Samuel Ginn College of Engineering 2013 Annual Report
From the dean I am proud to share with you the 2013 Annual Report from the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering at Auburn University. You will see that we continue to recruit many of the nation’s brightest students, provide innovative engineering programs, and conduct groundbreaking research that matters to society. Consistent with our strategic plan, we are creating the best student-centered engineering experience, engaging in research that improves quality of life and fosters economic competitiveness, and supporting a dynamic faculty that exemplifies excellence and innovation. This report contains just a sampling of the leading work we are conducting in areas such as biomedical engineering, advanced manufacturing and information technology. We have also provided information on the caliber of our students, the scope of our research expenditures and the loyal financial support of our alumni and friends. Taken together, these elements exemplify the standard of excellence for which Auburn Engineering is known. We are proud of our achievements; and as we look to the future, we are confident we will continue our trajectory of becoming one of the nation’s premier engineering programs. Regards,
Christopher B. Roberts
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Inside the mind Researchers have long wondered what differentiates an individual’s beliefs from those of another.
religious beliefs in humans may be attributed to the development of the ToM brain network.
Gopikrishna Deshpande, researcher at Auburn University’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center, and a team of scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are discovering that part of the answer lies within an individual’s brain networks. The team is investigating how these networks shape religious beliefs, and has found that brain interactions are different between religious and non-religious subjects.
“Religious belief is a unique human attribute observed across different cultures in the world, even in those cultures which evolved independently, such as Mayans in Central America and aboriginals in Australia,” said Deshpande, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This has led scientists to speculate that there must be a biological basis for the evolution of religion in human societies.”
The group has discovered differences in brain interactions that involve the theory of mind, or ToM, brain network, which influences people’s ability to differentiate between their own personal beliefs, intents and desires and those of others. Individuals with stronger ToM activity were found to be more religious. Deshpande notes that this supports the hypothesis that the formation of 2
Deshpande and the NIH researchers recently published their results in the journal “Brain Connectivity.” The team was following up a study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to scan the brains of both self-declared religious and non-
religious individuals as they contemplated three psychological dimensions of religious beliefs: the involvement and intent of supernatural agents, such as God; the love and anger of those supernatural agents; and the mixed foundation of religious beliefs based on doctrinal and experiential knowledge. The fMRI allows researchers to study specific brain regions and networks that become active when a person performs a certain mental or physical task. The team found that although the amount of activation in different brain networks did not vary among religious and non-religious subjects when contemplating the three dimensions, there was a difference in the actual brain networks that were activated by the dimensions. Through the use of this technology, Auburn researchers are gaining a better understanding of the human mind and the ways in which we form our belief systems.
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An easier pill to swallow
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Today, prescription drugs cost about 50 percent more in the United States than they do in other countries. As medical costs continue to rise, so does the need for medications that are more affordable, have a longer shelf life and provide greater benefits.
For example, some drugs tend to change form and lose their functionality over time, especially if they become exposed to moisture or high temperatures during storage. By stabilizing drug molecules with sugars, these medications have a longer shelf life.
Ram Gupta, Walt and Virginia Woltosz professor of chemical engineering, and graduate students Courtney Ann Ober and Stephen Montgomery, are developing a number of technologies to improve drug delivery and enhance the way medications interact with patients. One of these innovative technologies involves pharmaceutical cocrystals, which are multi-component structures used to bind a drug molecule with another molecule, such as sugar. By binding drug molecules in this way, researchers can improve the properties of a medication without changing the fundamental effectiveness of the drug.
Cocrystals can also aid in the solubility of drugs, which determines how well they are absorbed into a patient’s body and in turn, how well they perform. It is estimated that 40 percent of new pharmaceutical medicines are poorly watersoluble, significantly impeding drug dissolution and bioavailability. By combining drugs with a water soluble sugar molecule, researchers have been able to increase the amount of a medication that is absorbed in the body, resulting in significant implications for the production and cost of medications.
In addition, many drugs form weak crystal structures which don’t allow them to be compressed into solid tablets. Consequently, they must be packaged into gelatin capsules which are often larger and more difficult to swallow. A smaller, more easily ingested tablet increases the likelihood that patients will take their medications as prescribed. Through reduced costs, increased shelf life, and easier methods of taking medication, Auburn engineers are offering solutions that can permanently impact the welfare of patients throughout the nation.
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New age manufacturing Advances in the technology of 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, can be seen from dental crowns to orthopedic implants and from body armor to jet engine parts. In addition, high-performance polymers and metal-based systems are creating unlimited possibilities for the production of prototypes and finished parts. Additive manufacturing is a cost-effective, highspeed process that offers both design freedom and convenience. In creating 3D objects by adding material in carefully calibrated layers, Auburn Engineering faculty and students are designing, producing and testing structural elements and parts. With fused deposition machines, our researchers are producing lightweight structural elements from plastics such as polylactic acid and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene for uses in Auburn’s automotive manufacturing systems laboratory. Future capabilities including stereolithography, which is the process of constructing solid objects by successively “printing” thin layers of an ultraviolet resin one on top of the other, as well 6
as polyjet printing capabilities, will be used to manufacture parts for use in various vehicular manufacturing industries. Andres Carrano, Philpott-WestPoint Stevens associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and David Blersch, assistant professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering, are evaluating various polymers to design and fabricate surfaces using additive manufacturing. Smooth ceramic tiles are being replaced with plastic ones that have a range of topography and roughness designed to accelerate the growth of beneficial algae for purposes such as increasing the absorption of pollutants in water, as well as the production of bioproducts. A faster growth rate increases the overall yield of these bioproducts. “We are employing additive manufacturing technology to manipulate surface characteristics in order to explore their effects on the growth rate and product yields of algae,” said Blersch. “This affords fine-scale control over these surface characteristics, so that we can determine those
that optimize the yield of a particular set of products from the algae.” Fadel Megahed, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, uses the additive manufacturing and metrology lab to provide a learning platform for his undergraduate statistical quality control classes, as well as his graduate course in the design of experiments. Students are looking to understand and quantify the impact of various settings of 3D printers on the quality characteristics of printed parts. “The excitement of additive manufacturing is that we can build more customized products,” said Megahed. “The challenge is how to make that process faster.” The technological advances that Auburn Engineering is making in additive manufacturing are just another way we are bridging the gap between research and practice.
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Robotic revolution
The day may soon come when the order you placed online will be delivered through the air – not by plane, but by drone. Kevin Gue, associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is part of a research group that has developed a roadmap, or planning document, to address changes in the material handling and logistics industry. Gue has utilized his research expertise in warehousing, material handling and order fulfillment to examine how emerging technologies can have a direct impact on companies now, as well as 10 to 15 years down the road. The development of the roadmap incorporated four workshops in cities throughout the United 8
States to assess what the industry will look like in 2025 and how businesses should be preparing now. This included conversations regarding the workforce, suppliers and planning systems involved in the industry. The overwhelming consensus was that stakeholders may be focusing too much on the present, and not spending enough time preparing for the future. “As the study describes, there are many challenges that individual companies will have to solve in the future, such as robotic order picking, automated truck loading and possibly home delivery by unmanned drones,” Gue said. Companies like Amazon are pioneering the use of drones through package delivery, and Gue believes the industry will undergo a rapid change
as more and more companies experiment with these technologies. “In robotics in particular, we’re going to see a revolution in the next three to 10 years that I think is going to be shocking and exciting at the same time,” he said. “We’re going to have robots doing things that we never thought could be done. The technology is pushing us.”
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Big data, big challenges
A major challenge of analyzing big data is reducing the amount of time it takes to find meaningful results. Weikuan Yu, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, is increasing the efficiency of computer systems that process big data. From international information technology corporations to the Internet search engines we use routinely, Yu’s work has the potential to accelerate the amount of data processed at one time, with one software product already released to Mellanox Technologies for the accelerated analysis of unstructured data. With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Yu is currently exploring 10
computer system methods to achieve both system and task efficiency on high performance cluster computers. The project focuses on advancing the programming model MapReduce, used by leading corporations such as Yahoo and Facebook to process big data sets with multiple computing jobs simultaneously. “Our continuous innovation for the fast analytics of big data has led to a number of novel and practical data movement and task management techniques that are appreciated by the research community, system practitioners and the commercial industry,” Yu said. Yu and his research team are creating a set of techniques across multiple layers of software packages by exploring cross-layer cooperation
techniques to achieve system efficiency. He is also investigating cross-phase techniques to enhance job fairness and system throughput which enables data to be analyzed at every phase of the software package. To maximize the resource utilization and completion rate of processing multiple tasks, Yu is studying crossjob task co-scheduling techniques that recognize the relationship between jobs in order to process them in a productive manner. A wide variety of federal and industrial sponsors of Yu’s big data research include the NSF, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Mellanox Technologies, Intel and Scitor.
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NATIONAL RANKINGS Undergraduate program1
30th
among public universities
Graduate Program1 Graduate Online Program1
29th
Ranked Ranked
7th
38th
25th
111
135
Pre-Engineering
Aerospace
2013 U.S. News & World Report
514
Biosystems
364 1
in undergraduate enrollment 2
nationally in engineering degrees awarded to African-Americans 3
Undergraduate enrollment by major
12
among public universities
2
2012 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE)
Civil
576 Chemical 3
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
529
Computer Science and Software
ENROLLMENT Undergraduate Graduate Total
4,294 883 5,177
FRESHMAN CLASS SNAPSHOT
28.5/1225 3.85
Average ACT/SAT
Average High School GPA
962 26%
new engineering freshmen
499
Electrical and Computer
of Auburn’s total freshman class
31
Polymer and Fiber
Materials
317
Industrial and Systems
52
1,045 Mechanical
121 Wireless
13
Graduate enrollment by major
48 29
Aerospace
Biosystems
88
Chemical
105 124 Civil
Computer Science and Software
GRADUATE ONLINE DEGREES
196
Electrical and Computer
Masters
Civil Engineering
Doctorate
Chemical Engineering
Electrical and Computer Engineering Industrial and Systems Engineering
Dual MBA/Industial and Systems Engineering Materials Engineering
Mechanical Engineering 14
Industrial and Systems
Mechanical
Polymer and Fiber
GRADUATE SNAPSHOT
Aerospace Engineering
Computer Science and Software Engineering
121 160 12
496 387
FACULTY SNAPSHOT
146 29
tenure/tenure track faculty
non-tenure track faculty
STRATEGIC RESEARCH AREAS
RESEARCH SNAPSHOT
$60.1 45th
• Energy and Environment
million in research expenditures
• Cyber Security and Information Technology
in nation in research expenditures1 (ranked in top 50 for past seven years)
• Infrastructure and Transportation • Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Engineering • Engineered Materials and Nanotechnology
Research expenditures by department in millions
$12.0 Administration
$11.9
$8.2
Civil
• Advanced Manufacturing
$10.6 Electrical and Computer
Biosystems
$5.6 Mechanical
$.71 Aerospace
1
2012 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE)
$6.6 Chemical
$3.0
Computer Science and Software
$2.0 Industrial and Systems
$.74 Polymer and Fiber
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PHILANTHROPY SNAPSHOT
$16,502,759 $28,773,318 174% 2013 Goal Raised
2013 fundraising efforts
$5.3
$7.5
Faculty Support
Student Support
$1.5
Percentage of goal raised
Facilities Support
$14.5 Program Support
Funds raised by year in millions
$21.9
$13.3
2008
2010
$20.4 2009
16
$21.2 2012
$19.1 2011
$28.8 2013
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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering 1301 Shelby Center 735 Extension Loop Auburn, AL 36849-7350
Auburn University is an equal opportunity educational institution/employer.
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