Volume 5, Number 6, March 2009

Welcome to Ahoya! Engineers - Marquette University's College of Engineering e-Newsletter for alumnae, alumni, students and their families, faculty, staff, and MU friends. We want you to know what’s happening in your College of Engineering. This newsletter will be published periodically to share our accomplishments, milestones and activities.

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Meeting the Class of 2013. Although highways and streets to the campus were snow covered and slippery, the nasty weather on Saturday, Feb. 21 didn’t deter your college’s accepted applicants and their parents from arriving for the annual Scholarship Competition and Engineering Open House. 

439 accepted engineering students from 41 states, Canada and Puerto Rico showed up early in the morning to take the scholarship test.  During the exam their parents attended an information forum to learn more about the benefits of a Marquette engineering education.  Reuniting after the test, approximately 1100 applicants and parents walked to Haggerty Hall to tour the engineering building and speak with faculty and students who were eager to meet them.  To say it was a full house would be an understatement.

Many of the guests actually arrived the evening before, when the students participated in Casino Night, hosted by the Engineering Student Council, while their parents were treated to a Milwaukee Fish Fry.  Don’t worry – the students didn’t go hungry.  They indulged in pizza and soda while trying their luck at the tables.

Thank you to our guests for traveling to campus from near and far.  We hope you left Marquette excited about our College’s mission, vision and educational initiatives.

And thank you to our faculty and students for making this an enjoyable and successful event.

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with Marquette! The Marquette Club of Milwaukee invites you and your family to a St. Patrick’s Day Fish Fry on Friday, March 20.   The celebration will feature gifts for the kids, raffle items, green beer and a performance by the Trinity Irish Dancers.  The event will be held in the Alumni Memorial Union from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.  Bring your family for a traditional Wisconsin fish fry and catch up with alumni and friends.

Tables of 10 with premier seating may be reserved for $225; individual cost is $18 for adults, $10 for children ages 4 to 12 and free for children age 3 and under.

Please respond to Alumni Engagement and Outreach by March 16 at (414)-288-7441, or register online on MU Connect.  

Collaborative Grant Funded. Dr. John LaDisa, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering is one of 25 researchers receiving the first grants awarded by the Southeastern Wisconsin Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI).

Stents are miniature metal scaffolds implanted during 70-90% of the 1.3 million catheterizations performed annually in the United States to treat coronary artery disease. 18-20% of coronary artery lesions involve the junction of two arteries (i.e. bifurcations) which remain one of the most challenging lesion subsets in the field of minimally-invasive coronary intervention. This proposal is designed to innovate for this clinical need by applying an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional initiative that leverages existing areas of expertise in cardiovascular medicine and radiology; biomedical engineering, and design; rapid prototyping and fabrication at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), Marquette University, and the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), respectively. Other collaborators on the grant are David Marks MD, Raymond Q. Migrino MD and Dennis Foley MD at MCW and Vito Gervasi at MSOE. Completion of this goal may ultimately facilitate translation of the team’s novel bifurcation stent to the clinic where approximately 195,000-260,000 bifurcation lesions are observed annually.

The CTSI is a partnership of all of the major academic institutions in the region — Marquette, the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee School of Engineering and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as well as Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, Zablocki VA Medical Center and the Blood Center of Wisconsin. Formed in 2008, the institute is developing an infrastructure to enable researchers from various institutions to collaborate and to compete for federal grants.

Grants such as these will facilitate and foster the continuum of research from bench to bedside and to the community and practice.

Senior Designers Busy In DLC Shop. Your engineering seniors have been very active in the college’s Discovery Learning Center Shop as the deadline for their Senior Design Project prototype presentations approaches.  They have been using the facilities to make the first models of the projects they began designing early in the fall semester.  This will be followed by the final build of the prototypes later in the semester.

Mary Doyle, mechanical engineering and Kevin Hand, biomedical engineering, assemble a device to
assist physically challenged individuals while Jim Stemper, mechanical engineering, machines parts on the lathe

UPE Active Again. Computer engineering students Brian Arnold, Joshua Peterson, Gregory Jacobs, Kun Wen (Oscar) Goh and Matthew Strong joined 8 students from computer science to re-form the Marquette chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE).

UPE is the international honor society for computing and information disciplines, endorsed by both the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).  UPE chapters across the country and around the world work to recognize outstanding scholarship, promote the advancement of computing, and support members in their continued education.

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