Engineer Spring 2010

SPRING

10 Inside: Ticket to Ride Family Ties

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Twenty-one Student Groups help launch careers

Stay Connected to the College of Engineering Join the ENG online community! Post, tag, Tweet, ask questions, reconnect with alumni and watch engineering videos. Stay up-to-date on the most recent happenings, including networking opportunities, job fairs, seminars and other employment events.

44 Cummington Street Boston, MA 02215

Selim Ünlü, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs

Kenneth R. Lutchen, Dean

Richard Lally, Assistant Dean for Administration

Solomon R. Eisenberg,

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Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs

Twitter: www.twitter.com/BUCollegeofENG YouTube: www.youtube.com/BUCollegeofENG

Engineering Leadership Advisory Board John E. Abele Gregg Adkin ’86 Noubar B. Afeyan Alan Auerbach ’91 Roger A. Dorf ’70 Ralf Faber Janie Fouke Ronald G. Garriques ’86 Norman E. Gaut Joseph Healey ’88 Jon K. Hirschtick

Bill I. Huyett Amit Jain ’85, ’88 Dean L. Kamen Hon ’06 Nick Lippis ’84, ’89 John Maccarone ’66 Venkatesh Narayanamurti Richard Reidy SMG ’82 Subra Suresh John Tegan ’88 John Ullo David Wormley

SPRING 2010

Engineer Engineer

Editor Michael Seele Staff Writers Mark Dwortzan, Jason L. London Design and Production Boston University Creative Services Photography BU Photography, Vernon Doucette; College of Engineering, Mark Dwortzan, Jason L. London; except where indicated The BU College of Engineering Magazine is produced for the alumni and friends of the Boston University College of Engineering.

Please direct any questions or comments to Michael Seele, Boston University College of Engineering, 44 Cummington Street, Boston, MA 02215. Phone: 617-353-2800; fax: 617-353-5929; e-mail: engalum@bu.edu; website: www.bu.edu/eng.

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4 Prepared for Takeoff Twenty-one student groups help launch careers

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Gift to ENG Aims to Attract Top Students, Fund Undergraduate Summer Research Ticket to Ride: John Garvey Advances Fast Track to Space Family Ties: Three Related Alums Help Keep ENG on the Leading Edge Tackling Society’s Grand Challenges: Graduate Students Advance Solutions in Health Care and Clean Energy

Depar tment s

2 14 25 33 34 COVER: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles group leaders explore UAV flight dynamics at Aurora Flight Sciences in Cambridge, Mass.

From the Dean Eng News Faculty News Alumni Events Class Notes

Building a Better Engineer

By Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen

It would be easy to train future engineers if all we had to do was teach them engineering. A nuts-and-bolts curriculum along the lines of that offered at any number of engineering schools around the world would do. Start with the general engineering basics, finish with a set of major-specific courses, hand over the degree at Commencement and wish the graduates luck.

They would need it. Learning to be technically competent is certainly necessary for the engineer, but it’s not nearly enough to compete in the global workplace of the 21st century and to impact society in ways only engineers can. That’s why we restructured the College a few years ago to make interdisciplinary education more seamless; it’s also why we’re expanding the summer research opportunities available to our undergraduates and enhancing other outside-the-classroom experiences.

Of course, we focus a great deal of our efforts on refining the courses and hands-on laboratory work that are the foundation of an engineering education, and we are constantly examining their relevance in an ever-changing world and making improvements. But ensuring that our students are acquiring the vital skills and knowledge they need means that our job is only partially done. We must also ensure that they are comfortable using their quantitative skills and understanding of technology to recognize and address society’s challenges and lead eclectic groups of people to solve them.

For the past several years, the College has been working to expand and enhance the extracurricular activities that help students make that connection. Engineers Without Borders, for example, takes students out of their comfort zones and puts them to work solving real engineering problems. Professional societies offer opportunities for students to network with researchers and industry practitioners in their field. Honor societies give students in-depth experiences in research and its application, and provide a venue to o­ rganize College-wide community service events grounded in engineering. Student design competitions are an exciting and challenging way to stimulate and nurture the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit of our students.

A new Unmanned Aerial Vehicles group has literally taken off this year, drawing 75 students and an alumnus mentor to the challenge of designing, building and flying a UAV. These are but a few examples from the nearly two dozen undergraduate organizations highlighted in the cover story of this issue.

There are many other student organizations that use different means to achieve the same ends.

Student interest has grown exponentially as today’s generation of students emerges more motivated by community service than any in recent memory. Our challenge is no longer to interest students in these opportunities; it is to provide enough opportunities to meet their interest. That is where alumni can help.

Students in most of these organizations do some fundraising to support their activities, but a large portion of their funding comes from alumni donations. The College’s operating budget does not provide for this type of expenditure. Fortunately, the alumni have been very supportive, allowing us to offer some—but not all—of the activities that the students desire and need. If we are to continue expanding these important opportunities, and give every student who wants to participate the chance to do so, we will need a growing partnership with alumni. Whether it’s a foundational gift—as in establishing a major fund to support undergraduate summer research like the one noted on page 3—or a contribution to the Annual Fund, your participation has a direct and meaningful impact on students’ experiences.

This year, in the midst of a delicate global economic recovery, the College is on pace to set a new record for the number of alumni donors. I hope that you will join as a partner in our mission to ensure that your alma mater continues to shape engineers who will make a difference in our world.

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By Michael G. Seele

Gift to BU College of Engineering Aims to Attract Top Students, Fund Undergraduate Summer Research A major gift to the Boston University College of Engineering will ensure that top students will have access to transformative summer research experiences for many years to come under the new Kenneth R. Lutchen Distinguished Fellowship Program.

Founded by an anonymous alumnus of the College’s Biomedical Engineering program, the ongoing program will be funded by annual $100,000 donations that will support up to 10 undergraduate research projects each summer.

The $100,000 gift will be available every year and represents the largest commitment by an alumnus in the history of the BU College of Engineering.

The donor named the fellowship program in honor of Lutchen, his former professor and the College’s dean since 2006.

“I am extremely appreciative of the guidance and mentorship that I received from Dr. Lutchen while I was a student at Boston University, and it is my honor to be able to establish the Kenneth R. Lutchen Distinguished Fellowship Program that has the opportunity to benefit future generations of engineering students,” the donor said.

The first Lutchen Fellowships will be offered to a combination of top applicants to the College of Engineering Class of 2014 and to a few rising juniors and seniors. Each fellow must identify a research project working with an engineering faculty mentor and maintain a minimum 3.0 grade point average. Entering freshmen who win a $10,000 fellowship can use it during the summer after their sophomore or junior years. The program is open to all engineering undergraduates, regardless of major.

“Having a lasting impact on a student’s life is a teacher’s greatest reward, and I am honored and humbled by this gift,” Lutchen said. “This fellowship program will ensure the

The Kenneth R. Lutchen Distinguished Fellowship Program will support up to 10 undergraduate research projects each summer.

Boston University College of Engineering can offer our students these wonderful opportunities to enrich their engineering education and achieve levels of excellence they might not have thought possible.”

As a junior faculty member in 1985, Lutchen was instrumental in establishing the Biomedical Engineering Student Design Program, a required program where seniors, guided by a faculty member, take on realworld engineering problems in a yearlong research project. He created the program’s anchor course on how to approach a major project, how to communicate all facets of the

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project, and how to professionally present the project at the department’s Annual Senior Project Conference, which he also created. The conference attracts nearly 200 people a year, including 100 from outside Boston University.

Lutchen ran the Biomedical Engineering Senior Project program for 23 years, and the Conference will mark its 25th anniversary on April 30, 2010. The program was subsequently expanded to all engineering seniors in every department as a graduation requirement. Lutchen later served as chairman of the Biomedical Engineering Department before becoming the College’s dean.

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Undergraduate groups help students launch careers

Aurora Flight Sciences engineer Justin McClellan (’04) (right) discusses unmanned aerial vehicle flight platform design with UAV group leaders Brian Serra (Aero’11), Dane Sarcone (ME’11), Wijnand Schoemakers (Aero’11) and Ryan Hunter (ECE’11).

By Mark Dwortzan

Their mission: to design, build and fly a fully autonomous aircraft that can penetrate a mock security facility undetected and return with a flash drive containing secret military plans— all within 10 minutes.

Huddled in their office beneath two wooden airplane models and a makeshift blimp, President Ryan Hunter (ECE’11) mulls possibilities for autonomous, onboard software algorithms and sensors; Vice President Dane Sarcone (ME’11) explores options for the flight platform; and Treasurer Patrick Pease (ME’11) strategizes on how to integrate the software and sensors into the flight platform.

These students are not dorm-room entrepreneurs, but rather leaders of a new College of Engineering undergraduate student organization, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) group, which launched in September with the goal of competing in the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s (AUVSI) 2011 International Aerial Robotics Competition. To accomplish their mission, they’ll spend the next two years not only studying and advancing leading-edge technology, but also managing project timelines, budgets and 75 undergraduate members.

“The flight platform grants practical experience to those interested in mechanical and aerospace engineering, while the necessary autonomy grants experience to computer engineers in ways that enhance the undergraduate curriculum,” says Hunter. “This kind of real-world, hands-on experience is something employers seek in ­candidates.”

Twenty-one ways to launch Engineering practice. Project management expertise. Career preparation. All three educational benefits can be obtained, in different measures, at any of 21 undergraduate student organizations based at the College of Engineering. [See inset on page 7.] Some, such as the UAV group, appeal to highly specific interests; others, such as the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, are diversity-based; still others, like the Biomedical Engineering Society, are local chapters of national professional organizations or honor societies.

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“Some of the groups give students the opportunity to do more hands-on engineering and apply their classroom knowledge,” says Joanne Cornell, ENG director of undergraduate programs. “For those who become officers, the groups offer a leadership training ground that exposes them to running meetings, planning events and establishing an organizational structure.”

These organizations also help undergraduate engineering students learn more about their field and start building a student and professional network that could bolster graduate school and job prospects. Energized by personal interests, and social and career advancement opportunities, most of the College’s 1,185 undergraduates join at least one group before they graduate.

Engineering Practice In the UAV group and several other student organizations, undergraduates engage in hands-on projects that enable them to road-test engineering concepts they’ve primarily encountered in texts and lectures. For instance, this year members of the BU chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers are teaming up to redesign, build and race a small off-road vehicle in the SAE Mini Baja eastern regional competition; the BU Rocket Team is refining and retesting a hybrid fuel rocket research test bed; and the BU Energy Club aims to develop a small-scale electricity monitoring sensor network. [See page 8.]

Practicing their engineering skills on foreign soil since 2008, members of the BU chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB)

Engineers Without Borders BU chapter members Charles Jahnke (BME’10), Richard Burriola (ME’10), Paolo Belfiore (BME’09) and Elissa Mueller (ME’12) assessing a problematic water distribution system in Chirimoto, Peru. (Photo courtesy of Art Jahnke.)

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are partnering with regional civil engineers in Chirimoto, a remote agricultural community in northern Peru, to clean up the town’s drinking water supply. Contaminants from Chirimoto’s inadequately filtered system have inflicted parasitic infections on much of the population since severe floods devastated the area in the early 1980s.

Following up on an initial, weeklong fact-finding trip in January 2008, Jeremy Schein (ECE’10), Charles Jahnke (BME’10), Richard Burriola (ME’10), Elissa Mueller (ME’12) and Paolo Belfiore (BME’09) spent six weeks last summer assessing the problem in the hills above Chirimoto. The EWB team conducted chemical and bacteriological tests of all water sources and examined and mapped pipes and filters of four water delivery systems.

“The community elected to have us revamp one of the old systems and use funds from the regional government to modernize and integrate the other three systems using slow-sand filter technology,” says Belfiore.

For Schein, the chapter’s president, this work has provided a critical global perspective on civil and environmental challenges and a proving ground for how engineering can enhance people’s lives.

“I think students join because they’re really excited about the possibilities of using their engineering skills to make a true difference in the world,” he observes. “It’s one thing to read a textbook; it’s another thing to actually be building water filters on the ground in Peru.”

Burriola was moved by the human dimension of the engineering project.

“As we took a bus through the countryside, we could see fires on the side of the road and people sifting through trash,” he recalls.

“The people of Chirimoto were inspiring—they worked so hard every single day to make so little, but seemed far happier than the people you see walking down Commonwealth Avenue.

They don’t necessarily want high tech, but a better quality of life.”

Project Management Engineering in the real world is not only about advancing new technologies, but also managing them—and the people behind them—from concept to product deployment.

Most ENG-based student organizations offer undergraduates the chance to develop project management skills and consist of an executive board (president, vice president, secretary and treasurer) composed entirely of ENG students.

With support from an ENG faculty advisor and funding from the BU Student Activities Office and the College, e-board officers run meetings, plan and market events, hold annual elections and raise funds. In the process, they learn what it takes to create and sustain a results-oriented organization.

For the UAV group, fundraising goes far beyond bake sales and pledge drives. To get their fledgling organization up and running in September, the UAV e-board met with Justin McClellan (’04), an engineer at Aurora Flight Sciences who had approached the College last summer about potential collaborations. Seated around a conference table with McClellan and colleagues at the Virginia-based defense

Society of Women Engineers (SWE) BU section. (Photo courtesy of SWE BU section.)

2010 UNDERGRADUATE ORGANIZATIONS Alpha Eta Mu Beta – Biomedical Engineering Honor Society American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics American Society of Mechanical Engineers

Minority Engineers Society Pi Tau Sigma – Mechanical Engineering Honor Society Rocket Team

Biomedical Engineering Society

Sigma Gamma Tau – Aerospace Society of Manufacturing Engineers

Energy Club

Society of Automotive Engineers

Engineering Honor Society

Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers

Engineering Student Government

Society of Women Engineers

Engineers Without Borders

Students for the Exploration and Development of Space

Eta Kappa Nu – Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Institute of Industrial Engineers

contractor’s Cambridge office, they discussed the project’s scope, time frame and manpower requirements.

“My preliminary concern was to make them aware of the program management aspects of the project,” says McClellan, who helped secure seed funding and serves as an industry advisor. “I also wanted to make sure they understood that this project would be an ongoing effort they could hand off to younger classes, and would require graduate student

Samantha Byrnes (BME’10), organizer of the 2010 Society of Women Engineers New England Regional Conference.

Tau Beta Pi – Engineering Honor Society Unmanned Aerial Vehicles For these organizations’ website links, visit www.bu.edu/eng/ugrad/groups/.

assistance on the autonomy aspects and faculty support within the College of Engineering.”

So far the UAV group has met the project’s administrative challenges with the same fervor that it has brought to surmounting its technological hurdles.

“In just two months, we’ve organized a team, established requirements and sought out funding,” says Pease. “It’s a huge leadership experience.” Adds Sarcone, “It’s like running a company.”

To keep project timelines on target, the e-board meets twice a week and holds biweekly meetings with the entire group. “Our biggest challenge is that we have a very limited amount of time to get this project off the ground,” says Hunter, “and pass our courses and graduate.”

Getting e-board and other active members to function as a team and stay on task is a common challenge for student organization presidents.

“When you’re trying to organize people, it’s sometimes hard when everyone has their own opinion,” says Erica Squillacioti (ME’10), president of the BU section of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), an educational and service organization that encourages women to attain high levels of educational and profes-

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Teammates Neha Dave (ME’11) and Obehi Ukpebor (ME’12) compete in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) BU chapter’s paper tower contest. (Photo courtesy of ASME BU chapter.)

sional achievement in the field of engineering.

“Running planning meetings has taught me to be open to suggestions and work with different personalities to get things done.”

The art of compromise is one of the many leadership skills that Samantha Byrnes (BME’10) has honed as organizer of the 2010 SWE New England Regional Conference, which the BU section will host for the first time in April.

Typically drawing 500 student and professional members, the conference includes local laboratory tours, workshops and panel discussions, a career fair and a dinner.

“I’ve recognized that I can’t micromanage everything, and learned how to delegate responsibilities,” says Byrnes, who has run conference calls, lined up speakers, secured meeting rooms and performed many other tasks to ensure the success of the conference.

For some undergraduate student organizations, the most pressing challenge is increasing student participation amid the clamor of countless on-campus activities and the demands of weekly problem sets. Since his election as president of the BU chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) last spring, Andrew Menard (ME’10) resolved to take this “under-the-radar” chapter and turn it around.

“In the past, ASME was a do-it-on-yourown organization,” says Menard. “As in a lot of professional societies, many people are members of the national organization but not active at BU.”

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So what’s brewing? Fast-Growing BU Energy Club Explores Next-Generation Solutions During a recent meeting of the Boston University Energy Club, Jarrod Milshtein (ME’13) and Michael Cannamela (PhD candidate, ME) teamed up to evaluate the technical merits of a new concept for wind-powered outdoor lighting.

“Using a small wind turbine and rechargeable battery pack, the proposed lamp would charge during the day when it’s windy and turn on at night,” says Milshtein, the organization’s first undergraduate chair representing College of Engineering students. “We thought wind turbines were not effective on a small scale, and we wondered if the electricity generated during the day would be sufficient to keep the lamp lit at night.”

Other students at the meeting explored the commercial viability of the idea and its potential impact on society.

Graduate student Elijah Ercolino (ME’10) founded the Energy Club to spark a facts-based, interdisciplinary conversation about energy challenges and solutions among graduate students in ENG, the College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) and the Graduate School of Management (SMG).

Launched with six members in 2007, the organization has since expanded to more than 500 undergraduate, graduate and alumni participants with wide-ranging perspectives on twenty-first century energy technology, commercialization and policy.

Activities this year include an annual Energy Night conference in February featuring panel discussions, a keynote speaker, posters and a reception; an interdisciplinary energy discussion series (first topic: next generation transportation); field trips, such as a tour of an electric car design lab; and several talks from academic and industry experts on topics ranging from offshore wind generation to the smart grid.

While ENG students account for about 20 percent of Energy Club members, the club now aims to boost ENG undergraduate participation with lab space and hands-on projects.

“The idea is to do a small-scale electricity monitoring sensor network,” says Club President Benjamin Snydacker (SMG ‘10). “We chose this to tie in to BU’s efforts to be a leader in the smart grid space.”

For Milshtein, an alternative fuel car enthusiast and enrollee in the new ENG Concentration in Energy Technologies and Environmental Engineering, joining the Energy Club was a no-brainer.

Bottom: The Energy Club holds weekly Saturday morning alumni group meetings at Espresso Royale.

Right: Michael Galbo (MSE’09) made his first contact with his current employer at an Energy Club event.

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“The fundamental challenge facing my generation is the environment and global warming,” he says. “It’s cool to be part of a group focused on what interests me and to collaborate with students in the different schools.”

To facilitate this kind of interdisciplinary conversation, the Energy Club executive board includes vice presidents, undergraduate chairs and faculty advisors representing CAS, ENG and SMG. As they plan and run events, many e-board members develop a network of energy-oriented professors, administrators and professionals.

More informal networking takes place at 10 a.m. every Saturday at Espresso Royale on Commonwealth Avenue, where current and former students gather to explore energy topics with professionals who bring wideranging experiences and perspectives on the industry to the discussion.

“It’s a chance for alumni members in the energy field to discuss what we do and how it’s applicable to everyone else, and to network and support one another on professional projects,” says Colin Boosey (’04), an energy engineer at Trane, Inc. “For the undergraduates who show up, it’s a chance for them to see what life is like in different energy fields once they graduate.”

And, quite possibly, find employment.

“My career started because of the BU Energy Club, as the first contact I met at EnerNOC was through a BUEC event,” says Michael Galbo (MSE’09), a commercial building energy expert at the downtown Boston company. “Through the club, I was able to connect with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs all over Boston. I learned about new and exciting technologies as well as the laws, policies and financial mechanisms that make them come to life. This club was well worth the time I put into it, not only for the connections I made, but also for the knowledge I gained.”

To boost membership, Menard and his e-board colleagues launched a Facebook page, revised their e-mail list, established freshman and sophomore class representative positions, invited guest speakers to meetings, built a sixfoot-tall roller coaster to draw attention at the ENG student organizations fair in September and held a contest in which three-student teams raced to construct the tallest paper tower that could hold a full-stemmed glass at the top.

“There’s definitely more participation, interest and energy in the group now that we’re holding events and meetings more regularly,” Menard observes. “People know about us now.”

Career Preparation By giving participants the opportunity to engage in hands-on projects and organize teams to achieve specific goals, student groups help prepare undergraduates for future responsibilities as professional engineers. But many go a step further, helping members sharpen job search skills, learn about graduate school programs and career paths from trailblazing role models and launch a professional network that could give them a leg up on securing graduate school and job acceptances.

The Minority Engineers Society (MES), the BU chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), whose mission is “to increase the number of culturally responsible black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally and positively impact the community,” covers all the bases. MES runs an alumni panel and guest speaker series; career fairs; résumé, interviewing and jobs search workshops; on-campus study nights; industrial field trips; and community outreach events in partnership with Boston area high schools; and, like many other student organizations, sends selected members to professional conferences.

It was at a NSBE national conference in Orlando last March that Kurt Abrams (ME’11) discovered his future.

“In one workshop a patent attorney described how he pursued a law degree after studying engineering as an undergraduate, and discussed some of the cases that he’s worked on,” Abrams recalls. “His presentation opened my eyes that I can do both engineering and law.

Just from that one meeting, I’m now interested in becoming a patent attorney.”

Neha Dave (ME’11), junior class representative of ASME’s BU chapter, found her role model much closer to home in Krista Botsford

(’98), a guest speaker at the organization’s first meeting in September. Botsford, CEO and founder of Botsford EcoTech Partners, LLC, recounted how she worked at other firms, including IBM, before starting her own environmental consulting company.

“Krista showed that you don’t have to stick to one job to be successful in your career, and how engineering and entrepreneurship can be combined,” says Dave, who envisions starting her own high-tech business.

A major benefit of membership in many ENG student organizations is a robust professional network, which is critical to landing a job or starting a business in today’s marketplace.

Attending a national SWE conference as a BU student member helped launch the career of former SWE President Michelle Tortolani (’82, ‘89), now an engineering program manager for advanced radio frequency systems at Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems.

“As a SWE student member, I attended the SWE National Conferences and took advantage of the networking, professional development and career planning opportunities offered,” Tortolani says. “My first job out of college was at Hughes Aircraft Company in Fullerton, California, and was the result of a contact that I made at a SWE National Conference.”

Professional conferences can also offer great exposure to budding undergraduate researchers. At the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) national conference in

Minority Engineers Society (MES) members Francesca Neptune (CAS‘08), Francesca Okolie (CAS‘08) and Kurt Abrams (ME‘11) at the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) national conference in Orlando.

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Pittsburgh in October, three BU chapter members participated in a poster session, including Robert Nims (BME’10), who presented research on a noninvasive, computer-assisted method of assessing and predicting lung airway conditions.

“At the conference, individuals would stop by my poster, and it was a great chance to gain new insight on the topic and potential alternative data treatments,” says Nims. “Also, other people involved in the field suggested how different technologies may alter the results or different ways to assess the results.”

Some of the most productive networking occurs among members of student organizations, says SWE-BU Section President Squillacioti. “Our social events help women to meet students in their classes who could become potential study partners, and students in other grades who may provide advice on their program, lab work, jobs, internships and study abroad,” she said. For example, at SWE-BU’s annual Black, White and Pink party, juniors and seniors pair up with and mentor freshmen and sophomores in the same major.

For ASME alum Botsford, student membership opened doors not only by introducing her to many role models and professional contacts, but also by impressing potential employers.

“I attended professional events at Boston chapter industry meetings, which provided great networking opportunities for internships, co-ops and jobs after graduation, and opportunities to connect with mentors,” she says. “My involvement as an ASME student member and my attendance at Boston professional ASME chapter meetings were helpful talking points in job interviews.”

In addition to ending up with an impressive arsenal of hands-on engineering, leadership and job search skills that they can demonstrate to potential employers, many College of Engineering students emerge from their undergraduate student organization experience with a collection of uplifting memories. From flying an aircraft they’ve built in an international contest to watching a high-profile conference they’ve planned go live to meeting someone who alters the direction of their career, these groups offer engineering undergrads the chance to follow their dreams—and, in some cases, launch them.

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Ticket to Ride: John Garvey

Advances Fast Track to Space A jumbo jet is the most cost-effective aircraft for coast-to-coast flights, but would be overkill for passengers traveling from L.A. to Phoenix.

A much smaller vehicle would require far less airfare—and depart more often. The same principle applies to small satellites and space probes: Rather than wait a few years to piggy­ back on a large, complex, expensive mission, it would be much cheaper and faster to use a launch system customized to get small-scale payloads into orbit.

Toward that end, John M. Garvey (EE’96), president and CEO of Garvey Spacecraft Corporation (GSC), a Long Beach, Californiabased aerospace research and development company, is developing reusable launch vehicle (RLV) systems and advanced space technologies. “We’re trying to address what we think is an emerging market niche for very small payloads, and provide customers with their own dedicated launch systems,” he says. “By reducing the total cost, we’re addressing the primary decision factor for that market segment.”

Over the next decade, Garvey aims to become a premier launch service provider for nanosatellites, one- to 10-kilogram spacecraft that have drawn increased attention in defense, space exploration and academic circles, including Boston University. In the course of completing projects for the Air Force, commercial aerospace firms, universities and other clients, GSC is evolving a two-stage vehicle designed to launch nanosat-class payloads to low Earth orbit.

Garvey compares today’s budding nanosatellite industry players to the nineteenthcentury pioneers of the American West. “There were a lot of miners, trappers and explorers with different ideas about the best way to get through the Rocky Mountains, and the guys who got it right survived and sometimes even made money,” he observes.

Since founding GSC in 2000, Garvey has proven that he has the right stuff to blaze new, more cost-effective trails to space. The company has developed and flight-tested small-scale, low-altitude versions of a number of launch vehicle technologies that, while investigated

by NASA and large aerospace companies, have never gotten off the ground. Working with its partners, GSC is the first organization to fly a 10

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composite liquid oxygen (LOX) propellant tank, a lightweight version of conventional aluminum LOX tanks; a liquid propellant aerospike engine, an alternative, performance-enhancing rocket engine configuration once seriously considered for use on the Space Shuttle; and a mixed LOXmethane rocket engine, a concept that may someday enable on-site fuel production for Mars landers.

“Our goal was to push these technologies a little bit and help provide proof of concept, rather than leave them in the hangar, never having flown,” says Garvey, who in 1996 began building and testing rockets in his spare time with a handful of coworkers from McDonnell Douglas. He named the first launch vehicle Kimbo 1, after his wife Kim, then a manager of a major segment of the International Space Station.

“I was building the rockets in our garage and she couldn’t get her car into her spot one day because it was filled with engine hardware,” Garvey recalls. “She asked, ‘Don’t you get enough of this at work during the day?’ to which I lamely responded, ‘I was thinking of naming the rockets after you, Kimbo.’” Kim ended up letting her husband use the garage for another two years and three rockets.

A child of the Apollo era who still enjoys the primordial rush of a successful rocket launch, Garvey kept his eyes on the skies even as he majored in economics at Harvard. Rather than go on to business school, he pursued a master’s degree in electrical engineering through BU’s Late Entry Accelerated Program and took elective courses in propulsion and thermodynamics.

One of six students on a research team in Professor Mark Horenstein’s (ECE) laboratory, he helped build a free-floating electric field probe for exploring space plasma for the Air Force Geophysical Laboratory. Horenstein describes Garvey’s contributions to the design, assembly and testing of the prototype as herculean.

“Much of his work involved programming the microprocessor, a relatively new device at the time,” says Horenstein. “John exhibited a fabulous work ethic and a bulldog attitude to attacking complex tasks.”

Garvey displayed that ethic at his first job developing communications satellites for RCA

John M. Garvey (EE’96) (right) with academic partner Eric Besnard, director of the California Launch Vehicle Education Initiative, at the launch of the Prospector 9, a reusable nanosat launch vehicle. (Photo courtesy of Garvey Spacecraft Corporation.)

and at the McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company, where he spent more than a decade working on multimillion-dollar projects such as the Space Station and the Delta Clipper, a prototype vertical takeoff and landing RLV. Uninspired by the bureaucratic nature of such large-scale programs, he periodically gravitated to “fringe projects,” including work on teleoperated Mars and lunar rovers.

Determined to realize his dream of advancing a dedicated launch system for nanosatellites and other small payloads, Garvey founded GSC in 2000 and formed a partnership a year later with California State University, Long Beach’s (CSULB) cooperative research program, the California Launch Vehicle Education Initiative (CALVEIN). Since 2001, the partnership has produced numerous static fire tests and 19 flight tests in the Mojave Desert, and 14 new rockets (now called Prospectors) featuring a variety of advanced RLV elements.

CALVEIN has also allowed Garvey to mentor a new generation of rocket scientists, a task he clearly relishes. “When you get kids who understand that they can be the first ones to fly a LOX-methane rocket and show their parents in Wikipedia what they did, you realize you’ve made a difference,” he says.

—Mark Dwortzan

Family Ties: Three Related Alums Help Keep ENG on the Leading Edge

Steve Girouard (BME’89) walks briskly through the terminal at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport as announcements of departing flights erupt from overhead speakers. Advancing toward the gate where he will soon board a flight to Minneapolis, he prepares to encounter what may be the next big thing in high-tech health care.

For the past year Girouard has scoured the Midwest for promising new therapeutics, medical devices and diagnostics for Johnson & Johnson, where he works as senior director of emerging technologies. Based at the company’s Corporate Office of Science and Technology in Cleveland, he visits universities, medical centers, technology incubators and early-stage investors to pinpoint innovative products and business opportunities with high growth potential.

“I can see health care 10 years from now from my job today,” says Girouard, who has devoted much of his career to advancing nextgeneration cardiovascular technologies. “I get to live the future ahead of everyone else, and that’s pretty exciting.”

Half a continent away in California’s Silicon Valley, Girouard’s cousins, identical twin brothers Bradley (EE’84, EECS’89) and Brendon (EE’84) Howe—both former BU swim team stars who crunched through engineering problem sets “backstage” during meets—are also championing technology’s future.

At Altera Corporation in San Jose, Bradley directs advanced chip design efforts as vice president of the company’s Integrated Circuit Engineering division; Brendon, vice president and general manager of two business units at Network Appliance, Inc. (NetApp) in Sunnyvale, manages engineering and product development of a state-of-the-art network storage system that enables large enterprises to store mission-critical data.

Since leaving the College of Engineering, the Howe brothers and their cousin have consistently gravitated toward entrepreneurial, futurethinking businesses, and are now bringing their knowledge back to campus for the benefit of current and future students.

“I’ve always had a sense of what the next thing was going to be,” says Bradley. “When it

Steve Girouard (BME’89), Bradley Howe (EE’84, EECS’89) and Brendon Howe (EE’84). Photos courtesy of Johnson & Johnson, Altera Corporation, and Network Appliance, Inc., respectively.

comes to positioning myself in high potential, emerging technology companies, I’ve had a pretty high hit rate.”

So has Brendon, whose experiences at four highly idealistic startup companies inform his current work as a general manager of a leading-edge product development organization.

“It’s been very rewarding to jump into cycles of trying to anticipate a market, get ahead of a technological curve, figure out different ways of attacking a problem that will be disruptive to existing technology providers and create new business opportunities,” he observes.

It’s an innovative mindset that the Howe brothers first developed in the early 1980s, when both the desktop computer industry and the College of Engineering curriculum were rapidly expanding.

A quarter-century later, the Howe brothers and their cousin are not only working to stay ahead of the curve of advancing technology, but also sharing data points from their experiences to help the College of Engineering remain a trailblazing institution.

Girouard, who received the College’s 2002 Distinguished Alumni Award for Service to Alma Mater, has contributed his biomedical industry expertise to the College for more than 10 years. As a longtime member of the BME Industrial Advisory Board, he has helped develop curricula for the BME senior capstone class on Design, Development, Marketing and Entrepreneurship in Biomedical Engineering, as well as appearing as a guest lecturer on innovation and intellectual property.

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Both Bradley and Brendon offer their perspectives from the front lines of the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem at meetings of the College of Engineering’s West Coast Alumni Leadership Council, a group of 16 leading California-based high-tech professional alumni.

Responding to a robust outreach effort by Dean Kenneth Lutchen over the past few years, the council works with him to help align the College’s curriculum with key technology and hiring trends and to develop new industryacademic partnerships.

While serving on the council, Bradley has relished the opportunity to get an insider’s view of how the College is evolving and to help influence its future direction.

“The school means a lot to me; I’m proud of being a BU grad,” he says. “So when the dean reached out to industry leaders for some brainstorming and guidance on how the school could connect better with industry, I was happy to be involved.”

Brendon joined the council not only to give back to the College but also to help current and future students transition more effectively to their first jobs in industry.

“When I graduated in 1984 and tried to navigate my way from the classroom to the work environment, I felt on my own,” he recalls.

“Missing was a tight liaison with industry where high tech professionals could act as mentors or advisors on hiring and technology trends—one that I’m now helping to build.”

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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Tackling Society’s Grand Challenges: Graduate Students Advance Solutions in Health care and Clean Energy

As the twenty-first century’s first decade came to a close, two major engineering-driven issues moved to the forefront of the national conversation: health care and clean energy. Several graduate researchers at the College of Engineering are collaborating with faculty in advancing promising engineering solutions in both of these critical domains.

Engineer’s Jason L. London recently spoke with five graduate students whose research is aimed at either improving patient care or reducing environmental impact. From developing robotic cardiac surgery techniques to producing carbon-neutral energy from the material in a plastic bottle, these students are confronting some of society’s toughest challenges. Here, they describe how they are working to make a difference.

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Working at Winchester Hospital in Massachusetts, Jesse Lock, MD, a doctoral candidate in Mechanical Engineering, knows firsthand the impact technology and innovation can have on patient care.

“I love being a pediatrician and the idea that technology can help physicians diagnose and heal patients. But during my residency training, I was surprised by the simplicity of medical equipment. When compared to the complexity of a modern car or mobile phone, a heart monitor is years behind.

Following my residency, I joined the College’s Late Entry Acceleration Program.

After two years I matriculated into the doctoral program and was fortunate to end up in Professor Pierre Dupont’s BioRobotics Research Laboratory, where the focus is on medical devices. We’re working on a thin, snakelike robotic device for doing intracardiac surgery.

Current cardiac repair is done in one of two ways: open-heart surgery, which provides excellent exposure but can be physically traumatic; or by using peripherally inserted catheters, which is minimally invasive but can be very difficult to control. Our approach is to combine the best of both worlds.

The robot we’re developing is minimally invasive but still able to move dexterously and precisely within the heart. I know how traumatic full-scale cardiac surgery can be for children, and this could be a great solution. And with the current debate on Capitol Hill, it seems likely that there will be a national trend toward reducing health care costs with less invasive surgeries.

Our short-term goals are to improve the robot’s functionality within the operating room and to demonstrate its ability to move effectively within the heart. I can also imagine where this device would be useful to access other areas of the body, such as the brain or lungs.

In the longer term, my goal is to find practical applications for devices while continuing to work as a pediatrician.”

Collaborating with the College of Engineering and the School of Medicine, Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) Fellow Amira Hussein is working to prevent spinal fractures before they start.

“Before joining BU I was looking for research on bone mechanics, where I could perform both mechanical testing and numerical analyses of biological tissue. I wanted to see how I could apply mechanical engineering concepts in a biological area. [Associate] Professor Elise Morgan’s (ME) lab was the perfect match.

In my research I’m working to improve predictions of vertebral fractures. Spine fractures are common, especially with an aging population, and 45 percent of fractures can go undiagnosed. Our group has developed a device that incrementally compresses human cadaver spine segments to failure. After each load increment, the spine segments are imaged at high resolution using micro-computed tomography. We then use digital image correlation techniques developed in [Associate] Professor Paul Barbone’s (ME) lab to determine failure patterns and regions where failure is likely to occur.

At the Medical Campus, we obtain clinical three-dimensional images of the spine segments, and estimate the bone mineral density and fracture risk of our samples. The images are used to generate three-dimensional, patientspecific models to simulate and predict vertebral fractures.

Knowing the clinical fracture risk and results from our sample simulations, we hope to show that 3-D simulations of spine fractures may provide better predictions of spine fracture risk. This type of injury can lead to further fractures that are not limited to the spine. Early discovery can improve patients’ quality of life and potentially reduce medical costs.”

Soobhankar Pati’s research focuses on producing carbon-neutral energy and reducing pollutants. Spurred by positive results, he’s not stopping after graduation.

“Working in Professor Uday Pal’s (ME) lab, I’m developing a method to extract pure hydrogen from garbage that will eventually be used by fuel cells to derive energy. Our process is very unique, as it uses garbage to produce separate streams of high-purity hydrogen and synthetic gas in a single step.

To simulate garbage, we’re using highdensity polyethylene (HDPE), which is essentially the same material used in a plastic bottle.

The HDPE is inserted in one side of our solid oxide membrane and steam enters through the other side. The steam dissociates to produce hydrogen and oxygen ions, and the membrane selectively allows only oxygen ions to migrate across. The oxygen ions react with the HDPE to produce a multipurpose synthetic gas, leaving a pure stream of hydrogen gas behind. It’s an energy-positive, carbon-neutral process.

In the waste-to-energy market, the main question is, how much waste can your device consume in a day? In the next three years, our goal is to be able to consume two tons of waste a day, and it’s definitely within reach.

Our group started this project from scratch, and it’s amazing to see the progress we’ve made.

I plan to graduate this year, but I’m not stopping my research; I hope to stay on as a postgraduate researcher. It’s a dream for doctoral students to continue their PhD work, and I am excited about the impact that this project will make.”

To see video demonstrations of each student’s research, please visit www.bu.edu/eng/magazine/research.

Brad Kaanta’s research in micro-fabrication and micro-chromatography is helping to advance cleaner energy resource exploration.

“Before I came to the College of Engineering, I was exposed to MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) research in the U.S. Air Force. I loved micro-fabrication, and I came to the College of Engineering specifically to work in [Associate] Professor Xin Zhang’s (ME) lab. I also received a Dean’s Fellowship, which enabled me to find my own research project and dive right in.

One of the main areas of my research concerns cleaner resource exploration. In this discipline, our lab has developed a very successful and mutually beneficial research relationship with Schlumberger, an oil field and energy services company. In collaboration with Schlumberger, I’m now working to build detectors for gas micro-chromatography, a technique used in chemical analysis.

In the oil industry, more accurate chemical analysis can improve engineers’ ability to detect different types of oil in the ground.

Ideally, gas chromatography can detect gases ranging in size anywhere from ‘C1’—methane— to ‘C40,’ which is basically sludge or wax. If you can detect what’s in the output, you can generate fewer pollutants during the process. Oil well sites can cost over $100,000 per hour to run, so the more information you have before drilling, the less damage you can do, and the quicker you can get results.

Originally this project was funded only for a year, but because of our success, we’re currently working on a three-year, National Science Foundation grant. Schlumberger has already transferred some of the research we’ve developed to their engineering centers. This shows that our research has been successful, and there are clear signs of future positive results.”

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Jeremy Stark is working to make desert-based solar panels dust-free, and more efficient in the process.

“Since the deposition of dust on solar panels prevents light from entering the cell, our research aims to make the panels self-cleaning to prevent dust accumulation and loss of power.

The most effective place for a largescale solar farm is the desert, but sandstorms sometimes blanket the panels with dust and debris, which can significantly degrade operations. These installations can span as much as a quarter mile, and the cost of manually cleaning panel surfaces with water is very high.

Our lower-cost technology uses a set of transparent electrodes placed on the panel’s surface. Driven by phased voltage pulses, the electrodes remove dust through electrodynamic force. Only a small fraction of solar panel power output is used to drive the electrodes for cleaning, a process that can be completed in less than two minutes. An off-site control board determines when panels need to be cleaned— either at a set time each day, or programmed for when panel efficiency drops off due to dust deposition.

I got involved in this research while doing undergraduate research in transparent electrodynamic screens and the development of an analyzer for characterizing fine particles at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, with Malay Mazumder—who is now a research professor in the ECE Department. He’s one of the main reasons I came here, along with the resources at the Photonics Center.

We are now working towards the commercialization of the self-cleaning technology within a year. We’re making good progress, and hopefully our research will make solar panels efficient and cost-effective.”

www.bu.edu/eng

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ENGNews New Alumni Mentoring Program to Prep ENG Students for Post-Collegiate Life Attention Engineering juniors and seniors: Ever wonder what REALLY goes on after college? Not sure how to get to where you want to be, careerwise? Do you have questions you just don’t know who to ask?

So began the flyer that organizers of the new Boston University College of Engineering Young Alumni Mentoring Program—Julie Young (BME’07), Stephanie Prager (MFG’08) and Annie Zavadil (BME’06, ’08)—distributed on campus last fall. As they get a foothold on the first rung of their own career ladders, the three recent graduates are reaching out to assist current ENG students in planning for what happens once they complete their studies.

The Young Alumni Mentoring Program (YAMP) pairs ENG juniors and seniors with recent alumni throughout the country based on career goals and interests. In a series of biweekly e-mail conversations, the mentors advise their students on questions ranging from graduate schools to first jobs in industry.

Participating students learn about relevant classes, useful resources and instructive mentor experiences.

“BU ENG does a great job of bringing in accomplished engineers to talk to BU students,” said Young. “However, they don’t have many young alums coming back to discuss what lessons they learned during their first year out of college, what recent struggles they had to overcome and what they wished they had done while in school. The YAMP program is focused more on the next five years rather than the next 40 years.”

Participating students sign up for a minimum of six months of e-mail, phone or in-person exchanges with their mentor, but may also access other mentors via e-mail or at one or two informal networking events per semester in the Boston area.

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At the YAMP kickoff event on November 23 in the Photonics Center, eight of the program’s 34 mentors engaged in one-on-one conversations with nearly two dozen ENG junior and senior participants gathered at two large round tables.

Janelle Nesvold (ME’10) met up with her mentor, Jessica Miller (ME’08), an architectural engineer at TRO Jung/Brannen, to continue an earlier discussion on how to conduct an effective job search. “I’d been sending out résumés online, but I wanted to take things a step further and get to know people who are already in industry,” said Nesvold.

Elena Simoncini (BME’10) and her mentor, Tracy Pogal-Sussman (BME’05, ‘07), a student at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, discussed medical and graduate school options. “I could see myself in Elena’s shoes,” said Pogal-Sussman. “I remember exactly this time of year when I was a senior and just starting to talk to grad students in my lab about master’s programs.”

YAMP organizers Prager and Young, both mentors to high school girls through their jobs and members of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), conceived the program when Young appeared on a panel at an SWE event in February. After the event, a few students told Young that her advice was particularly helpful because it related directly to their career paths over the next few years, rather than 20 years out of college.

In subsequent months Prager and Young founded YAMP and invited Zavadil to join the team as a third coordinator.

All three envisioned starting an e-mail exchange where young alums could share their experiences and mistakes associated with undergraduate and post-graduate life—and thus enable juniors and seniors to enter graduate school or industry with greater confidence.

Mentors and mentees discuss graduate school and career options at the November kickoff event.

Assisted only in logistical matters by the ENG Alumni Relations Office and Career Development Office, YAMP has drawn an enthusiastic response from Dean Kenneth Lutchen.

“As dean, one of my most gratifying roles is seeing alumni go on to have successful careers and then return to Boston University to inspire and engage the next generation of our engineering community,” Lutchen wrote in an introductory letter to prospective mentors. “The mentoring experience is one that can be incredibly valuable, and your willingness to extend a hand to current students is deeply appreciated.”

Prospective junior and senior students and alumni mentors may contact the organizers at engyamp@bu.edu to find out more about the program or register. Approved mentors are required to sign up as part of the BU Career Advisory Network.

—Mark Dwortzan

ENGNews

BME Researchers Discover How Superbugs Become Resistant to Multiple Antibiotics Many people with bacterial infections stop taking antibiotics when their symptoms improve, thereby allowing the hardy bacteria that survive to multiply and potentially mount a more powerful defense against future applications of the same drug. But a new study led by Professor James Collins (BME) indicates that sub-lethal doses of an antibiotic can trigger another, more alarming outcome, in which the targeted bacteria become cross-resistant to multiple ­antibiotics.

Collins, BME graduate student Michael Kohanski and post-doc Mark DePristo described their research in the Feb. 12 edition of Molecular Cell, findings that could spark considerable changes in how antibiotics are used across the globe as the public health community strives to combat the proliferation of multidrug-resistant strains of bacteria, the so-called “superbugs.”

Two years ago, the researchers had proven that when applied in lethal doses, antibiotics stimulate the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) molecules, or free radicals that damage DNA, protein and lipids in bacterial cells, contributing to their demise. In the Molecular Cell study, they demonstrated that the free radicals produced in targeted bacteria by a sub-lethal dose of an antibiotic live on to accelerate the formation of mutations that protect against a variety of antibiotics other than the administered drug.

“We know free radicals damage DNA, and when that happens, DNA repair systems get called into play that are known to introduce mistakes, or mutations, in the DNA,” said Collins, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “We arrived at the hypothesis that sub-lethal levels of antibiotics could bump up the mutation rate

Applying low levels of the antibiotic ampicillin to the microbe E. Coli ­triggered genetic mutations that ­protected the ­bacteria against a number of ­antibiotics.

(Image courtesy of Professor James Collins (BME).)

via the production of free radicals, and lead to the dramatic emergence of multidrug resistance.”

Testing their hypothesis on strains of the microbes E. coli and Staphylococcus, the researchers administered sub-lethal levels of five kinds of antibiotics to the targeted bacteria and showed that each boosted levels of ROS as well as mutations in the bacterial DNA. They next conducted a series of experiments to show that bacteria initially subjected to a sub-lethal dose of one of the antibiotics exhibited cross-resistance to a number of the other antibiotics—and in some cases, no resistance to the initially applied antibiotic. Finally, they sequenced the bacterial genes known to cause resistance to each antibiotic and pinpointed mutations in those genes believed to be instrumental in protecting against that ­antibiotic.

“The sub-lethal levels dramatically drove up the mutation levels and produced a wide array of mutations,” Collins observed. “Because you’re not killing with the antibiotics, you’re allowing many different types of mutants to survive. We discovered that in this zoo of mutants, you can actually have a mutant that could be killed by the antibiotic that produced the mutation but, as a result of its mutation,

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be resistant to other a­ ntibiotics.”

The group’s findings underscore the potentially serious consequences to public health of administering antibiotics in low or incomplete doses. This is common practice among farmers who apply low levels of antibiotics to livestock feed; doctors who prescribe low levels of antibiotics as placebos for people with viral infections; and patients who don’t follow the full course of antibiotic treatment.

“We need tighter regulations on the use of antibiotics. Doctors need to be more disciplined in their prescription of antibiotics and patients need to be more disciplined in following their prescriptions,” said Collins, whose research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The study’s findings may ultimately lead to the development of new antibiotic treatments enhanced with compounds designed to prevent the emergence of multidrug resistance. For example, one potential treatment might inhibit the DNA damage repair systems that lead to the problematic mutations, while another might boost production of cell-destroying free radicals so that a low dose of antibiotic is s­ ufficient to kill targeted bacterial cells.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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ENGNews

Nanophotonics Innovation Could Boost Biomolecular Studies and Sensor Capabilities Exploiting recent advances in nanophotonics, an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Assistant Professor Hatice Altug (ECE) has created a highly sensitive infrared (IR) absorption spectroscopy technique that can identify specific proteins and other molecules using far less sample material than conventional spectrometers require. The technique constitutes a powerful new tool for biomolecular studies and drug discovery and could considerably enhance biological and chemical sensor detection capabilities.

Infrared absorption spectroscopy uses infrared light to excite the bonds that connect atoms within molecules, causing them to vibrate at a specific resonant frequency.

By examining what frequencies of light are absorbed by a material, scientists can determine what kind of bonds it contains and thus identify the material.

Because absorption signals are often weak, conventional IR spectroscopy requires large samples of target molecules in many layers. To overcome this limitation, the research team used tiny gold nanoparticles as highly efficient “nanoplasmonic” antennas that greatly amplify the signal received from an individual protein molecule.

“Our technique enhances the signal by a factor of up to 100,000,” Altug said.

“Because our technique is ultra-sensitive, we don’t need a large number of molecules from which to obtain signals. In fact, we can obtain signals from even a single-moleculelayer-thick protein film.”

Altug and her collaborators— Professor Shyamsunder Erramilli (BME, Physics); Research Professor Mi Hong (Physics); graduate student Ronen Adato and post-doctoral fellow Ahmet Ali Yanik in Altug’s lab; and three Tufts University bioengineers—reported on this unprecedented

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achievement in the November 17 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To obtain the high sensitivity needed to detect vibrations from an extremely small sample of silk protein molecules, the team designed a 50-by-50 array of gold, rodshaped nanoantennas and tuned their resonant frequency to match that of the bonds within the sampled molecules.

Combining theoretical calculations and advanced nanofabrication techniques, Yanik and Adato obtained up to a 100,000fold enhancement of the molecules’ vibrational signatures and whittled the sample thickness down to a single layer of protein.

The technique constitutes a powerful new tool for biomolecular studies and drug discovery and could considerably enhance biological and chemical sensor detection capabilities.

Drawing on seed funding from an ENG Dean’s Catalyst Award and ongoing support from the National Science Foundation, Massachusetts Life Science Center and Department of Defense, Altug and her coinvestigators are now applying their novel IR spectroscopy technique to other kinds of molecules. “Our plasmonic method is quite general and can be adapted to enhance the infrared fingerprints of other biomolecules, such as nucleic acids and lipids. It therefore provides a general purpose toolkit for ultrasensitive vibrational spectroscopy of biomolecular systems,” she explained.

Because the ultra-sensitive technique requires only one-layer, two-nanometerthick samples, it may ultimately enable

Assistant Professor Hatice Altug (ECE)

scientists to study proteins at the single-­ molecule scale and in their natural state, yielding more accurate data.

“Conventional IR spectroscopy requires a large number of proteins, usually 5,000 to 10,000 layers of them in one stack that resembles a baklava,” said Erramilli.

“With our single-layer substrate we can capture proteins in their native environment.”

As a result, the new technique could be used to improve our understanding of how protein molecules interact and how external forces alter their shape and behavior—questions of fundamental importance in biochemistry and drug discovery.

The method may also help amplify chemical and biological sensing capabilities in defense and other applications, helping sensors to pick up clear, identifiable response signals from a trace amount of chemical or biological agent.

To improve biosensor performance, Altug has also developed a new system that combines nanoplasmonics and nanofluidics technology in a single platform. Described in the January 11, 2010 edition of Applied Physics Letters, these hybrid biosensors efficiently deliver biomolecules to the sensor surface for detailed analysis and could be used in point-of-care applications and drug development studies.

—Mark Dwortzan

ENGNews

New Nanopore Technique Facilitates Faster, Cheaper Genome Analyses Ultra-fast, low-cost genomic sequencing and profiling may someday accelerate the pace of biological discovery and allow clinicians to quickly and precisely diagnose patients’ susceptibility to disease and tolerance of selected drugs. But this scenario may not be realized until engineers find a way to considerably increase the sensitivity of sensors used to detect the DNA molecules that define the human genome.

It’s a feat that could be achieved by reducing the number of target DNA molecule copies needed to obtain an accurate read. And that presents a formidable challenge: to produce sufficient copies to decipher the genome using current technology, most scientists still rely on time-consuming, expensive and errorprone DNA replication tools such as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

Now researchers have devised a method that advances the prospects for efficiently analyzing DNA samples without amplification. In a study published in the December 20 online edition of Nature Nanotechnology, Associate Professor Amit Meller (BME, Physics), BME postdoctoral fellow Meni Wanunu, BU physics student Will Morrison and collaborators at New York University and Bar-Ilan University

demonstrated a method to tune solid-state nanopores—tiny, nearly cylindrical silicon nitride sensors that electronically detect DNA molecules as they pass through the pore—to require far fewer DNA molecules than ever before.

“This study shows that using our method, we can detect a much smaller amount of DNA than previously published,” said Meller. “When people will start to implement genome sequencing or profiling using nanopores, they could use our nanopore capture approach to greatly reduce the number of copies used in those ­measurements.”

Nanopore capture consists of two distinct steps: the arrival of a sample molecule to the pore mouth, and the threading of the end of that molecule into the pore.

To significantly increase the rate at which nanopores capture incoming, two-nanometer-wide DNA molecules, Meller and his colleagues used salt gradients to alter the electric field in the pore’s vicinity. This achieved a funneling effect that directed charged DNA molecules toward the mouth of the pore and boosted the molecules’ arrival and threading rates.

By upping the capture rate by a few orders of magnitude and decreasing the Schematic of a solid state nanopore used for genome analyses (not to scale). The electrostatic potential near an approximately five nanometer-wide, solid-state nanopore attracts negatively charged, double-stranded DNA molecules into the pore, which electronically detects the molecules as they traverse the pore. (Photo courtesy of Nature Nanotechnology.)

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volume of the sample receiving chamber, the researchers reduced the number of DNA molecule copies required for nanoporebased detection by a factor of 10,000—from about one billion sample molecules to 100,000. They also demonstrated that longer DNA molecules (containing tens of thousands of nucleotide base pairs) increased the capture rate even more.

“PCR and other DNA replication technologies limit DNA molecule length,” said Meller. “Because our method avoids amplification, it not only reduces the cost, time and error rate of DNA replication techniques, but also enables the analysis of very long strands of DNA.” Funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, the research team set out to achieve a better understanding of the physical forces that govern the DNA capture process. They arrived at their findings by using high-end transmission electron microscopes (TEM) to fabricate hundreds of nanopores with atomic-scale precision, and testing differently configured salt gradients near the pores. ”We had to perform extensive studies with these nearly atomic-scale pores in order to reveal how the electrostatic potential, which extends at least hundreds of nanometers away from the pore, focuses DNA into and through the pore,” said Meller.

To conduct further investigations of unamplified genomes, Meller is now exploring other technologies, including optical detection and force measurements, for reading single DNA molecules as they pass through nanopores.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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ENGNews

ENG Junior Wins PBS Design Squad Competition College of Engineering junior Wes Uy won the third season of the WGBH engineering reality competition program Design Squad by edging out five cast members—including classmate Ana Pelucarte—in the season’s final episode, which aired on Sunday, December 13. Uy received a $10,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation.

In each of the 10 half-hour episodes filmed during the summer of 2008, a client posed a challenge to a pair of three-student teams, who competed to brainstorm, design and build the best solution. Shifting from team to team throughout the series, Uy won the scholarship by accumulating the most team victories.

“Holding up the $10,000 check high above my head was one of the best feelings of my life,” said Uy, an electrical engineering major who aspires to develop robotic defense technology. “It concluded an entire summer’s worth of hard work, dedication, bonding with teammates and ridiculously fun, hands-on learning—it was an experience of a lifetime.”

Design Squad Senior Producer Dorothy Dickie lauded the level of maturity and thoughtfulness that Uy brought to each team and challenge: “Wes was not afraid to think outside the box and experiment with different solutions to every engineering problem. He was truly excited by each and every engineering challenge that was presented to him, and that was infectious.”

In the final showdown, Uy and another finalist led their teams in a competition to build a sailboat to race half a mile from Misery Island to the West Beach shoreline in Beverly, Massachusetts; the captain of the first team to cross the finish line would net the Intel scholarship. To boost their chances of victory, Uy and his team-

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mates researched different sailboats and sail structures and how they performed, and contacted experienced sailors for pointers on sailing. But nothing could prepare them for the thrill of the race itself.

“My heart was pounding heavily after hearing the starting horn go off,” Uy recalled.

“Our boat started off slow while the other team cruised ahead, but we kept our fingers crossed and started to pick up some speed.

About halfway across the sound we gained a boat-length’s distance ahead of them, and as we neared the shore, it was apparent that we were going to win. I was so overcome by excitement that I almost tripped as we raced up the shore to cross the finish line.”

Uy entered the competition equipped with handyman skills gleaned from watching his father do home renovations, past exposure to a broad range of tools and materials and a keen intuition about how things work—but he believes that dedication was the deciding factor in propelling him to victory.

“Even off the set, the task at hand was always on my mind,” he said. “My teammates and I would constantly sketch out alternative ways to get a project done and run through different scenarios that could potentially cause us problems with our design.”

Chosen from hundreds of college student applicants across the country to appear in the Peabody and Emmy awardwinning program, Uy competed against Pelucarte and four cast members from Duke University, MIT and Smith College (see Fall 2008 ENGINEER, pp. 12–13). Much of his success came from his ability to cooperate with different team members to accomplish challenging tasks in short order.

Wes Uy (ENG’11) and teammates sail to victory in the final episode of Design Squad’s third season.

(Photo courtesy of WGBH/Michael Rossi.)

For instance, during one challenge, in which Paralympic athlete and wheelchair rugby player Kerri Morgan asked the two teams to track her every move on the court by building an automated wheelchair that simulated a defensive player on the attack, Uy motivated two conflicted cast members to pull together as a team. In another challenge, in which the Design Squad teams were tasked to build indestructible, remotecontrolled, flying football targets for Nerf toymaker Hasbro, Uy championed an idea advanced by one of his teammates and figured out how to implement it.

“Since Wes was such a team player, he really showed the importance and value of teamwork in spades,” said Marisa Wolksy, executive producer of Design Squad. “He also modeled for viewers that engineering isn’t about nerds sitting at their desk all day doing math; it’s fun, active and about being in the world solving real problems.”

Uy emerged not only with the $10,000 scholarship (which BU is applying to his tuition), but also a heightened appreciation for the diverse paths engineers can pursue and the confidence to launch his own challenging, hands-on projects: “I hope that the show will motivate viewers to go out and take on projects of their own and realize that as engineers, we have the ability to change the world.”

—Mark Dwortzan

ENGNews

Using an “Ecovative” Approach, Alumni Unveil the Next Step in HD In the $40 billion high-definition (HD) display market, acronyms rule: LED, LCD and DLP. Prysm, Inc., a digital display technology group founded by Amit Jain (’85) and Roger Hajjar (’88), has added one more: LPD, or Laser Phosphor Display, which the company says is much more energy and environmentally efficient than current high-definition displays.

According to Prysm, Inc., LPD technology uses to up to 75 percent less power than other HD display technology and is made using low-impact manufacturing processes and non-toxic materials without reducing the high-definition quality. “[LPD has] the power consumption of a 100-watt lightbulb per square meter and the scalability to virtually any size application,” said Jain, the company’s CEO. “We knew that the image quality would appeal to commercial audio visual customers everywhere, but we also found the LPD energy efficient enough to be very important in every geographic market.”

The LPD unveiling is the latest step in a 20-plus-year engineering relationship between Jain and Hajjar, who met in Professors Mike Ruane and Masud Mansuripur’s Optical Data Storage Lab. Not unlike old-fashioned tube televisions, where electron beams are used to excite phosphor dots to emit light, Prysm’s technology uses low-power, long-life semiconductor lasers to emit red, green and blue colors, with no motion blur and a longer life than current HD displays. Prysm’s initial focus is targeting large format displays used in commercial venues such as sports arenas.

Because power consumption and operation cost are critical topics in technology display design, Prysm’s mission statement is based around “ecovation,” a commitment to development and design that exceed industry standards for energy

use and environmental impact while delivering a brilliant display.

The LPD unveiling is the latest step in a 20-plus-year engineering relationship between Jain and Hajjar, who met in Professors Mike Ruane and Masud Mansuripur’s Optical Data Storage Lab. Over the years, Jain and Hajjar have collaborated on three high tech startup companies with technologies they’ve developed.

Five years ago, the duo launched Spudnik (see Fall 2008 ENGINEER, p. 11), described by Jain as “high technology for couch potatoes.” Spudnik evolved into Prysm, which went public in January and has over 100 employees in San Jose, California, Concord, Massachusetts, and Bangalore, India. Both Jain and Hajjar, Prysm’s chief technology officer, sit on the board of the College of Engineering’s West Coast Alumni Leadership Council.

—Jason L. London

Amit Jain and Roger Hajjar (Photo courtesy of Prysm, Inc.)

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At Alumni Weekend, Clean Energy a Hot Topic Members of the College of Engineering community, including alumni, faculty, students and staff, gathered on October 23 for the College’s second annual Future of Engineering Symposium, which focused on engineering’s role in clean energy solutions and helped kick off Boston University’s Alumni Weekend.

The symposium, “Amplifying the Societal Impact of Engineering Research: A Case Study in Clean Technology,” was hosted

by College of Engineering Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen and featured a keynote address from Yet-Ming Chiang, Kyocera professor of ceramics in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. “Right now, we’re in a golden age of engineering,” Lutchen said. “We’re facing many problems that need to be solved through engineering. And these problems need an engineering education, which will lead to real-world engineering solutions.”

Chiang’s talk focused on the extensive engineering research in the BostonCambridge area, clean energy storage, the critical emergence of the battery industry as long-term energy solution, and the quest for an affordable and clean electric vehicle.

“There’s never been a better time for engineering research to have an impact on technology and society,” Chiang said.

“Research breakthroughs are still needed in many areas, but with so many factors— global warming, supply and demand, and energy independence—driving our research, we continue to push the envelope to achieve these solutions in the future.”

A founding scientist of American Superconductor—a leading manufacturer of high-temperature, super-conducting wire for energy and power applications—and A123Systems, one of the world’s leading suppliers of high-power lithium ion batteries, Chiang’s research in new battery technol-

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ogy earned him a R&D Magazine “R&D 100” and “R&D Editor’s Choice Award” in 2006.

“On a worldwide scale, the battery industry is as small as a lug nut,” Chiang said.

“But it’s also critical, because without the lug nut, you lose the wheel. With renewable energy becoming widespread, increased storage will be needed. As an old colleague once said, ‘He who cannot store will have no power after four.’”

While costs remain prohibitive, Chiang said advances are being made in the field of clean, electric automobiles, which was highlighted by a video demonstration of a “killacycle” electric motorcycle going from zero to 60 miles per hour in under a second.

New battery research is playing a critical role, particularly through advancements in nanotechnology and materials science engineering.

“Materials science engineering is critical to the life of the battery, and energizing nanoscale batteries is critical to battery performance,” he said. “New breakthroughs will lead to new models and different ways to

look at research. And as research grows, the rate of adoption continues, and engineering metrics continue to advance.”

Following the symposium, clean energy discussions continued throughout alumni weekend. On October 24, Professor Michael Caramanis (ME) co-hosted the alumni college class, “The Future of Clean Energy: Challenges to Sustainable Energy Technology.” The interactive discussion focused on the future of the electric smart grid and the importance of consumer information in efficiently managing energy consumption.

Also on October 24, Boston University President Robert A. Brown hosted the inaugural President’s Panel on Energy, which explored alternative sources for creating ethanol and featured a panel of industry experts including representatives from the U.S. Department of Energy, Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and DuPont, Inc. —Jason L. London

Yet-Ming Chiang

ENGNews

Clean Energy Lectures Bring Leading Lights to Campus How might we develop profitable clean energy technologies while reducing the carbon footprint of fossil fuels?

Speakers at this fall’s Boston University Presidential Lecture Series on Energy and Environmental Sustainability addressed these issues head-on in hour-long presentations and Q&A sessions. Launched in February 2009 and hosted by the College of Engineering at the Photonics Center Auditorium, the series showcases best practices, leading-edge research, and policy and market trends in clean energy and sustainable development.

The Presidential Lectures are sponsored by the BU Clean Energy and Environmental Sustainability Initiative (CEESI), a collaboration among the College of Engineering and five other BU colleges and schools. CEESI faculty members, many based at the College of Engineering, are leading cross-disciplinary and world-class research efforts on problems such as the smart grid, the hydrogen economy, green manufacturing and smart lighting.

At the November 4 Presidential Lecture, Steve Fludder, vice president of General Electric’s “ecomagination” business initiative, described the unit’s successes in domains ranging from aviation to wind energy.

“Ecomagination is a companywide business strategy that is focused on bringing both profitable and environmentally beneficial solutions into the marketplace that ultimately will benefit our shareholders, but along the way will have positive economic benefit for our customers,” said Fludder. In 2008, his first year at the helm of ecomagination, the initiative grew by 21 percent and represented nine percent of GE’s total revenue.

Fludder presented the firm’s vision of a sweeping energy infrastructure transformation supported by more than 80 GE smart grid, renewable energy, water management, energy efficiency and carbon management solutions.

“We have this vision of a prosperous, greener future,” he said, “and it comes about by transforming the power infrastructure, improving end-use efficiency, addressing resource scarcity that might otherwise hamper economic growth and really challenging ourselves in terms of competitiveness and investments in innovation.”

At the December 2 Presidential Lecture, Julio Friedmann—Carbon Management Program Leader for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—discussed his strategy to combat the considerable environmental impacts incurred by the world’s ongoing reliance on fossil fuels. He

Dean Kenneth Lutchen with GE ecomagination VP Steve Fludder

noted that even with the addition of alternative energy sources, fossil fuels and their emissions will be with us for a long time.

To significantly reduce those emissions below current levels, Friedmann advanced a strategy that he calls Low Impact Fossil Energy (LIFE). This approach, he said, could decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 50-90 percent and substantially curtail the water consumption, land use and airborne particulate production associated with fossil fuel extraction and combustion.

The strategy centers on carbon capture and storage; underground coalto-gas conversion; smarter exploitation of unconventional hydrocarbon fuels such as shale gas; and next-generation measures to reduce the significant water consumption and land footprints associated with fossil energy production.

“Ultimately, we have to make steep emissions reductions, and this is one of the ways to do that,” said Friedmann, citing several examples of LIFE technologies that are starting to gain traction in the U.S. and abroad. “It is, however, part of a portfolio; this has do be done in combination with renewables, conservation, efficiency, nuclear —the whole complement of tools and ­technologies.”

—Mark Dwortzan

Julio Friedmann, Carbon Management Program Leader at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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NSF Grant Adds Laboratory Component to Nanotechnology Concentration The National Science Foundation has awarded the College of Engineering a major grant that will develop a hands-on research component in the College’s new undergraduate concentration in nanotechnology. Beginning in 2010, the grant, “NUE: Undergraduate Laboratory Experiences in Nanotechnology Devices and Systems (U-LENS),” will implement lab modules in two undergraduate nanotechnology courses, “Nanophotonics Devices Laboratory” and “Nanometer-Scale Processes in Living Systems.”

“The lab work will make students feel more comfortable in a research setting and provide a portal for entering into research.”

“This will really allow students to flesh out what they are learning in theory from the classroom,” said Associate Professor Anna Swan (ECE). “The lab aspect will get students in the lab and add a hands-on component to their coursework.”

The grant’s lab modules will strengthen the experiential learning for undergraduates in the concentration and will serve as a gateway for interaction between faculty involved in nanotechnology research and companies in nanotechnology areas.

“We have already received commitments from start-up companies to utilize our students as summer researchers,” Swan said.

“The lab work will make students feel more comfortable in a research setting and provide a portal for entering into research. The students will present posters of their work at a Photonics Café where they will mingle with faculty, graduate students and start-up companies.”

The grant will also fund the purchase of new laboratory equipment and facilitate

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Associate Professor Anna Swan (ECE) and freshman Samir Ahmed (ENG’13) investigate the use of one-atom-thick graphene as a membrane for nanoscale pressure sensors that could boost oil well productivity.

the development of several new freshman engineering modules on nanotechnology, which will be available to all College undergraduates.

Swan is one of five principal investigators, alongside Assistant Professors Hatice Altug (ECE), Sean Andersson (ME), Tyrone Porter (ME) and Michael Smith (BME). The grant also includes participating faculty from throughout the College of Engineering, as well as Boston University’s departments of Physics and Chemistry, and the Center for Nanoscience & Nanobiotechnology (CNN).

“The new nanotechnology concentration, along with the NSF grant, fits perfectly with the general research mission of Boston

University,” Swan said. “Lab work can inspire students, and it’s great that we’ll be able to capture students in this way. It will bring visibility to nanotechnology at Boston University.”

The NSF grant strengthens the College’s new concentration in nanotechnology, which provides undergraduate students with foundational knowledge of nanotechnology and helps position them for careers in the nanotechnology field.

For more information on the undergraduate concentration in nanotechnology, please visit www.bu.edu/eng/ugrad/ concentrations.

—Jason L. London

ENGNews

ENG Fetes Temple Smith with “Frontiers in Biomolecular Engineering” Symposium About 200 colleagues from Greater Boston and across the globe gathered at the Photonics Center on Friday, September 25 for a daylong symposium celebrating the recent appointment of Temple Smith as emeritus professor of Biomedical Engineering.

“Frontiers in Biomolecular Engineering” was organized by the Biomedical Engineering Department and featured presentations from 11 scientists and engineers whose work was influenced by Smith.

“During his [19-year] tenure at Boston University, Temple Smith has inspired legions of BU faculty and students, but his influence has been felt well beyond the walls of 36 Cummington Street and the borders of BU,” said Boston University Provost David Campbell. “He’s a world leader in computational analysis of protein structure, computational genomics and bioinformatics.” Campbell noted Smith’s many signature achievements, from co-developing the Smith-Waterman sequence alignment algorithm, a tool underlying most DNA and protein sequence comparisons, to analyzing and modeling the evolution of the ­ribosome.

“This symposium and the individuals who have come to watch it are a testimony to Temple’s impact as a scientist and as a scientific colleague,” said College of Engineering Dean Kenneth Lutchen. Smith’s contributions have been essential to BME’s rise to become one of the largest departments of its kind in the country, its consistent top-10 ranking by U.S. News & World Report, its distinction as the only department in the nation to receive both a Whitaker Foundation Leadership Award and a Coulter Foundation Translational Partnership Award, and its nearly $30 million annual research budget, Lutchen added.

Michael Waterman and Temple Smith co-developed the Smith-Waterman sequence alignment ­algorithm, a tool underlying most DNA and protein sequence comparisons.

He credited Smith with helping to reconcile established faculty members who focused on biology and chemistry, and newer faculty who applied engineering methods to these disciplines.

“Temple Smith was the first faculty member in our department who had the capacity to convince the existing faculty that there was a huge role for engineering to play at the molecular, cellular and genomic scale,” Lutchen recalled. “He helped us bridge that chasm and become the integrated department that we are today.”

Hailing from academia and industry, the symposium’s speakers explored leadingedge research in biomolecular engineering, bioinformatics and systems biology, and its potential impact on medical research, drug discovery and disease treatment.

Reflecting on the diverse set of scientific and technological advances addressed

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at the conference, Smith later observed, “What’s most exciting in the long term is that eventually this should lead to real changes in the way we do medicine and train doctors.

The new technologies also allow us to ask deeper and deeper questions.”

The sheer number of people who attended the symposium to pursue those questions made a strong impression on Smith. He noted that about half of the speakers were either former students or post-docs, and counted about 32 of his students at the symposium and post-conference dinner.

“There’s something very nice about [seeing] a whole bunch of people whose careers were influenced by my time,” said Smith. “Hopefully, you make a positive difference in people’s lives; that’s what this profession is all about.”

—Mark Dwortzan

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BU Team to Advance Surveillance Capabilities in Autonomous Vehicles A fleet of six unmanned Navy boats patrols a stretch of Boston Harbor for suspicious individuals, vehicles entering restricted areas and incoming liquid natural gas containers. Rigged with video cameras, laser range finders, navigation and control sensors, and on-board computers—and linked together in a network—the six vessels update one another when they detect potential security breaches. Meanwhile, a human operator continually interacts with the network to obtain critical information, but finds herself overwhelmed by the task of supervising multiple autonomous vehicles subject to ever-changing conditions.

Aiming to radically reduce the workload for human operators of semiautonomous underwater, ground and aerial vehicles in such scenarios, the U.S. Office of Naval Research launched the Smart Adaptive Reliable Teams for Persistent Surveillance (SMARTS) project on Sept. 11.

Structured as a three-to-five-year MultiUniversity Research Initiative (MURI) and funded at $1.5 million per year, the project tasks machine learning and control theory experts from MIT, Boston University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania to engineer more intelligent and capable autonomous vehicles for military and civilian applications.

Calin Belta, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, systems engineering and bioinformatics and director of the Hybrid & Networked Systems Laboratory; and Professor Christos G. Cassandras (ECE), head of the Division of Systems Engineering and director of the Control of Discrete Event Systems Laboratory, are co-investigators on the BU research team.

Using sophisticated computational tools and experimental models, Belta and

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Cassandras are working to develop autonomous, intelligent single agents—entities that compute, communicate and control —that can interpret and reason about their environment in changing conditions, as well as networks of multiple agents that can safely and efficiently coordinate their activities with other agents and human operators.

The BU team draws on significant recent advances in robotics, sensor networks and computer, communications and control technology.

“Technology in the last 10 years has allowed us to move forward,” said Cassandras. “This includes the ability to communicate wirelessly across many agents or robots and to pack much more powerful computational capabilities in smaller spaces.”

He compared the project’s main challenges to those posed by the “traveling salesmen” problem, in which a group of salesmen must visit several cities in minimum time.

“You have a large number of cities, some more important than others, some appear and disappear, the salesmen may lose communication with each other, their cars may break down and they have to visit as many cities as they can within a set time,” Cassandras explained. “How do you coordinate all of this? At the highest level, you want to define the task in simple English so the team can efficiently decipher the details.”

In the SMARTS project, each vehicle or agent must make decisions with minimal input. Ideally, technology conceived by project researchers will enable semi-autonomous vehicles to make decisions completely independent of human interaction except when absolutely necessary, regardless of changes in weather, lighting or other ambient conditions.

BU test bed simulating an urban setting: Small wireless robots equipped with sensors form a team that cooperatively performs various tasks. The team automatically configures itself depending on the tasks to be performed, often reacting to random events. (Photo courtesy of Assistant Professor Calin Belta (ME).)

In the military theater, the ultimate goal of this research is to create teams of persistent surveillance agents to give combat vehicles the edge in detecting and responding to hostile targets.

“Their missions are to go, detect, visit targets and come home,” said Cassandras.

SMARTS technology may also be developed to enable motor vehicles to carve out an optimum path to an empty parking spot through congested traffic; empower sensor networks to display and control energy consumption by dishwashers, washer-dryers and other home appliances; and provide health monitoring services to homebound elderly or incapacitated adults.

With these applications in mind, Belta and Cassandras are working both on computers—using optimization methods to model the behavior of single and multiple agents and probabilistic techniques to model uncertain conditions—and deploying small robots that carry cameras, communicate with each other and perform missions in simulated settings.

For instance, to test out autonomous agent decision-making performance in an urban context, Belta sends robotic cars on various missions in a model city graced with plastic towers, makeshift roads with parking spots and computer-controlled traffic lights.

“We’re trying to come up with formal proofs for our controls and communications strategies and to ensure they’re bug-free,” he said. “We want to make sure that our control systems always work, regardless of operating conditions.”

—Mark Dwortzan

FacultyNews First Innovative Engineering Education Fellows Named The College of Engineering has launched a new faculty fellowship program that recognizes innovation in teaching and encourages its further pursuit. Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen has named the first two Innovative Engineering Education Faculty Fellows: Associate Professors Don Wroblewski (ME) and Ari Trachtenberg (ECE).

Lutchen said the new fellowship program “honors these individuals as innovative educators in engineering and provides resources to further enhance engineering education here at Boston University in a sustainable way.”

The fellows were recommended to Lutchen by a review committee comprised of members inside and outside of the College.

Wroblewski is the associate chair of the Aerospace Engineering Undergraduate Program and has been honored twice with the Mechanical Engineering Department’s Excellence in Teaching Award. His research pertains to experiments using plasma spray to develop a molten flux sensor.

A member of the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department’s Information Systems and Sciences group, Trachtenberg received the ECE Excellence in Teaching Award in 2003. His research focuses on security, algorithms and data synchronization, particularly in mobile devices.

Both IEEF winners plan to use their fellowships to work on practical applications that can be used to help students understand theoretical concepts.

Wroblewski will focus on a project titled “Herding CATS: Coordinate Application Threads through the ME Curriculum to Facilitate Course-to-Course Connectivity and Improve Material Retention.” By implementing specific application examples throughout the ME program, Wroblewski will attempt to increase students’ retention

Both IEEF winners plan to use their fellowships to work on practical applications that can be used to help students understand theoretical concepts. of significant concepts. Wroblewski also plans to tackle other key academic issues, from putting engineering topics taught in the classroom in the context of the larger society to exposing engineering students to the concept of lifelong learning and new Engineering concentrations.

Trachtenberg’s project, “Engineering Evangelism,” will introduce two methods into the engineering curriculum that integrate tangible applications for the information and skills students learn in the classroom. Trachtenberg’s first method,

“Tangible Expressions,” will play on the fact that engineers react well to tangible projects, and present real-world examples that coincide with the theoretical knowledge students learn in their first year. His second method, “Novel Devices,” will extend the use of computer engineering fundamentals to show their use in commonly used devices such as smartphones and game systems.

This method aims to motivate and excite students by showing them real-world applications pertaining to their learning.

—Kristina Winn

ENG Community Soaks in Annual Block Party

Celebrating the kickoff of the 2009–2010 academic year, the College of Engineering community gathered on September 4 for the College’s second annual block party on Cummington Street—an afternoon of food, music, activities and games. The highlight of the day was the dunk tank, where students and faculty dunked their peers and professors (including Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE), associate dean for research and graduate programs, shown here) to raise money for the Boston University chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

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Ronald Roy Awarded ASA Silver Medal The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) has awarded Professor Ronald A. Roy (ME) the Helmholtz-Rayleigh Interdisciplinary Silver Medal for his contributions to physical acoustics and biomedical ultrasonics. Roy will receive the award at the 159th meeting of the ASA in Baltimore on April 21, 2010.

The Helmholtz-Rayleigh medal is awarded annually to a researcher whose contributions encompass multiple technical areas in acoustics.

Roy is the 16th recipient. His research specializes in the application of physical acoustics principles to problems in biomedical acoustics, industrial ultrasonics, opto-acoustics, and acoustical ­oceanography.

“It’s wonderful to have one’s work recognized in this way,” Roy said.

“It is a true honor to be both nominated and selected by your peers. The ASA Silver Medal is one of the higher recognitions one can achieve in the field of acoustics.”

He has served as chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department since 2007. Roy joined the College as an associate professor in 1996 and was promoted to full professor in 2002. He spent the 2006–2007 academic year at the University of Oxford, where he served as the 65th George Eastman Distinguished Visiting Professor. His work in academic contract research includes stints as an adjunct assistant

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professor of physics and research scientist at the National Center for Physical Acoustics of the University of Mississippi, and affiliate associate professor of mechanical engineering, research associate professor of biomedical engineering, and research scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington.

The Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal is one of 12 medals awarded by the ASA for contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles or through research accomplishments in acoustics.

The first Silver Medal was awarded in 1974, and Roy said he was honored to be included in the same categories as many of his acoustic research ­predecessors.

“My most valued mentors won these medals,” he said. “My two thesis advisors—Robert Apfel of Yale and Lawrence Crum of the University of Mississippi—both won Silver Medals from the Acoustical Society, and it amazes me to think that I might be viewed in the same light.”

A Fellow of the ASA, Roy is also a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the International Society of Therapeutic Ultrasound and a past member of the European Society of Sonochemistry and the American Institute of Physics.

Professor Ronald A. Roy (ME)

Roy is the third ME faculty to be awarded an ASA medal in recent years.

In 2007, Professor William M. Carey was awarded the “Pioneer of Underwater Acoustics” Silver Medal for his contributions to understanding ocean ambient noise and defining the limits of acoustic array performance in the ocean; and Professor Allan D. Pierce received the Stanley Ehrlich Gold Medal for his contributions to physical, environmental and structural acoustics and acoustics education.

—Jason L. London

FacultyNews

Four ENG Faculty Win NSF CAREER Awards The National Science Foundation (NSF) has named assistant professors Hatice Altug (ECE), Sean Andersson (ME), Luca Dal Negro (ECE) and Katherine Yanhang Zhang (ME) recipients of its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in recognition of their outstanding research and teaching capabilities. The five-year, $400,000 award funds high-impact projects that effectively combine research and educational objectives.

Altug will use her award to advance new bio-detection platforms for the large-scale study of proteins, from their detection and quantification to the determination of their functions and interactions. Such systems could lead to a better understanding of cellular physiology, improve diagnostic tools and accelerate the discovery of new drugs for cancer, Alzheimer’s and other complex diseases. They could also be adapted for the study of other biological molecules, chemicals and gases and the development of public health and national security applications.

In his research, Andersson seeks to establish a theoretical and experimental foundation for tracking single and multiple particles on the nanometer scale. Measurements at this scale often rely on a pointlike sensor that is scanned across the sample.

Turning to tracking rather than scanning, Andersson hopes to create clearer,

more precise algorithms for the study of dynamics on the nanoscale. If successful, Andersson’s research could facilitate advances in numerous scientific fields, including molecular biology, medicine and neurobiology.

Dal Negro’s CAREER Award supports his efforts to advance nanophotonics by developing a new class of light-emitting devices that will enable unprecedented control and enhancement of certain light-emitting nanoparticles. Dal Negro’s research aims to enhance electromagnetic fields to the point where the radiation properties of the silicon nanostructures can be changed to emit light efficiently and rapidly for on-chip light emitters and lasers applications.

Zhang is creating a novel experimental method to investigate mechanical properties and forces within the extracellular matrix (ECM), a network of proteins that provides structural support and facilitates communication between tissues and cells. She is also assessing the impact of tissue-level mechanical loading on these properties and forces.

Communication signals between cells and tissues play key roles in establishing tissue structure-function relationships and controlling cell fate, but scientists know little about how mechanical forces are translated within the ECM from the tissue to cellular level.

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Assistant Professor Katherine Yanhang Zhang (ME) (Photo courtesy of Professor Zhang.)

Zhang’s experimental method seeks to improve our understanding of the mechanisms by which ECM mechanics influence cell and tissue behavior— and the onset of pathology in which altered mechanics play important roles.

This new knowledge could generate advances in cellular and tissue engineering, biomaterials and other fields.

—Mark Dwortzan and Jason L. London

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NSF Honors ME Faculty Four mechanical engineering faculty members recently won National Science Foundation (NSF) awards for research that includes biological and biochemical sensing, vaporized nano-emulsions in ultrasound, and control of dynamic and autonomous systems.

Associate Professor Xin Zhang was awarded two NSF grants: the Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) Award and the Biosensing Award.

Zhang’s GOALI-supported research aims to develop a mass-producible gas micro-detector capable of competing with the performance of laboratory instrumentation, which has applications in chemical analysis in both energy and health care systems. She will use the Biosensing/CBET Award to pursue research in biological/biochemical sensing at cellular and sub-cellular levels by converting a biological response to an electrical signal using micro/nanosystems. The objective of this research is to design and test a multidisciplinary micro/ nanosystem for positioning individual cells into an analyzing matrix for real-time monitoring of cell viability and response.

Assistant Professors Sean Andersson and Calin Belta were awarded a three-year grant for their collaboration on “DynSyst_ Special_Topics: A formal approach to the control of stochastic dynamic systems.”

The research aims to establish theoretical and computational frameworks for the analysis and control of stochastic systems, particularly in mobile robotics. The proposed research will lead to a framework in which an autonomous vehicle—in a loud, noise-filled environment that could potentially disrupt the vehicle’s sensors—is successfully deployed and can complete a highly specific task.

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Xin Zhang

Sean Andersson

Tyrone Porter

Calin Belta

Assistant Professor Tyrone Porter received the Broadening Participation Research Initiation Grants in Engineering (BRIGE) Award in support of his project, “The Role of Vaporized Perfluorocarbon Nanoemulsions in Enhanced UltrasoundInduced Lesion Formation for Cancer Therapy.”

Porter’s research centers on focused ultrasound (FUS), a noninvasive medical procedure for the treatment of localized solid

tumors. While FUS therapy can destroy solid tumors with millimeter precision, the treatment of most clinically relevant solid tumors requires placement of multiple lesions, which can take hours to achieve. Porter hopes to develop a phase-shift nanoemulsion (PSNE), which would reduce the time and acoustic energy required for treatment.

—Jason L. London

FacultyNews

Bigio, Dal Negro Win Faculty Awards

The annual Distinguished Lecturer Award honors a faculty member engaged in outstanding, high-impact research and provides the recipient with a public forum to discuss and showcase research before the Boston University academic community.

Bigio presented the lecture “Skipping the light fantastic: Detecting cancer, and things that precede cancer, with scattered light” on March 4. Addressing a packed audience at the Photonics Center auditorium, he discussed the origin, development and clinical potential of elastic scattering spectroscopy (ESS), a noninvasive optical method he

pioneered to detect sub-cellular, structural changes in tissue associated with the onset of most major cancers—critical information that pathologists cannot obtain with a microscope.

ESS is a technique that passes a fiber-optic probe through an endoscope or catheter. When the probe’s optical fiber shines white light on the colon or another organ of interest, an adjacent optical fiber collects the light scattered back from the tissue. Software then compares the spectrum emitted from the tissue with normal spectral signatures in a stored diagnostic algorithm to pinpoint early signs of cancer.

Bigio’s research on minimally invasive diagnostics and therapeutics based on optical technologies is part of a growing effort to reduce health care costs through preventive medicine, early diagnosis, reduced invasiveness of procedures and outpatient procedures. A fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the Optical Society of America, Bigio has won three R&D 100 Awards for minimally invasive diagnostics.

Professor Irving Bigio (BME, ECE, Physics, Medicine)

Assistant Professor Luca Dal Negro (ECE)

College of Engineering Associate Dean for ¨ Research and Graduate Programs Selim Unlü announced Professor Irving Bigio (BME, ECE, Physics, Medicine) as the recipient of the College’s Distinguished Lecturer Award and Assistant Professor Luca Dal Negro (ECE) as the recipient of the Early Career Research Excellence Award at the ENG faculty meeting on December 16.

Distinguished Lecturer Award

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Since joining the Boston University community in 2001, Bigio has earned joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Physics and Medicine. He currently serves as chair of the annual Photonics “Future of Light” Symposium and organizer of the BME Senior Design Project Conference. Previously, he was a research scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Early Career Research Excellence Award The annual Excellence in Research Award celebrates the significant, recent and highimpact research accomplishments of tenuretrack faculty less than 10 years removed from their PhD. Luca Dal Negro joined the College of Engineering in 2006, three years after receiving his PhD from the University of Trento in Italy. Already recognized as a leader in the field of nanophotonics, Dal Negro has published more than 60 journal articles (more than 30 in 2008 and 2009) and received invitations to speak at 26 seminars.

Dal Negro’s research centers on the fabrication and optical characterization of novel nano-optical materials and photonic structures. He has made several noteworthy contributions to the study of the optics of metallic nanostructures, and nanoplasmonics; light-emitting silicon nanocrystals; and deterministic aperiodic optical materials.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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FacultyNews

College of Engineering Welcomes Eight New Faculty Members The College of Engineering welcomed eight new faculty members for the 2009-2010 academic year. Experts in a wide variety of fields, they reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the College and are expected to bring innovative ideas to its classrooms and research labs.

Previously a member of the technical staff at OFS Laboratories in Somerset, New Jersey, Associate Professor Siddarth Ramachandran (ECE) received his doctorate in electrical engineering in 1998 from the University of Illinois. His main research focus is on fiber optics and lasers.

Assistant Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE) hails from the University of San Diego, where she recently received her doctoral degree in computer science and engineering. She previously worked as a researcher at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and Sun Microsystems. Coskun’s research interests are in temperature and energy management in multiprocessor systems, threedimensional stack architectures, reliability analysis and optimization, computer architecture and embedded systems.

Assistant Professor Ajay Joshi (ECE) joined the College from MIT, where he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He received his doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006.

Joshi’s research interests include wavepiped, multiplexed routing for giga-scale integration, integrated photonic networks for multicore systems, and carbon nanotube interconnects in VLSI applications.

Assistant Professor Harold Park (ME) was an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University

Siddarth Ramachandran

Ayse Coskun

Ajay Joshi

Harold Park

Jason Ritt

Matthias Schneider

Muhammad Zaman

Caleb Farny

Photos courtesy of faculty except for Schneider and Zaman

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BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

FacultyNews

of Colorado at Boulder. He received his doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University in 2004. Park is studying the development of computational methods that could enhance fundamental investigations of how surfaces impact the physical properties of nanomaterials and lead to novel nanoscale applications.

Assistant Professor Jason Ritt (BME) joined the College from the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, where he served as a postdoctoral fellow. He received his doctoral degree in neuroscience from Boston University in 2003. Ritt’s research concentrates on how organisms gather and use information from their environment through processes of active sensing and sensory decision making.

Assistant Professor Matthias Schneider (ME) comes to the College from Germany, where he served as head of the Biological Physics Group at the University of Augsburg and received his doctorate from the University of Munich. His research centers on the physics of blood clotting and cell adhesion, and membrane thermodynamics and mechanics.

Formerly an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Cell and Molecular Biology, Assistant Professor Muhammad Zaman (BME) received his doctoral degree in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2003. Zaman’s current research focuses on the biophysics

of cell-matrix interactions in three-dimensional matrices.

Lecturer Caleb Farny (ME) joined the College from the Focused Ultrasound Laboratory in the Department of Radiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he served as a Harvard University research fellow. His research focused on investigating ultrasound imaging techniques for thermal and diagnostic applications.

Farny received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the College of Engineering and served as a graduate research assistant in the College’s Mechanical Engineering Department from 2002 to 2006.

—Jason L. London

Siddarth Ramachandran Named OSA Fellow The Optical Society of America (OSA) has elevated Associate Professor Siddharth Ramachandran (ECE) to the rank of fellow for his study of the properties and applications of complex spatial patterns of light as they travel inside an optical fiber.

The rank of fellow honors OSA members who have made especially noteworthy contributions to the field of optics. The total number of fellows is limited to no more than 10 percent of OSA membership and the number elected each year is limited to only 0.4 percent of the current membership.

“The OSA is the most prestigious society in optics,” Ramachandran said. “Just based on the limited number of people named fellows each year, it’s an extreme honor.”

According to the OSA, Ramachandran is being honored for “pioneering contributions to fiber optics, including spatial mode conversion and the use of higher-order-modes for fiber lasers and nonlinear-optical devices.” Ramachandran’s use of unique beam shapes has led to several counterintuitive discoveries in the field of fiber optics that can be exploited for applications in telecommunications, high-power lasers, quantum optics and biology.

Prior to joining the College of Engineering in January 2010, Ramachandran spent nearly a decade at Bell Laboratories and its spinoff research unit in fiber optics, OFS Laboratories.

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Ramachandran’s use of unique beam shapes has led to several counterintuitive discoveries in the field of fiber optics that can be exploited for applications in telecommunications, high-power lasers, quantum optics and biology.

He has published or presented more than 135 papers in scientific journals, conferences, and news and trade publications; authored two book chapters; served as topical editor for Optics Letters and as book editor for Springer-Verlag; secured 20 patents; and chaired several conference committees in the field of optics.

—Jason L. London

www.bu.edu/eng

31

FacultyNews

Photo courtesy of Roberto Paiella

Three Faculty Members Earn Promotions

Three College of Engineering faculty members received promotions and/or tenure during the 2009–2010 academic year.

Ioannis Paschalidis

Professor Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE) has served as co-director of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering and academic director and founder of the Sensor Network Consortium. He has authored or contributed to over 35 book chapters, scientific journals and technical reports, and presented his research in over 150 conference presentations, abstracts and lectures.

His research centers on systems and control, networking, applied probability, optimization, operations research, computational biology and bioinformatics, with an emphasis on the design, performance analysis and control of communication and sensor networks.

A senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Paschalidis received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2000 and first prize in the Critical Assessment PRedicted Interaction Evaluation Meeting in 2007, and was an invited participant in the Workshop on Mathematics of Molecular and Cellular Biology in 2008.

Since joining the College in 1996, he has also served as a visiting scholar to Columbia University and MIT. He received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineer-

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BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

ing from the National Technical University of Athens and his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. Associate Professor with Tenure Elise Morgan (ME) received the College’s 2009 Early Career Research Excellence Award and the International Osteoporosis Foundation Young Investigator Research Award in 2005. She has published over 40 book chapters, journal articles and technical reviews and presented at nearly 70 conferences, seminars and lectures.

Her research examines the interactions between mechanical forces and tissue microstructure in the maintenance, regeneration and degradation of skeletal tissues. She is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Orthopedic Research Society, American Society of Bone and Mineral Research, Osteoarthritis Research Society and the American Society of Engineering Education.

Morgan joined the College of Engineering in 2003 as an assistant professor and an adjunct assistant professor in the Orthopedic Surgery Department at BU’s School of Medicine. She received her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering

Elise Morgan

Roberto Paiella

from Stanford University and her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

Roberto Paiella (ECE) has served as a technical staff member in the Optoelectronics Division for Agere Systems and postdoctoral technical staff member for Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies.

His research interests include semiconductor quantum structure applications, novel device concepts and circuit architectures for ultrafast all-optical information processing, and terahertz photonics.

A senior member of the IEEE, he received the College’s Legacy Gift Award in 2005, and the Laser Focus World Commendation for Excellence in Technical Communication in 2001. He has secured six patents, contributed to nearly 50 book chapters and journal articles, and authored the book Intersubband Transitions in Quantum Structure in 2006.

Paiella joined the College in 2003. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University and his doctorate in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology.

—Jason L. London

AlumniEvents ENG Grads Honored at Distinguished Alumni Awards Reception The College of Engineering honored four alumni at the 2009 Engineering Distinguished Alumni Awards reception at the Ingalls Engineering Resource Center during Alumni Weekend in October.

Highlighting the importance of partnerships between the College of Engineering and its alumni, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen said, “As new areas of growth for the College of Engineering develop in energy, entrepreneurship, nanotechnology, new-age materials and personalized medicine, alumni will have opportunities to make a lasting impact just by staying involved and engaged with the College.”

David A. Casavant (ENG’85, MS’88) and Gregory C. DeAngelis (PhD’87) received the Service to the Profession award. Casavant, a senior principal field clinical engineer at Medtronic Inc., conceived, co-invented and developed a new pacemaker modality called managed ventricular pacing (MVP) that has been credited in peer-reviewed journals with improving and extending life. Since it was FDA-approved in 2004, MVP has become the top-selling pacemaker feature for Medtronic.

Now regulating heart rhythms in over one million people throughout the world, MVP pacing provides significant improvements over earlier, dual-chamber pacemakers.

DeAngelis, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, neurobiology and anatomy, and biomedical engineering at the University of Rochester, has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying stereoscopic vision. His work fuses the fields of neurophysiology, psychology and computation, and focuses on neural mechanisms of depth perception and sensory integration for self-motion perception. A recipient of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences’ Troland Research Award in 2005, he has provided the first evidence for neurons that optimally combine information across different sensory systems to make perception more reliable.

Dean Kenneth Lutchen (center) with Distinguished Alumni Award recipients David A. Casavant (ENG’85, MS’88), Maj. Prospero A. Uybarreta (ENG’98), Gregory C. DeAngelis (PhD’87) and Peter M. Cirak (ENG’01, MS’07).

Maj. Prospero A. Uybarreta (ENG’98) received the Service to the Community award. Uybarreta, a test flight commander in the U.S. Air Force’s 445th Flight Test Squadron at Edwards Air Force Base, earned an MS in Flight Test Engineering at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and was ranked in the top one percent of over 12,000 active U.S. Air Force pilots. He has mentored and taught aeronautics to hundreds of students, both in the U.S. and Indian Air Forces; won numerous military decorations for his extensive service in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and beyond; and served as the project test pilot and safety officer for the “Active Stick” project, which successfully investigated the potential for a new active-feel feedback control system design.

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Peter M. Cirak (ENG’01, MS’07) received the Service to the Alma Mater award. For most of the past decade, Cirak, technical leader at Paradigm Precision Inc., has served on the College of Engineering Alumni Board and as master of ceremonies at the annual ENG Design Competitions. He has also appeared as a guest lecturer at the EK100 Freshman Advising Seminar for five years, delivering his presentation, “How to Succeed in Engineering,” to more than 1,500 students. He has supported mentoring, fundraising and outreach programs organized by the Undergraduate Programs Office, the Career Development Office and the Office of Alumni Relations.

—Mark Dwortzan

www.bu.edu/eng

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ClassNotes 1961

Thomas E. Chamberlain, BS Los Angeles, California For over 10 years, Thomas has presented papers on his heterodox approach to mathematical economics at conferences from Beijing to Athens and published selected contributions on the Internet. He was nominated for the 2004 International Scientist of the Year award by the International Biographical Center of Cambridge, England, for his work in psychology and economics and recognized by Who’s Who. While critical of mainstream economics in his writings, he has maintained many associations and friendships in the economics community. Thomas and Mary frequently visit their son, Tom, his wife, Aya, and their grandson, one-year old Thomas.

health and wellness insurance provider with the goal of offering the healthiest possible workplace via a new Gold LEED Certified building. E-mail him at tom.bovis@ bcbsri.org.

1982

Michelle Tortolani, BS, MS’89 Alexandria, Virginia On October 16, 2009, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) announced its selection of Michelle as a 2009 Fellow of the Society. She was recognized for demonstrated technical and program management excellence, long-term commitment to SWE and promoting engineering to women nationally and internationally.

1984

1972

Steven J. Cohn, BS Coral Springs, Florida Since graduating, Steven attended Columbia University—where he received an MS in biological engineering—and medical school at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. He is currently specializing in cardiology. Steven’s son, Jason, is a computer engineer and conducts robotics research for the U.S. Navy. “I feel that without my fine experience at Boston University, none of this would have been possible,” writes Steven. E-mail him at sjaycohn@aol.com.

1974

Peter Hoffman, BS, SMG’01 Lexington, Massachusetts Peter Hoffman, CFP(R), RLP(R) is a registered investment advisor representative with Compass Capital Corp. in Braintree, MA. After working for 10 years at Fidelity Investments, Peter joined the firm in 2009 to provide comprehensive financial planning and investment management to families and business owners. E-mail him at Peter@CompassSecurities.com.

Gary Patrick Douglas, BS Mesa, Arizona Gary recently celebrated 25 years with The Boeing Company. He holds an MBA and manages technology development programs within the Phantom Works organization for Integrated Defense Systems. E-mail him at gdouglas11@cox.net.

Thomas Tamim Habal, BS Paris, France Thomas is senior consultant and training manager for Serena Software, specializing in software configuration management and business process and mashups design. His wife is an interior designer and his daughter is studying law and geography at the Paris-Sorbonne University. E-mail Thomas at thabal@serena.com.

Edward “Ed” Pohl, BS Fayetteville, Arkansas Ed is working as an associate professor in the Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Arkansas, where he serves as the director of the Operations Management Program. E-mail him at epohl@uark.edu.

Marc Anthony Viola, BS Washington, D.C. Marc published his first book, A Spy’s Résumé (Scarecrow Press, 2008). The book shows how to collect data and formulate actionable information for a job search; use surveillance and reconnaissance, preparation, organization and serendipity to advantage; and walk into an interview well prepared. For more information, see www.scarecrowpress.com.

1988

Iggy Calalang, BS, MS’99 Gilbert, Arizona Iggy is a principal engineer for Medtronic, Inc. in Tempe.

He has worked at the medical device company since June, 2001. E-mail him at ignatius.calalang@medtronic.com.

Kevin Stever, BS Mableton, Georgia Kevin is the director of global compliance for CARE (www.care.org), one of the world’s largest private humanitarian organizations dedicated to fighting global poverty. E-mail him at k.stever01@gmail.com.

1989

Sherif Mityas, BS Chicago, Illinois Sherif has been appointed to the board of directors of Movie Gallery Inc., a leading video and game specialty rental and retail chain with over 3,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada. He also serves as president and CEO.

1990

1979

1986

Mark Hinders, BS, MS’87, GRS’90 Williamsburg, Virginia Mark is professor and chair of the Applied Science Department at the College of William and Mary in Virginia (http://as.wm.edu), where he has worked since 1993.

James H. Lee, BS Severna Park, Maryland James recently completed a three-year recall to active duty as a naval officer at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he taught project management, naval architecture, electrical engineering, spacecraft design and offshore sailing. During this tour, he was also deployed to Iraq to manage $300 million in reconstruction efforts in western Al Anbar province. He has returned to work at the Chantilly, VA office of The Aerospace Corporation, lectures on space systems at Johns Hopkins University, volunteers at the Small Satellite Program at the Naval Academy and serves as a naval reserve commander.

E-mail him at leejames2@yahoo.com.

1980

1987

1992

Sirarpi Heghinian-Walzer, BS, MS’82 Lexington, Massachusetts Sirarpi is a member of the contemporary Galatea Fine Art Gallery in Boston’s SOWA district at 460 B Harrison Avenue. E-mail her at swalzer@swalzer.com or visit www.swalzer.com.

Thomas Bovis, BS North Kingstown, Rhode Island Thomas received the CorenNet Global New England Chapter Executive of the Year (Regional Corporate category) award for his efforts to create a new sustainable workplace for the 1,100 associates of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island. As head of Corporate Real Estate, he led his team to align the organization’s mission as a

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BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Marty Dugan, BS, GSM’96 Waltham, Massachusetts Marty recently joined two startups, Eden Park Illumination, a microplasma lighting company, and ANDalyze, a biosciences water-testing technology company, as vice president of marketing focused on global commercialization. E-mail him at marty_dugan@ yahoo.com.

Muhanad Hisham Al-Sultan, BS Kuwait Muhanad and two friends completed a round-the-world motorcycle trip that covered 17 countries in 105 days, from May 15 to August 26. E-mail him at msultan@ kockw.com.

ClassNotes What are you doing?

We want to hear from you! Send your class notes submissions to engalum@ bu.edu or visit www. bu.edu/alumni/eng.

Wally Radjenovic, BS Toledo, Ohio Wally writes, “I’m excited to announce my 10th anniversary being married to Maia along with three wonderful boys, as well as my fourth anniversary of owning and managing my own company, Northwestern Ohio Foam Products.” Contact him at wr@nofp.com.

1993

1996

Angela (Folse) Sarafin, BS Houston, Texas Angela, a marriage and family therapist, has joined the staff of Delee D’Arcy Therapy (www.deleedarcytherapy. com) in League City, Texas. E-mail her at angelas@deleedarcytherapy.com.

Steffen K. Kaldor, BS Fishkill, New York Steffen works at IBM’s advanced 300mm semiconductor fabricator in East Fishkill, NY as an engineering manager.

He and his wife Lu Ann have two boys, Sebastian, 4, and Alexander, 1. Steffen hopes everyone at BU is doing well and can be reached at kaldor@alum.bu.edu.

Hector Margain, BS France Hector recently moved to Luxembourg to work for the European Parliament as a program director for its IT infrastructure. E-mail him at hmargain@alum.bu.edu.

Graeme Jarvis, MS Marblehead, Massachusetts Graeme is director of strategy and technology for John Deere Water, focusing on smart grid for water management, marketing and acquisitions, and partnerships.

Graeme can be reached at gjarvis@johndeerewater.com.

Michael T. Watson, BS Plymouth, Connecticut Michael received his doctorate in educational leadership in December and accepted an assistant principal position at Warren Harding High School in Bridgeport, CT for the 2009-2010 academic year.

Karen M. (Pascarella) Moores, BS Snohomish, Washington Karen and Chris Moores welcomed a second son, Carter W., into their family on June 2. “The two boys are keeping us very busy,” she writes.

1997

1994

Stephen Forasté, BS, MS’94 Wellesley, Massachusetts Stephen and Aly Forasté announce the birth of twins Phineas and Phoebe in April 2009. As a result, they moved from Charlestown to Wellesley and skipped the marathon this year. “We’re not sure when we may get out of the house long enough to start training again,” writes Stephen.

John A. McNeill, PhD’94 Stow, Massachusetts John coauthored The Designer’s Guide to Jitter in Ring Oscillators (Springer Science+Business Media, 2009). The book is intended for engineers working at “the cutting edge of analog and digital integrated circuit design,” he writes.

1995

H. Alex (Hernando) Sanchez, BS Boston, Massachusetts Alex was appointed to the board of directors of The Commonwealth Corporation in October, 2009. He is also a member of the firm’s executive compensation committee.

Krista (Botsford) Crotty, BS, MS’98 Las Vegas, Nevada Krista Botsford and Christopher Crotty were married in April, 2009 in Las Vegas. The couple rode their Bourget Low-Blow motorcycle to and from the wedding via the Las Vegas Strip. Krista is CEO and founder of Botsford EcoTech Partners, LLC, and can be reached at krista. crotty@cox.net.

Robert T. Hines, BS Niceville, Florida Major Bob Hines is an experimental test pilot in the U.S. Air Force. He and his wife, Kelli, have two daughters, Catherine, 7, and Sarah, 2. He is currently a flight commander and F-15C/E chief test pilot at Eglin AFB in Florida. Bob just returned from a deployment to Afghanistan, where he flew a Special Operations aircraft in support of a Joint Interagency Task Force. Since his return, Bob has led the developmental testing of new air-to-air missiles and air-to-ground weapons for use on all versions of the F-15. E-mail Bob at bkhines3@aol.com.

Benjamin Sullivan, BS San Diego, California Benjamin is the chief scientific officer of TearLab, Inc., an in-vitro diagnostics startup developing “lab-on-a-chip” technologies that enable eye care practitioners to test for specific biomarkers at the point of care. The company received a 2009 Medical Design Excellence Award.

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1998

Jason Thomas Gulbinas, BS Boston, Massachusetts Jason married Soultana Tsavalakoglou (SAR’98) on August 23, 2009 in Thessaloniki, Greece. BU alumni attending the wedding included Tomo Tamaki (ENG‘00), Eddy Mattica (ENG‘97), Rohit Khosla (CAS‘97), Manu Rekhi (CAS‘97), Jayen Patel (CAS‘07, MED‘02), Kerry Wu (SDM‘97) and Monika Nalepa (ENG‘98). Jason is completing his MBA at Babson College, focusing on entrepreneurship, and Soultana is a speech language pathologist in the Boston Public Schools. The couple lives in Boston. E-mail Jason at j_gulbinas@hotmail.com.

Jennifer B. (Chu) Hall, BS Glastonbury, Connecticut Jennifer and Benjamin Hall announce the arrival of their second child, David Thomas, in July 2009. “Parents and older brother are ecstatic!” Jennifer writes.

Megan Jensen, BS, MS’01 Arlington, Massachusetts Megan Jensen and Tom McLoughlin announce the birth of their first child, Connor Thomas McLoughlin, on January 11, 2010. Contact them at megjensen@ hotmail.com.

Jason Ulberg, BS Swampscott, Massachusetts Jason Ulberg and Jaime (Ruyack) Ulberg (SMG’98) announce the birth of their second child, Cecily Jane, on November 5, 2009. Contact them at julberg81@gmail.com.

Prospero Uybarreta, BS Edwards Air Force Base, California Prospero is a major in the U.S. Air Force and an experimental test pilot at Edwards AFB. He recently graduated from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, earning an MS in Flight Test Engineering. His research project involved flight-testing a system that gives pilots an array of tactile feedback options via control stick to enhance envelopelimit awareness and protection. During the yearlong course, he flew over 20 military aircraft. E-mail him at prosperouybarreta@yahoo.com.

Guylherme Tobias Zaniratto, BS Londrina, Brazil Guylherme married Tayara Feguri Krizanowski on October 3, 2009 in Londrina, Brazil. Guests included BU alumni Luiz Gabriel Camargo (ENG’00), Renata Tobias Zaniratto (CGS’00), Colin Butterfield (ENG’95) and Stanley Tsung (CAS’99). The couple lives in Londrina.

1999

Michael Robert Feinberg, MS Arlington, Massachusetts Michael recently joined Boston Micromachines Corp. as director of product marketing. He is excited to work with many of his former colleagues from the Photonics Center, including Professor Thomas Bifano and Paul Bierden. E-mail him at michaelrfeinberg@gmail.com.

www.bu.edu/eng

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ClassNotes

Rosanna (Legarda) Pasquale, BS Natick, Massachusetts Rosanna and Stephen Pasquale announce the birth of their first child, Ryan Vincent, on August 9, 2009.

Rosanna recently celebrated her 10-year anniversary at The MathWorks, Inc. in Natick, MA.

2000

Yoshitaka Katayama, BS Mission Viejo, California Yoshi and Jenn Katayama (COM’00) announce the birth of their second child, Kenzo Cole, on October 13, 2009.

Contact them at ykatayama_2000@yahoo.com.

Peter Lam, BS Boston, Massachusetts Peter announces the birth of Ethan Kam Chau on December 16, 2009. E-mail Peter at acclamation@ hotmail.com.

2001

Anuj Jain, BS Matawan, New Jersey Anuj Jain and Monica Gupta, who met as toddlers, were married in a traditional Indian ceremony on May 30, 2009 in West Orange, NJ. Guests from the ENG Class of 2001 included Mindy Black, Norman Eng, Connie Lee, James Oujiri, George Papadopoulos, Jake Schmitz and Jason Weiner; 2001 graduates Ashley Ellis Papadopoulos (SED), Kevin Sullivan (CAS) and Shye Tzadok (CAS) also attended. Anuj is a managing consultant with IBM Business Performance Services, and Monica is an associate with Booz & Company. The couple lives in White Plains, NY. E-mail Anuj at anuj.jain.2001@alum.bu.edu.

2002

Brooke Borel, BS Brooklyn, New York Brooke Borel is a freelance science writer based in New York who writes regularly for Popular Science and Australia’s Cosmos magazine. She is also a researcher for the U.S. edition of Science Illustrated. Send her scienceand technology-related tips at brookeborel@gmail.com.

Vanessa (Wassam) Hobson, BS Purcellville, Virginia Vanessa and Michael Hobson (‘01) announce the birth of their first child, Lily Belle Sweetpea, on August 27, 2009. Contact them at nessahobson@gmail.com.

Andre Reid, BS Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Andre announces the birth of Aurelia Carol-Lyn on December 16, 2009.

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BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

2003

Tzoul-ki (Julgi Han) Chan, BS Cambridge, Massachusetts Julgi initially joined a small software startup that was acquired by IBM a year later in August, 2007. Within six months of the acquisition, he became the highest revenue-generating sales representative on a twelve-person team and was promoted to team lead. One year later he was promoted to a senior enterprise sales team, where he now builds relationships and sells to IBM’s top 500 accounts. He was recently selected by his business unit executive to participate in the IBM Top Talent Program, a global executive pipeline initiative. E-mail him at julgi@ us.ibm.com.

Earl Martin Valencia, BS Santa Clara, California Earl married Patricia Ann Oliva on October 30, 2009 in San Francisco. Earl recently graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is currently working for Cisco Systems. Patricia formerly worked for Citibank as a personal wealth advisor. The couple is living in Santa Clara, CA. E-mail Earl at earlee@alum.bu.edu.

2004

Allison Bell Dianis, BS Durham, North Carolina Allison Bell and Scott Dianis (‘04) announce the birth of their first child, Elise Caroline on December 19, 2009, at 2:46 a.m. at Duke University Hospital in Durham. She weighed 9 pounds, 12 ounces, and measured 22 inches.

Patrick Sexton, BS, MS’07 Austin, Texas Patrick and Rebecca (Taylor) Sexton (MET’05) were married on June 13, 2009, in Gray, Maine. Tricia Kimball (CAS’02), Christina Grandy (CFA’02), Melissa Brassil (CAS’04), Mary Kirifides (SMG’04), Megan Adams (CAS’03), Phillip L. Bell (CGS’01, CAS’04) and David O’Grady (CAS’04, SHA’05) were in the wedding party, and guests included 35 BU alumni, many of whom participated in the BU bands. The DJ played “Hey Baby” as the last song, a Pep Band tradition after a BU win.

2006

Surya Sivaram, BS Boston, Massachusetts “I just found a job where I can both analyze and manage,” writes Sivaram. “It is wonderful. For all those who haven’t thought about product management, please do so. It has a good career path.”

2007

Kevin J. Chui, BS Shanghai, China Kevin is an engineering manager with Siemens LTC in Shanghai. E-mail him at kevin.chui@siemens.com.

Margaret Koker, BS Neenah, Wisconsin Last summer Margaret completed her Master’s thesis in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In September she began pursuing a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Materials Research in Stuttgart, Germany. E-mail her at margaretkoker@ gmail.com.

Danny Miranda, BS Providence, Rhode Island Danny became engaged to Christina Hehl (SAR’07,’09) in Boston on July 7, 2009. Christina received her Doctor of Physical Therapy degree in September and accepted a position at Braintree Rehabilitation Hospital in Braintree, MA. Danny is attending the biomedical engineering doctoral program at Brown University. Contact Danny at miranda.danny@alum.bu.edu.

2008

Joseph Gregory, BS Boston, Massachusetts Since April 2009, Joseph has served as a clinical research associate at NxStage in Lawrence, MA. E-mail him at joseph.a.gregory@gmail.com.

Carolina Save, BS Boston, Massachusetts Carolina attends Suffolk Law School and aims to study patent law to complement her Mechanical Engineering degree.

Kyle Willis, BS Brookline, Massachusetts Kyle and Cara Saudelli (CAS’08) were married on June 13, 2009 at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. Thirty-five BU alumni attended and the wedding party included maid of honor Claire McGregor (CAS’08), Sabrina Gonzalez (CAS’08), Hayley Cotter (CAS’08), Chloe Magner (COM’08), Nicholas Chasuk (CAS’08), Steven Marsh (ENG’09), Christopher Ilacqua (SAR’09) and Sean Coleman (ENG’08).

Looking Ahead, Planning to Give Back Boston University is so special to my wife and me—after all, we met here. But there was a time when I wasn’t sure I’d be able to graduate. I was working at a deli on Commonwealth Avenue and struggling to keep up with tuition. If not for the College of Engineering’s Dean Thompson, who helped me secure financial support, I wouldn’t have been able to stay in school.

Without graduating from the College of Engineering, I wouldn’t have been able to enroll in flight school and have successful careers in the U.S. Air Force, the aerospace industry, government and international relations. Or have the opportunity to meet and work with people from all over the world.

You never know when you will have the chance to really help someone out. A gift through Planned Giving allows us to do more, like put a scholarship out there for someone who really needs it. It’s a great way to give a generous amount down the road and still take care of my family today.

Peter Cocolis (’64)

Boston University Planned Giving officers can help you think strategically about how to support the organizations that are important to you. There are many ways to donate, and our gift planners can help you explore options that fit your unique interests and financial situation.

Once you know all the possibilities, you may discover that you have the ability to make a greater impact than you ever imagined.

Peter Cocolis(’64) and Lorraine Cocolis (SAR’63)

Find out more at www.bu.edu/alumni/gep.

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www.bu.edu/eng

3

NONPROFIT U.S. POSTAGE PAID BOSTON MA PERMIT NO. 1839

Xin Zhang PhD, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering

My lab’s research is driven by finding real-world problems and developing solutions based on performance and functionality, particularly in NEMS and MEMS-related research. Our investigations of nano- and micro-electromechanical systems could lead to advances in biotechnology, defense systems and nanomanufacturing. I believe that in order to solve a problem, you have to take ownership of it, and my students have embraced each project from the beginning. They are pushing me to a higher level and motivating me to do better.

Our lab has become a hub of materials science, nanotechnology, and microand nanosystems. Because our field is multidisciplinary in nature, our work is characterized by strong collaborations with other departments, schools and local industry. In terms of partnerships, there are really no boundaries here.

To learn more, visit www.bu.edu /eng.