January 2010 issue:
- Governor Doyle announces $5 million grant
- Demolition is underway
- Tickets are going fast
- Interviews for dean candidates beginning
- GasDay™ training venture saves utilities millions
- Freshman students participate in competition
- Biomedical engineering receives Falk grant
- Mechanical engineering professors present mechatronics workshop
- Engineering outreach hosts National Fluid Power Challenge
- Dr. Gilat-Schmidt receives grants
- Professional development workshop for K-9 teachers
- Help spread the news
Governor Doyle announces $5 million grant
During a visit to the College of Engineering last month, Governor Jim Doyle announced a $5 million grant to the Wisconsin Energy Foundation to support construction of the Discovery Learning Complex. The state grant is funded through a provision in the most recent biennial budget.
“We are fortunate to have universities like Marquette that offer an outstanding engineering education and are committed to preparing students for the challenges – and opportunities – of the 21st century,” Doyle said. “This project will help retain hundreds of jobs in Wisconsin, and prepare future generations to be leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”
The first phase of the Discovery Learning Complex, a $35 million project, will involve building a five-story, 115,000 square foot facility that will include an innovative Discovery Learning Laboratory and a two-story engineering materials and structural testing laboratory. It will also include other new teaching and research laboratories, common areas for students and office space. The project should be ready just in time for the start of classes in the fall of 2011.
The initial structure will be linked to a future 150,000 square foot building that will include classrooms, offices and additional laboratories. The total project cost is estimated at $100 million.
Banner picture from left to right: State Representative Pedro Colon from the 8th Assembly District, President Robert Wild, S.J., Kris Rappe, Sr. Vice President & Chief Administrative Officer of Wisconsin Energy Corporation, State Senator Jeff Plale from the 7th Senate District and OPUS Dean Stan Jaskolski
Demolition is underway
Demolition of buildings on the future site of the Discovery Learning Complex is well underway and the maneuvering of the machinery is quite a spectacle. View a photo gallery of the demolition.
Discovery Learning Complex demolition
Tickets are going fast
The College of Engineering Alumni Association (COEAA) invites you to its annual Silent Auction, Brunch and Basketball Game event on Saturday, March 6, 2010.
Join us for an opportunity to meet, greet, and outbid fellow alumni and afterwards, cheer on Marquette as they take on Notre Dame. Tickets are limited and available for purchase here. This exciting opportunity to show Notre Dame that “We Are Marquette!” is open to all alumni, faculty, staff, parents and friends of the College of Engineering.
Interviews for dean candidates beginning
Provost John Pauly, in a message to the campus community this week, said that the search committee for the OPUS Dean of the College of Engineering, chaired by Dr. Kyuil Kim, has made considerable progress. Starting last fall with candidate pools that numbered in the hundreds, the committee has narrowed its list for first-round, off-campus interviews which will be completed in the next two weeks.
"The search committee has worked diligently and very effectively with the search firm,” Pauly said. “The quality of applicants has been impressive."
After these preliminary interviews, the committee will invite finalists to campus for in-depth interviews, beginning in mid-February. Those interviews will include an open forum as well as meetings with key stakeholders, including students. The finalists' resumes and interview schedules will be made public in advance of their visits.
GasDay™ training venture saves utilities millions
Wisconsin residents don't jump to crank up the thermostat as fast as folks who live farther south. That's the assessment of Dr. Ron Brown, who runs the college’s business and educational venture, GasDay™, serving one-fifth of the homes in the nation that heat with natural gas.
Launched in 1993, the venture has seen growth in recent years, thanks in part to a wave of utility industry mergers that have added more clients. The program is self-funded, bringing in enough revenue to cover business expenses, provide research support for two faculty members and fund salaries for three full-time employees and roughly 20 part-time graduate and undergraduate students.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently features a lengthy article about Marquette's GasDay™. Read the full story.
Freshman students participate in competition
All freshman engineering students enrolled in the fall semester course Engineering Discovery 1 participated in the college’s 2009 Computer Graphics Design Competition for modeling experimental components within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Components included the Closed-Loop Wind Tunnel, Open-Loop Wind Tunnel, Diesel Engine Experimental Components, Vibratory Mass Finishing Bowl and the 6-Axis Anthropomorphic Robot.
Students were assigned to one of 12 “studios” and worked together as teams to create the complete (virtual) assembly models of the experimental components. To obtain the actual dimensions of the components, they visited the department’s experimental laboratories to measure all of the assigned parts, which facilitated creation of hand-sketches and CAD models of each part. These, in turn, were used to create subassemblies and then complete assembly CAD models.
See the winning poster below. Congratulations to all of the freshman engineering students on their projects.
Fall 2009 prize-winning poster
Biomedical engineering receives Falk grant
The Department of Biomedical Engineering has received a three-year $750,000 grant from the Dr. Ralph and Marian C. Falk Medical Research Trust to support the Neurorehabilitation Research Center. The principal investigators for Collaborative Research Integrating Neuroimaging and Neurorehabilitation are Drs. Kris Ropella, chair and professor, and Brian Schmidt, associate professor.
Ralph and Marian C. Falk, both now deceased, were devoted philanthropists who supported medical research. A physician who practiced in Boise, Idaho, Ralph pioneered research that made intravenous therapy safe and practical. In 1935, he purchased the company now known as Baxter International and established a research and development function that launched the company’s breakthrough advances in medical technology. Today, the Falk Medical Research Trust continues the tradition of facilitating innovative medical research, especially for diseases for which no definite cure is known. The Trust has been a crucial supporter of research yielding discoveries that will benefit countless people. Bank of America serves as trustee of the Falk Trust.
Marquette’s relationship with the Falk Medical Research Trust dates back to 2000 with an initial gift to create the Falk Neurorehabilitation Engineering Research Center (FNERC) at Marquette University. A subsequent $900,000 gift was the catalyst for expanding this collaborative research endeavor between the FNERC and the Functional Imaging Research Center (FIRC) at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). The Trust’s support strengthened an already significant partnership between MU and the MCW.
The FNERC’s focus on neurorehabilitation sets Marquette’s Department of Biomedical Engineering apart from other programs. Ropella states, “With the gracious support of the Falk Medical Research Trust, the FNERC has established productive interdisciplinary research teams which are investigating the complex physiology and function of the nervous system. This research is critical for designing therapeutic interventions aimed at restoring function in persons with neural injury or disease.” Marquette, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and the Functional Imaging Research Center are building on existing strengths in imaging and rehabilitation research in the Greater Milwaukee area and are merging neuroimaging and neurorehabilitation to improve the prognosis and quality of life for individuals with disability or lost function due to neural injury or disorder. Many, many thanks to the Dr. Ralph and Marian C. Falk Medical Research Trust!
Mechanical engineering professors present mechatronics workshop
Last month, Drs. Kevin Craig, Phil Voglewede, and Mark Nagurka assembled 40 elite Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Rockwell Automation (RA) engineers at the P&G Corporate Engineering Technology Laboratory in Cincinnati, OH, for a one-of-a-kind workshop focusing on mechatronics.
Today, every company’s challenges are getting more difficult, broader, and deeper and are multidisciplinary in nature. Basic engineering skills have become commodities worldwide. To be competitive, companies and their engineers must provide high value by being innovative, integrative, conceptual and multidisciplinary. Rockwell Automation and P&G understand this very well. RA engineers make motors and electronic drives and P&G is one of RA’s largest customers, as P&G engineers make the machines that make the consumer products with which we are all familiar.
Mechatronics deals with the integrated and optimal design of any physical system, including sensors, actuators, electronic components, and embedded digital control systems, from the very start of the design process. Performance, reliability, low cost, robustness, efficiency and sustainability are absolutely essential. A mechatronic approach to design gives each company a significant competitive advantage in the global marketplace.
The mechatronics workshop was not a class or lecture; it was a real workshop. Its purpose was to foster innovation and collaboration now and in the future for both companies. Interactive and participant-focused; participants learned from each other. It was all about insight. The Marquette professors presented a little, discussed a lot and always listened. They gave new views, new concepts – always with the intent to enhance understanding and insight.
This is the second mechatronics workshop organized and delivered by the professors. The next mechatronics workshop is planned for May 2010 in Italy between RA and Tetra Pak, another RA customer, with Marquette Engineering leading the way!
Engineering Outreach hosts National Fluid Power Challenge
Last month, Marquette was one of several nationwide sites to host the National Fluid Power Challenge, which engages 8th grade students in engineering problem-solving using fluid power technology.
Student teams from area schools prepared for the event by attending a day-long workshop in November, where they learned about fluid power and built a pneumatic lifter. The teams returned a month later to build a hydraulic "pick and place" machine for the contest. While the students built the hydraulic machines, their teachers toured STRATTEC Security Corporation in Milwaukee, an industry leader in automobile locks. Host of the STRATTEC tour was Marquette engineering alumna Kathryn Scherbarth, Vice President of Milwaukee Operations.
The Brookfield Academy team took first place honors for their design (see photo). Two teams from the Milwaukee Academy of Science took second and third place. Marquette Engineering Outreach awarded a total of $1300 in scholarships to the members of those teams to attend upcoming engineering academies.
Thank you to Lori Stempski, Administrative Assistant for Enrollment Management, and Maria Bengtson, doctoral candidate in Biomedical Engineering, for coordinating event activities.
1st Place Brookfield Academy team
Dr. Gilat-Schmidt receives grants
Dr. Taly Gilat-Schmidt, Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department, was recently awarded two grants to investigate methods for reducing radiation dose to women receiving computed tomography (CT) scans.
While reducing the radiation dose is desirable in all imaging applications, certain tissues and patient populations are more susceptible to radiation damage. For example, a recent study found that women have a higher risk of developing cancer from a CT scan than men of the same age (Einstein, JAMA 2007). One reason for the increased risk to women is that the breast tissue is highly sensitive to radiation damage and also receives more radiation because it's located on the surface of the body.
Dr. Gilat-Schmidt’s Medical Imaging Systems lab is collaborating with the FDA Division of Imaging and Applied Mathematics, through a grant funded by the FDA Office of Women’s Health titled, “Radiation Dose and Excess Cancer Risk in Women Undergoing X-Ray Computed Tomography: Quantification and Risk Mitigation.” Marquette’s portion of the project funds a graduate research assistant for two years to investigate the image quality and dose reduction of commercially available breast shields.
The project will also investigate alternative acquisition methods that are hypothesized to provide equivalent image quality in the breast shields, while further reducing the radiation dose. The proposed radiation reduction methods will be applicable to all CT scans of the heart and chest. The methods will be tested through computer simulations and phantom experiments.
The second project, titled “Reducing the Radiation Dose to Women Receiving Cardiac CT Scans” and funded by the Alvin and Marion Birnschein Foundation, will investigate methods of modifying the CT system geometry to image the heart with reduced irradiation of breast tissue. The project funds one graduate research assistant who will use computer simulations of female patient models to develop and validate a method of prescribing the optimal scanning geometry.
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Professional development workshop for K-9 teachers
In this popular Physical Science & Engineering Professional Development workshop, participants will learn how to teach hands-on lessons in physical science using engineering problem-solving activities. The workshop will be held Saturday, March 13, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the College of Engineering. Click here for a registration form.
In 2010, new activities have been added that cover topics in magnetism, electricity, air pressure, water pressure, and pneumatics/hydraulics (fluid power) using magnetic cars, electrical circuits with LED technology, diving bells, hovering hockey pucks, and fluid power lifters. Instructors for the workshop are Jack Samuelson, Coordinator of Engineering Outreach, and Bob Friedel, Science Education Consultant.
The college thanks the National Fluid Power Association for supplying materials for the workshop; information will also be provided to the teachers about the association’s annual Fluid Power Challenge. For more information, call 414.288.6720 or email engineering@marquette.edu .
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