Awards and Accolades

UVM Wins Big at ENGCOMM—UVM’s team placed in the Top 5 and earned the award for best international team at the annual Engineering and Commerce (ENGCOMM) case competition at Concordia University in Montreal.

Gregory Rowangould has been named the new Director of the Transportation Research Center.

Jeff Marshall has been named the new Associate Dean of Research.

Bernard "Chip" Cole is the new NASA EPSCOR and Space Grant Director.

CEMS Faculty Win Local IEEE Chapter Awards Mads Almassalkhi: Outstanding Young Professional Engineer, Faculty of the Year and Hamid O at IEEE awards-1Hamid Ossareh: Innovator of the Year.

Frederic Sansoz has been named an ASME Fellow.

Matthew Scarborough is the Early Career winner for the Environmental Engineering Division of ASEE for the 2020 conference.

Rachael Oldinski won the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Advisor Award.

John Lens is one of two winners of UVM’s Outstanding New Service-Learning Faculty Awards.

Niccolo Fiorentino won the U.S. Bone and Joint Initiative Young Investigator Award.

CEE graduate student Bijay KC and mathematics graduate student Patrick Mullins have been selected as Graduate Teaching Assistants of the Year by the Graduate College.

Kristin Underwood won the RW Carbin Community Award for Conservation.

Lisa Dion – Athena Award Winner, VT Chamber of Commerce for her work inspiring women in STEM. Matt Scarborough worked with four students on their capstone project, which won second place at the InternationalWater Environment Federation Student Design Competition.

Mandar Dewoolkar has been named an ASCE Fellow.

Jianke Yang has been named an Optical Society of America Fellow.

Luis Duffaut Espinosa was elected IEEE Senior Member.

GRANTS

Cold REgion Research Laboratory awarded a $3.7 million grant to UVM over the next 3 years.

The CS department received a $1 million pilot grant with Google to study open source software team optimization.

Senator Leahy announced a $3 million grant to establish a National Center on Restorative Justice at Vermont Law School. Members of UVM CEMS, including Abigail Crocker, formed the Justice Research Initiative to engage in this important work.

BRAID FUNDING UVM has received $30,000 in BRAID funding for 2020. The BRAID initiative (Building, Recruiting, And Inclusion for Diversity), co-led by AnitaB.org and Harvey Mudd College, launched in September 2014 in partnership with 15 universities across the nation. BRAID Schools implement efforts to increase the participation of students from underrepresented groups in their undergraduate CS programs.

UVM's "Vermontilator" uses an alternative mode of helping critically ill patients breathe. Photo: Joshua E. Brown

COVID

CHAMPIONS

VERMONT TEAM INVENTS EMERGENCY VENTILATOR WORK CONTINUES SEEKING QUICK ROLL-OUT

BY JOSHUA E. BROWN

A team of scientists, engineers and doctors at the University of Vermont have developed a new design—and built a working model—for a simple, inexpensive ventilator. Affectionately called the “Vermontilator," preliminary calculations suggest the UVM Ventilator “can be produced quickly and in large numbers for a few hundred dollars per unit in parts and materials,” says University of Vermont lung expert Jason Bates who is leading the new effort.

Unlike other improvised emergency ventilator designs, the UVM team’s approach uses an alternative mode of helping critically ill patients breathe. It’s called “airway pressure release ventilation” or APRV. This APRV approach may be particularly useful for patients suffering with the new virus. “One of the main complications from COVID-19 is called acute respiratory distress syndrome, a disease where the lungs fill up with an inflammatory fluid,” explains Dr. Anne Dixon, director of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at the University of Vermont Medical Center and Larner College of Medicine. “Many of these patients end up being dependent on a ventilator for fairly prolonged periods.” The new ventilator could help these patients by inflating their lungs using long inspirations of air, which are held inflated at a constant and relatively high pressure, Bates explains. Then “at regular intervals, short expirations are allowed during which the lungs expel carbon dioxide,” he says.

Using this simpler breathing pattern allowed the team at UVM’s IMF Labs to build the prototype Vermontilator with a simple mechanism. Unlike a traditional ventilator—a very complex piece of equipment that can cost more that $25,000—the Vermont-built machine was quickly assembled out of a commercially available motor that drives a rotating disk, conventional medical hoses, and other relatively simple parts. Bates credits the extraordinary skill of UVM engineers Jake Kittell, Mike Lane, Carl Silver and Guy Kennedy as being critical to the project’s rapid progress.

Paige Hamilton helping to repair equipment at UVMCC. Photo: Courtesy of Paige Hamilton

PAIGE HAMILTON (‘20) HELPED REPAIR UVM MEDICAL CENTER’S EQUIPMENT SUPPLY

BY GEEDA SEARFOORCE

When the University of Vermont closed its doors to the student body amid the spread of COVID-19, things did not slow down for the UVM interns working in close proximity to the medical world. In April, Paige Hamilton (‘20) shed some light on the work she did at UVM Technical Services Partnership to contribute to the UVM Medical Center’s equipment supply.

“I have been doing prep work in conjunction with the hospital staff to prepare spaces and equipment for COVID-19 patients. This has included testing equipment from storage to meet patient needs in new COVID-19 care areas along with my regular work of repairing medical equipment that comes into our workshop. Lately, I

have been working with my coworkers in prepping ventilators for use and doing preventative maintenance as well as calibrating thermometers so patients can be accurately screened.

Above all else, I want to remember the outpouring of love an compassion that people have shown for one another during this time. I have seen people off ering to help their elderly community members with grocery shopping and an outpouring of kindness towards those that have less. It is my genuine hope that once we see this crisis through, that we as a community continue to come together in kindness and change the way that we treat one another.”

UVM'S CATCODERS CONNECT DATA WITH CONTEXT

BY AUDREY WILBUR

Jason Bates, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering and in the Department of Medicine, facilitated a project involving a student coder and a team working to model the spread of the COVID-19 virus in Vermont.

The CatCoders program allows students to lend their skills to real ventures and issues. Christian Skalka, the Chair of the Department of Computer Science and one of the faculty leads on CatCoders, touts the benefi ts of the program. “CatCoders connects UVM Computer Science students with stakeholders in the broader research and business community—at UVM, in Burlington, and beyond,” Skalka explained. “It provides students with paid opportunities to gain experience with real-world projects. It provides stakeholders with opportunities to engage talented students with unique and valuable skills in CS methods and applications.” In this case, the surveying of research databases to gage current COVID-19 statistics to aid in the creation of a computational model that will help predict how many tests and ventilators will be needed, particularly in Vermont.

Jason Bates, who established this particular CatCoders project, found a fi t for the job with Jayce Slesar (‘22), a data science major. Slesar shed some light on his work, as well as his enthusiasm for lending his skills to help others. “What I work on is automating the retrieval of stats based on the spread of the virus by fi ltering and mining scholarly articles produced daily and around the world. The data I pull from those then gets used in models to predict how the virus will behave in Vermont… It is an amazing opportunity to be a part of and I feel a lot better knowing the code I write goes into helping people and solving a problem rather than expand a business.” Jayce Slesar, as well as Jason Bates and his colleagues, have joined the ranks of those turning their passions towards helping their communities during the coronavirus outbreak.

WHEN CORONAVIRUS IS NOT ALONE

BY JOSHUA E. BROWN

UVM-led study presents ‘meme’ model for multiple diseases

Interacting contagious diseases like infl uenza and pneumonia follow the same complex spreading patterns as social trends. This new fi nding, published in the journal Nature Physics, could lead to better tracking and intervention when multiple diseases spread through a population at the same time. According to Hébert-Dufresne, professor of computer science at the University of Vermont, and his co-authors, Samuel Scarpino at Northeastern University, and Jean-Gabriel Young at the University of Michigan, the presence of even one more contagion in the population can dramatically shift the dynamics from simple to complex. Once this shift occurs, microscopic changes in the transmission rate trigger macroscopic jumps in the expected epidemic size—a spreading pattern that social scientists have observed in the adoption of innovative technologies, slang, and other contagious social behaviors.

The classic example of social reinforcement, according to HébertDufresne, is “the phenomenon through which ten friends telling you to go see the new Star Wars movie is diff erent from one friend telling you the same thing ten times.” Like multiple friends reinforcing a social behavior, the presence of multiple diseases makes an infection more contagious than it would be on its own. Biological diseases can reinforce each other through symptoms, as in the case of a sneezing virus that helps to spread a second infection like pneumonia. When diseases reinforce each other, they rapidly accelerate through the population, then fi zzle out as they run out of new hosts. According to the researchers’ model, the same pattern characterizes the spread of social trends, like viral videos, which are widely shared and then cease to be relevant after a critical mass of people have viewed them.

A second important fi nding is that the same complex patterns that arise for interacting diseases also arise when a biological contagion interacts with a social contagion. The paper details Dengue outbreaks in Puerto Rico where failure to accurately

(Far left) Jacob Leopold; (Left) Christian Skalka, Lisa Dion, Jackie Horton, and Radhakrishna Dasari at the annual CS Fair; (Right) Laurent HébertDufresne.

account for the interplay of several strains reduced the eff ectiveness of a vaccine. This in turn sparked an anti-vaccination movement—a social epidemic—that ultimately led to the resurgence of measles—a second biological epidemic. Hébert-Dufresne notes, “Our work shows that it is time for the disease modeling community to move beyond looking at contagions individually.” The new study may shed light on the spread of coronavirus. “When making predictions, such as for the current coronavirus outbreak occurring in a fl u season, it becomes important to know which cases have multiple infections and which patients are in the hospital with fl u—but scared because of coronavirus,” says Hébert-Dufresne. “The interactions can be biological or social in nature, but they all matter.”

PUTTING THE HUMAN IN HUMAN RESOURCES

BY GEEDA SEARFOORCE

The College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences is proud to support our staff members who are serving their community as well as the University of Vermont during this time of need. Jacob Leopold, Administrative Professional in CEMS Human Resources, is doing his part to give back to the town of Shelburne as the Chief of Shelburne Rescue. He shared his perspective about the work he’s doing. “I took over as Chief in June 2018. Shelburne is a third service (separate from Fire) municipal department comprised of forty volunteers and about ten employees. We have an average of eleven hundred 911 calls each year (we do only 911 responses). In my capacity as Chief, I report to the Selectboard and the Town Manager, and have been advising on town operations and COVID planning and continuity of operations. I also serve as the administrative head of the ambulance service and work with the offi cers to ensure safe and effi cient 911 EMS responses for the Town of Shelburne. I also serve as an Advanced EMT leading 911 responses a few times each week.

I am surrounded by the goodness of humankind every day. I’m not worried about forgetting it. That goodness is always there, it’s just getting the recognition it rightly deserves.”

WHY SCHOOL CLOSURES HELP

BY JOSHUA E. BROWN

Sadly, it’s “a very busy time” to be a mathematical epidemiologist, says Laurent Hébert-Dufresne—professor of computer science at UVM and an expert on the mathematical modeling of epidemics. He wants people to understand why it was so important, during the Covid-19 epidemic, to close schools, shut restaurants, cancel concerts and empty cruise ships. “A lot of people wonder if it’s necessary, if it’s reasonable,” he says, “and the answer is yes.” Not all diseases are like this, but the novel coronavirus appears to “live at the mesoscale,” Hébert-Dufresne says—the scale of universities, hospitals, churches and other medium-sized gatherings of people. Therefore, attacking it at this scale is a more powerful and effi cient way to stop the spread than simply relying on individuals to wash their hands and keep their distance.

Standard models assume that diseases simply move by diff usion through a pattern of random mixing. One-person-to-the-next-interactions are, of course, at a basic level, how the virus is spread. But our real lives are not a web of random contacts but are organized around social institutions. When an epidemic localizes around one of these kinds of structures, it could be that the odds of catching the virus “on the street,” Hébert-Dufresne says, would be 1 in 10,000, but in that school it might jump to 1 in 10. “So it makes sense to focus our interventions on these larger structures,” he says, at least as much as on individual behaviors, like hygiene. If an individual reduces their social contacts by 10% “we’re going to do roughly 10% better,” HD says. And with a vigorous eff ort to close enough schools and cancel large gatherings, the “math makes it clear,” he says, that, at certain moments, an epidemic “can suddenly collapse.”