College of Engineering
CYCL NE ENGINEERING
and Appointments
W. Samuel Easterling
James L. and Katherine S. Melsa Dean of Engineering
Arun K. Somani
Senior Associate Dean, Anson Marston Distinguished Professor, Philip and Virginia Sproul Professor
Connie Hargrave
Associate Dean for Engagement and Excellence
Sriram Sundararajan
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Sri Sritharan
Assistant Dean for Research, Anson Marston Distinguished Professor, Wilkinson Chair of Interdisciplinary Engineering
Cris Schwartz
Assistant Dean for Engineering Student Success
Editing: Breehan Gerleman
Writing: Breehan Gerleman, Mike Krapf, Rory McDermott
Photography: Ryan Riley
Graphic Design: Madeline Willits and William Beach collegerelations@iastate.edu | www.engineering.iastate.edu
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7,807 15 3 17 21
engineering students undergraduate majors in Fall 2023 across eight departments new majors in the last fve years doctoral master’s programs programs
$109.8M in research expenditures 96% of undergraduates have a job after graduation
Top 3% in the nation for research expenditures among universities without a human medical school
$3.1B
38,000
economic impact for Iowa by the Center for Industrial Research and Service over the last fve years jobs created or retained by CIRAS over the last fve years
$76K average starting salary for undergraduates $
23,000
students inspired to explore STEM in state-wide K-12 First LEGO League outreach programs
MONTEZUMA MICROGRIDS
Iowa’s first renewable, resilient microgrid
“This project will make the town of Montezuma the very frst utility-scale microgrid in Iowa with the best reliability and resilience. The Montezuma microgrid will revolutionize and modernize the Montezuma Municipal Light and Power system by integrating smart grid technologies. It will be a model for other rural utilities.
The microgrid will improve Montezuma by ensuring energy supplies for critical loads, controlling power quality and reliability at the local level, and promoting customer participation
through demand-side management and involvement in electricity supply.
This is so much more than an R&D project because it will directly beneft more than 1,400 Montezuma residents and generate signifcant impacts on surrounding counties. It shows Iowa State University is working to bring real benefts to Iowans and boost local economies.”
Zhaoyu Wang, professor of electrical and computer engineering and project leader
“This new microgrid will have immediate benefts for the community because it will provide a resilient power system with new technology that integrates renewable generation, and the project design can be replicated in other rural communities.
The digital twin of the Montezuma microgrid and the training curricula that we’ll develop and test with various partners – ranging from K-12 schools, the Meskwaki Nation, to unions and community colleges – will build an energy workforce that can design, build and operate other resilient systems like this.”
Anne Kimber, director of Iowa State University’s Electric Power Research Center and project co-leader
Iowa State’s Electric Power Research Center will work with Montezuma Municipal Power & Light to create a microgrid featuring power generation from solar panels, a battery storage system and two chargers for electric vehicles.
$12 million in funding from U.S. Department of Energy, with local cost-share
SCALING UP BIOREACTORS
FOR A STRONG BIOECONOMY
Bioreactors – and the biological tec hnologies they run on – have the potential to spur new bioindustrial manufacturing and expand the U.S. bioeconomy. But the key to that future is transferring bioreactor science and engineering to industry-scale.
Three Cyclone Engineering teams are working to bridge the gap between the lab and the large-scale use of bioreactors to manufacture bio-based products.
FERMENTATION FRAMEWORK
“Scale-down” – studying and perfecting existing manufacturing-scale fermentation tec hniques at the smallbe scaled to industry processes.
scale – will guide the team in creating a new fermenter design and scale up framework that helps ensure lab discoveries can
Project Partners: Cargill, Geno
CONTINUOUS BIOREACTOR
The team is creating a new type of continuous bioreactor that
integrates product extraction and separation into the design, so less equipment is needed to complete the process.
BIOREACTOR MONITORING
Focused on enzyme production, the team is developing new product sensors that measure enzyme activity continuously and directly in the bioreactor, as well as the development of open-source monitoring software.
Project Partner: Novozymes
CHEMURGY CHEM
BUILDING BIOMANUFACTURING
Around 1900, Iowa State alumnus and faculty member George Washington Carver coined the term chemurgy: using applied chemistry to produce industrial products from agricultural materials.
Today, Cyclone Engineers are leading the modern version of Carver’s vision in a $20 million, state-wide National Science Foundation
EPSCoR project to make the state of Iowa a national leader in biomanufacturing.
Chemurgy 2.0 goes beyond chemistry and chemical engineering to include biosciences and advanced manufacturing technologies. The team’s goal is to build research capacity, collaborations and infrastructure for Iowa’s biomanufacturing industries – and to develop Iowa’s biomanufacturing workforce.
What kind of biomanufacturing will Chemurgy 2.0 advance?
PLASTICS FIBERS PROTIENS
CHEMURGY URGY
PROJECT LEADERS AT IOWA STATE
Principal Investigator: Laura Jarboe, Cargill
Professor in Chemical Engineering
Co-principal Investigators: Monica Lamm, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, and Nigel Reuel, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and Stanley Chair in Interdisciplinary Engineering
PROJECT NUMBER: 2242763
PROJECT PARTNERS
University of Iowa
University of Northern Iowa
Central College
Dordt University
IOWA STATE’S BIOSCIENCES EXPERTISE AND INFRASTRUCTURE
Bioeconomy Institute
Center for Biorenewable Chemicals
Offce of Biotechnology
Center for Crop Utilization Research
Nanovaccine Institute
AT LARGE SCALE SIMUL ATING TORNADOS
Cyclone Engineers are leading a $14-million, National Science Foundation-funded project to design and plan a National Testing Facility for Enhancing Wind Resiliency of Infrastructure in Tornado-Downburst-Gust Front Events, or NEWRITE.
The facility would allow testing at large-scales (a fullscale house or 1:10 scale models of retail buildings, shopping malls or hospitals) and high wind speeds (86-225 mph for EF1 to EF5 tornados, 100-125 mph for downbursts, 80-100 mph for gust fronts) in simulated windstorms.
“Being able to test structures at much larger scales, in extreme winds produced in these windstorms, will bring us
closer to understanding reality and help engineers to improve the wind resilience of structures,” says Partha Sarkar, professor of aerospace engineering and project leader.
The grant also supports replacing Iowa State’s existing Tornado/Microburst Simulator with a 1/20th-scale model of the full-scale NEWRITE.
Researchers will model and produce a “digital twin” of the full-scale and 1/20th-scale NEWRITE simulators to help them design the proposed facility.
$14 million in funding from National Science Foundation
Project Leaders at Iowa State
Principal Investigator: Partha Sarkar, professor of aerospace engineering
Co-principal Investigators: Alice Alipour, associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering, and Anupam Sharma, professor of aerospace engineering
PR OJECT NUMBER: 2330150
A WINNING F RMULA FOR A SPORTS ANALYTICS STARTUP
Henry Shires, senior in computer engineering, is bringing major-league baseball analytics to your local little league diamond.
He co-founded Casmium to help youth baseball coaches collect and analyze player performance data – quickly, easily and affordably.
Iowa State’s Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship has helped Shires take Casmium from idea to startup launch.
Shires and his co-founders started by competing in Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship business pitch-offs, and then they joined CYstarters, an 11-week summer startup accelerator program.
“CYstarters was what we needed to transform our pure engineering thinking into entrepreneurialplus-engineering thinking,” says Shires.
Now Casmium offers an app to collect play-by-play data and a dashboard to visualize pitching and hitting percentages, hit spray c harts and more. High-school teams are testing and offering feedback for future versions – getting Casmium ready to swing for the fences.
#12 undergraduate entrepreneurship program by The Princeton Review
Entrepreneurial University of the Year for the Americas Award
from the Accreditation Council for Entrepreneurial and Engaged Universities
Innovation & Economic Prosperity Economic Engagements Connections Award
From the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities
Among top 100 universities worldwide for granted patents
AWARDS and APPOINTMENTS
Eight NSF CAREER Awards in 2024
Industrial and manufacturing systems engineering
Project: Novel Parallelization Frameworks for Large-Scale Network Optimization with Combinatorial Requirements: Solution Methods and Applications
Mec hanical engineering
Project: Unveiling the Structure and Stability of Prenucleation Clusters and their Roles in Crystallization Pathway and Final Crystal Structure
Mec hanical engineering
Project: Graded and Reliable Aerosol Deposition for Electronics (GRADE): Understanding Multi-Material Aerosol Jet Printing with In-Line Mixing
Electrical and computer engineering
Project: Towards 3D Omnidirectional and
Aerospace engineering
Project: Cyberinfrastructure for Printable
Electrical and computer engineering
Project: Advances to the EMT Modeling
Effcient Wireless Power Transfer with Multifunctional Microstructural Materials and Simulation of Restoration Processes
Controlled 2D Near-Filed Coil Array for Future Grids
DANIAL DAVARNIA
CHENG HUANG
JOHN LEE
AZADEH SHEIDAEI
ETHAN SECOR
HUGO VILLEGAS PICO
FOR MORE INFORMATION: go.iastate.edu/B7PLDR
W. Samuel Easterling has been re appointed as the James L. and Katherine S. Melsa Dean of Engineering.
Valery Levitas, a Distinguished Professor in Engineering and the Murray Harpole Chair in Engineering, was elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts’ Technical and Environmental Sciences division in recognition of his work studying materials subjected to severe plastic deformations under high pressures.
Agricultural and biosystems engineering
Project: Foundational Interaction Researc h for Manipulating Drones
SID PATHAK
Materials science and engineering
Wayne Chen joined Iowa State as the Vance and Arlene Coffman Endowed Chair of Aerospace Engineering.
Project: Towards a Fundamental Understanding of Interface Strain-Driven Pseudomorphic Phase Transformations in Multilayered Nanocomposites
Robert C. Brown, Distinguished Professor in Engineering, Gary and Donna Hoover Chair in Mechanical Engineering and co-director of Iowa State’s Bioeconomy Institute, was elected Fellow of National Academy of Inventors for inventions in the thermochemical conversion of biomass to biofuels and biochemicals.
Jean-Philippe Tessonnier associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and Richard C. Seagrave Professor, was named Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors for inventions in biomass use, catalyst design, electrosynthesis, advanced manufacturing and performance materials.
JOSHUA PESCHEL
College of Engineering
The 80,000-square-foot Therkildsen Industrial Engineering building opens for classes in the fall of 2025.
The building is named in honor of Iowa State graduates C.G. “Turk” and Joyce A. McEwen Therkildsen, who made a $42 million lead gift, the largest for an academic building in Iowa State University history.