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MEAM Alumni Newsletter

January 2008

Dear Friends,

It gives me great pleasure to bring you our first electronic MEAM newsletter at the beginning of the new year. This is an opportunity for all of us to keep in touch, for you to stay informed on the exciting developments on campus, and for MEAM faculty, staff, and students to learn more about you and to take pride in your accomplishments.

There have been many changes in campus over the last two years. Our faculty and student size has increased dramatically. Professor Prashant Purohit joined us in 2006, and Professors Paulo Arratia, Robert Carpick and Katherine Kuchenbecker joined us this year in 2007. In addition, we now have two new lecturers onboard: Dr. Jonathan
Fiene and Dr. Bruce Kothmann. This new talent coupled with the leadership of Professor Mark Yim (Undergraduate Curriculum Chair) and Pedro Ponte (Graduate Group Chair) have resulted in many curriculum changes at the undergraduate and graduate level with new course offerings in design, aerodynamics, nanotechnology and robotics and an increased emphasis on hands-on, laboratory training. Our undergraduate enrollment is at a ten-year high (190 students) and our PhD enrollment has reached an all time high (59) students.

Along with all this good news I also have some really sad news to share. Professor Ira Cohen passed away on December 8, 2007 after a brave fight with cancer. Even at the end, Professor Cohen remained true to his bicycling and squash-playing schedule, working hard on his latest book, refusing to allow his illness get in the way of the
things he loved.

If you have a story you want to share with us or just want to let everybody know what you are up to, please email oliviarb@seas.upenn.edu so we can share with the friends of MEAM community. To have this newsletter sent to a different email address, recommend it to a friend, or unsubscribe, please visit http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/meam-newsletter.

Vijay Kumar
Chair, MEAM


MEAM Newsletter, January 2008
http://www.me.upenn.edu/alumni/newsletter-jan08.html

1. MEAM in the news

Dr. Krishna P. Singh (MEAM Ph.D., '72) pledged $20M to build the new Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology, a new state-of-the-art nanoscale research facility at Penn. This is the largest gift in the history of Penn Engineering. Wall Street Journal's report on this gift is available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118610185345486846.html.

2. Spotlight on MEAM Faculty

Professor Katherine Kuchenbecker joined the Mechanical Engineering Department in July of 2007. Katherine is an expert in haptics. [To those of you unfamiliar with this term, haptics is the science of touch; haptics is to touch as vision is to sight.] She adds strength to our already strong robotics group, and design initiative. She designs new machines that allows users to touch, feel and interact with simulated worlds through a "haptograph", the same way we are able to see the world through photographs today. See http://www.me.upenn.edu/faculty/kuchenbecker.html.


3. New Design Initiative

We have embarked on an ambitious program to infuse design, and manufacturing into our curriculum at the undergraduate and masters level.  This initiative has three thrusts.

A.  Integrated Product Design Master's Program

This new program is a collaboration between the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Design and the Wharton Business School. The program includes coursework in engineering design, human interfaces, ergonomics, marketing, finance, and form and function of products and research at the intersection of the business, artistic and engineering aspects of product design. Professor Mark Yim will direct the program. See http://www.me.upenn.edu/ipd/ for more information.

B.  The PACE Lab - http://www.me.upenn.edu/~pacelab/index.html

The PACE (Partnership for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education) Laboratory opened in Fall 2007 in Towne 195 with funding from GM, EDS, HP, Siemens, and Sun.  The lab will allow us to infuse computer-aided-design, manufacturing and analysis throughout our curriculum. The laboratory was inaugurated on November 14 with a grand event featuring a lecture from Jim Wiemels, Vice President for Global Manufacturing Engineering at GM, and other key executives.  See http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=1258.

C. New Courses emphasizing Design

*MEAM 111 Visual Thinking by Jenny Buck (introduced in Fall 2007)

Visual Thinking is a drawing, creative thinking, and iterative prototyping course using a series of mechanical design projects to help move engineers, (and artists and others) out of the often analytical, even equation-based comfort zones into the broader realm of unpredictable time constrained problem solving.

*MEAM 150 Fundamentals of Mechanical Prototyping now 1.0 CUs

Prototype development techniques are an intrinsic part of the design process. This includes design layout, measurement, as well as part generation, machining, lathing, laser cutting and manufacturing processes. Design projects are chosen, designed, and fabricated by students. Students will learn the necessary design processes, the basic shop skills for preliminary designs of new concepts and creating prototypes, and working knowledge of computer-aided design and manufacturing technologies.

*MEAM 099 - Independent Study in CAD/CAM/CAE Applications

The goal of this independent study course is to introduce students to the basics of a suite of sophisticated software tools, including NX 5, MD/Nastran, MSC.ADAMS, Fluent, and Altair Hyperworks to solve real-world design problems.  Working at their own pace, students have the option to select from a range of research-inspired projects or to bring in their own challenges.


4. Awards and Honors

Professor Portonovo S. Ayyaswamy, Asa Whitney Professor of Dynamical Engineering, was named the recipient of the 2007 Worcester Reed Warner Medal by American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for "seminal, cross-disciplinary and ground breaking publications on phase-change heat/mass transfer with droplets and bubbles, multi-phase flows, buoyancy-driven transport and ionized arc-plasma transport, with long-lasting and significant applications in condensation, combustion, micro-electronic packaging, and micro-/macro-biological system." The Worcester Reed Warner Medal was established in 1930 and honors outstanding contributions to the permanent literature of engineering.  http://www.seas.upenn.edu/whatsnew/2007/ayyaswamy.html

Professor Noam Lior was a keynote speaker at the UNESCO Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water & Environment Systems in Dubrovnik.  http://www.dubrovnik2007.fsb.hr/inv_lectures.php

Professor Jennifer Lukes was selected to present at the 2007 Frontiers of Engineering symposium in Redmond, Washington from September 24-26.
http://www.nae.edu/nae/naefoe.nsf/weblinks/GBAN-6UBPUR?OpenDocument

Professor Robert W. Carpick was appointed Penn Director of the Nanotechnology Institute.  See Almanac article: http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/volumes/v54/n12/carpick.html. 

Michael Dugan (MEAM '07), Peter Brueckner (MEAM '07), William Jelliffe (MEAM '07) and Kristin Condello (MEAM '07) won first place in the SEAS Senior Design Competition with their robotic sitar, RAVIBOT. Their work was featured on ABC Channel 6 and at the Esther Klein Art
Gallery.  See http://www.seas.upenn.edu/whatsnew/2007/ravibot/
http://www.upenn.edu/pip/?pip=ravibot

Kevin Galloway (MEAM PhD candidate), Rahul Kothari (WG '06), Rodrigo Alvarez (SEAS/MS '06), and Howard Katzenberg (WG '06) won first prize in the 2006 Weiss Tech House Pennvention competition for MuscleMorph, an actuator that imitates real biological muscles.  Read about it in:
http://www.tech-house.upenn.edu/dynamic/site/pennvention/2006_pennvention.php
and
http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/alum_mag/issues/summer2006/wharton_now_1.html

The MuscleMorph team also won the honor of ringing the NASDAQ Stock Market Closing Bell.  The NASDAQ website gives further details: http://www.nasdaq.com/reference/200608/market_close_080806.stm

Kevin Galloway (MEAM PhD candidate) won the Judge's award in the 2nd Best Idea Slam 2007 sponsored by the Weiss Tech House.  His invention, Traffic Safety Light in a Glove, incorporates red and green LED lights in a glove for police officers to direct traffic in dark settings. Several articles are listed here:
http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/current/features/030107-1.html
http://www.tech-house.upenn.edu/dynamic/site/secondbest/index.php
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0507/gaz11.html


5. Alumni news

Max Adler (MEAM '07) began working for Schlumberger as a field engineer in Lafayette, Louisiana on December 4th, 2007.  Before that, he traveled for three months in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal, China and South Korea. 

Kristin Condello (MEAM '07) is currently enjoying life in Providence, RI where she is an associate project engineer for Hasbro.  She is "engineering toys, working out, and exploring the northeast."

John-Ross Swanstone Cromer (MEAM '06) is now at Control Systems Engineering at a industry leading ENC company, and won the company's Silver Dollar Recognition award for discovering a process to generate digital blueprint templates.

Kevin Ecker (MEAM '07) is a Project Engineer for JJ DeLuca Co., a construction management firm in Springfield, PA.  His latest projects are a new bank and two 4 story apartment buildings.  He is also training to become a volunteer firefighter.

Ryan O'Toole (MEAM '07) is working for Schlumberger Limited, the world's largest oil services company, doing reservoir evaluation for some of the worlds biggest oil companies who are drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.  He runs a highly mobile team which gets dispatched to offshore rigs all over the gulf.  His job duties include not only
management of his team, but interpretation of well data, customer relations, and handling hazardous materials such as radioactive sources and explosives.