS Dean Emeritus Dr. Stanley V. Jaskolski, Eng ’62, Grad ’64, ’67, received the All-University Merit Award and Michael D. Farrell, Eng ’70, and Donna Behm Farrell, Arts ’70, received the All-University Service to Marquette Award.

Stan Jaskolski                               Mike and Donna Behm Farrell

College of Engineering award recipients include James H. Grotelueschen, Eng ’73, Grad ’74; Edmund R. Steinike, Eng ’85; Francis S. Luecke, Eng ’67, Dr. Janis M. Orlowski, M.A.C.P., Eng’78; and Stephanie Goplin Olsson, P.E., P.T.O.E., Eng ’00.  Congratulations to all. Click here to nominate a fellow-alumnus/a for a future award.

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Commencement

Nearly 2,400 graduates celebrated Marquette’s 130th spring Commencement ceremony on May 22 at the Bradley Center.  May engineering graduates included 156 undergraduates, 21 master’s degree recipients and 4 doctoral degree recipients.  They joined family and friends for the College of Engineering celebration, where each graduate is individually recognized.  Watch the complete all-university Commencement ceremony online. Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough was the Commencement speaker.

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eLIMO street legal

The eLIMO is street legal as of early May.  This is another major milestone in the project.  The Department of Public Safety plans to use the eLIMO as part of the student transport fleet beginning in fall 2011. Stay tuned to the eLIMO blog for the latest information on the project. 

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Riedel honored

Susan Riedel, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, was recently honored as recipient of the  Rev. John P. Raynor, S.J. Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.

“She’s a pioneer in pushing the envelope in engineering education, experimenting with alternative teaching methodologies, questioning pedagogy and rigorously assessing student learning,” said a nominator.  Congratulations Susan.

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Engineering students in business plan competition

Two groups of undergraduate engineering students competed in the 9th annual Business Plan Competition  hosted by the MU Kohler Center for Entrepreneurship.  The students prepared impressive presentations, poster displays and business plans.  Both groups received awards.

Team EASYG:  Provides competitive products at an affordable price that make it easier and safer for medical professionals to practice and administer medicine. The first product introduced by EasyG™ will be a wireless ECG monitoring device for use by medical professionals such as EMTs. Team members are Tom Berdelle a 2011 graduate of the College of Business Administration and Tom Evans a biomedical engineering student. Team EASYG received the best undergraduate plan award.

Team PHARMAWATCH:  Biomedical engineering students Chaitan Parikh, Tom Hodgsen, Ben Meyers and Billy Polhill are developing a wrist watch device that will serve as a low-cost device to remind patients when to take their medicines.  Pharmacists and doctors can easily program the watch to schedule the meds and reminders for each individual patient.  This group won the award for best poster presentation.

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Way Klingler Sabbatical and Fulbright Fellowships to Borg

Dr. John Borg, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has received the 2011-12 Way Klingler Sabbatical Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship. These fellowships will support Borg’s sabbatical year at the at the Fraunhofer Institut für Kurzzeitdynamik in Freiburg, Germany. His research involves understanding the dynamic behavior of heterogeneous materials subjected to blast and impact loads. Borg and his collaborators will combine their expertise and embark on a venture to better understand traumatic brain injury, due to a range of causes from sports injuries to military personal subjected to impact and blast loads. Experiments on surrogate foam targets will be conducted by impacting them with projectiles and blast waves launched from a variety of gas guns.

Borg’s collaborators in Germany have been performing computational studies to understand the effect of shock loading at the molecular level and building models up toward a centimeter scale, while he has been working at a centimeter scale building models down towards the molecular scale. They hope their combined efforts will bridge the gap between large and small scales to completely describe the loading and damage mechanisms associated with cellular damage. Their findings will contribute to understanding how protective and safety materials could be redesigned in order to prevent injuries from shock and impacts incurred from explosions, sports and accidents.

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Wenzel associate professor emeritus

Dr. Tom Wenzel, chair and associate professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental engineering, has been awarded associate professor emeritus status in anticipation of his upcoming retirement.  Wenzel will retire effective of June 30, 2011. Dr Chris Foley, professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental engineering, will be the new department chair.

Dr. Wenzel's family would like to celebrate his retirement by hearing from students, faculty, staff and other members of the Marquette family. They invite you to share your stories, favorite memories, well wishes for Dr. Wenzel and pictures.  All your responses will be compiled in a book.  Marquette University and all the students that have passed through the civil engineering program hold a very special place in his heart and you are invited to share how he impacted your experience at Marquette.

Please e-mail all stories, favorite memories, well wishes and pictures to Jessica Wenzel at jessicaw@berghammer.com by June 10.

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MU to Silicon Valley

Denise Zarins, Eng ’93, Grad ’95, recently spoke to students and faculty about her career path, offering tips and life lessons for those wanting to become biomedical engineering entrepreneurs. She talked extensively about the treatment option to safely manage hypertension that her company is developing.

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Marquette ASME chapter in competition

Peter Geerts, Chris Everson, Julien Jacque and Matthew Malak from Marquette’s chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) recently traveled to Lawrence, Kansas to compete in the ASME Student Professional Development Conference.

The design competition challenge was to design a device that would use the potential energy of 1 liter of water falling from a 1 meter height to propel a lightweight car the farthest distance.  The competition was hosted by the University of Kansas and was attended by approximately 20 other universities. 

Marquette’s device used the falling water to rotate a water wheel which raised a pendulum that released and transferred the energy to their car.  The Marquette team is pleased to announce that they took fourth place out of twenty-five entries. They had tough competition from teams that used the competition as a senior design project or chapters who had spent the past eight months working toward the competition. The ASME chapter looks forward to competing in future design competitions.

From left: Matthew Malak, Julien Jacque, Peter Geerts and Chris Everson

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Mathison to join faculty

Margaret Mathison will be joining the faculty as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering beginning in fall 2011. She completed her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at Iowa State University and is finishing her doctoral degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue University. Her teaching and research interests are in the area of building energy efficiency.

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Jameson on the move . . . fast

John Jameson, biomedical engineering doctoral candidate, represented the Marquette Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technologies for Children with Orthpaedic Disabilities, Tech4POD, at the recent 115th running of the Boston Marathon.  Jameson finished 460th out of 26,907 entrants in a time of 02:47:46; a 6:24 minute per mile pace.

John Jameson finishes the 115th running of the Boston Marathon and represents OREC (Orthopaedic & Rehabilitation Engineering Center) and the Marquette Engineering RERC

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