High School Day exposes students to life as Mizzou engineers

Chemical engineering senior Phong Nguyen demonstrated the Stokes Flow activity on High School Day.

If you want to learn what it’s like to be an engineer, and more specifically, a Mizzou engineering student, there’s no better way than seeing for yourself.

Dozens of students descended upon Lafferre Hall on March 11 for High School Day, hosted by Mizzou Engineering Student Council (MESC). The event gives high school students from around the state an up-close-and-personal look at life inside Mizzou Engineering in a way few tours can match.

A snowy Saturday in Columbia was jam-packed with events, beginning with remarks from MU Engineering Dean Elizabeth Loboa and a Q&A panel with current MU Engineering students. There were recreational activities at the MizzouRec and a scavenger hunt — geared to introduce high schoolers to the various Engineering student organizations — interspersed between hands-on activities sponsored by each College of Engineering department.

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GENI grants EECS research duo a first-place wish

Doctoral candidate Dmitrii Chemodanov and Prasad Calyam, an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, recently earned first place in the GENI Experimenter Contest, which earned them $2,000 and Chemodanov a travel grant to present their work at the GENI Engineering Conference. Photo by Jennifer Hollis.

Prasad Calyam’s work on using cloud computing resources to aid first responders has been well-recognized, and he and doctoral student Dmitrii Chemodanov recently earned another accolade for their work.

Chemodanov and Calyam, an assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, recently earned first place in the GENI Experimenter Contest, which earned them $2,000 and Chemodanov a travel grant to present their work at the GENI Engineering Conference held in March in Miami.

GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) is a virtual testbed infrastructure for networking and distributed system experiments supported by the National Science Foundation. Chemodanov and Calyam, with help from fellow EECS faculty member Kannappan Palaniappan, submitted a paper and presentation titled “Incident-supporting visual cloud computing utilizing software-defined networking,” for the competition, and used the GENI platform to conduct their research.

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Bioengineering, Medicine team up on laser dermatology breakthrough

Paul J.D. Whiteside demonstrates one of the Hunt Lab’s waveguide devices.

Have a particularly problematic tattoo you want to get rid of? Looking to get rid of troublesome body hair? Removing both requires getting laser light deep into the skin, past the protective layer of melanin.

Currently, the process requires high powered lasers to get through the top, protective layer of skin deeper into the tissue, and relies on free-space propagation of the laser beam (i.e., through the air), which can be dangerous both to the clinician and the patient. Stray laser beams can cause permanent eye damage at the power needed to affect tattoo removal.  But new technology developed by University of Missouri College of Engineering researchers in collaboration with the MU School of Medicine is primed to make the process safer and more effective.

Mizzou Engineering doctoral candidate Paul J.D. Whiteside and Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Heather K. Hunt are using a technique, invented in the Hunt Lab,  called sonoillumination to allow the laser to penetrate deeper into the skin with greater efficiency. Moreover, instead of free-space propagation, the laser transmits directly into the skin only on contact. This means lower-powered lasers can achieve the same results, providing greater health and safety benefits both for the patient and the dermatologist performing the procedure.

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CAREER award funds research on carbon nanotube interactions

Matt Maschmann, an assistant professor in MU’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, recently earned a five-year, $500,000 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his proposal, “CAREER: In-Situ Process-Structure-Property Evaluation of CNT Forests.” Photo by Jennifer Hollis.

Understanding the properties of carbon nanotubes (CNT) and carbon nanotube forests has been the main focus of Matt Maschmann’s research career. And now, they’re the focus of a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Maschmann, an assistant professor in MU’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, recently earned a five-year, $500,000 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his proposal, “CAREER: In-Situ Process-Structure-Property Evaluation of CNT Forests.” The NSF CAREER Award program is the organization’s most notable award for outstanding tenure-track faculty early in their careers.

“This is one of the rare opportunities where they want you to talk in first person and say, ‘This fits into my career, and in five years’ time…’” Maschmann said. “In this five years, I’ll accomplish this step, and this small step is very crucial to my career.”

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Robotic technology creates cost-effective method to study Missouri crops

To accurately create 3-D models of plants and collect data both on regions of crops and individual plants, the research team developed a combination approach of a mobile sensor tower (in background) and an autonomous robot vehicle equipped with three levels of sensors and an additional robotic arm. Photo courtesy of Gui DeSouza.

A two-pronged robotic system pioneered by University of Missouri researchers is changing the way scientists study crops and plant phenotyping.

Gui DeSouza, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and his Vision-Guided and Intelligent Robotics (ViGIR) Laboratory have partnered with researchers from the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources to study the effects of climate change on crops in Missouri. The effort is part of a larger study, funded by the National Science Foundation, to understand the overall effects of climate change in Missouri.

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True Dedication

Michael Seidel (father), Lindsay Bosworth (sister), Kate Eisel (sister), and Terri Seidel (mother) cut the ribbon to officially christen the Joshua M. Seidel Advanced Concrete Materials Laboratory in Lafferre Hall. Photo by Jennifer Hollis Photos by Jennifer Hollis.

Josh Seidel was an impeccable engineer and entrepreneur — a sterling example of the type of engineering leader that has called the University of Missouri College of Engineering home over the decades. The foundation set up in his memory wanted to continue that tradition in his honor, helping christen the Joshua M. Seidel Advanced Concrete Materials Laboratory in a ceremony held on Feb. 17 in Lafferre Hall.

The Josh Seidel Memorial Foundation provided the generous support, allowing for renovation of existing laboratory space and the purchase of equipment to provide the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department with a state-of-the-art experiential learning space. The foundation was formed to honor the memory of Seidel, a 2001 MU mechanical engineering alumnus who passed away in 2013. Its goal is to support students seeking to build skills in engineering, science and other technical realms, as well as encourage entrepreneurship.

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#TBT - MESSENGER mission member credits success to MU education, faculty mentor

Mechanical and aerospace engineering alumnus Dan O’Shaughnessy started off with a fellowship at NASA and now serves as the spacecraft MESSENGER’s system engineer. Photo courtesy of Dan O'Shaughnessy. Photo courtesy of Dan O’Shaughnessy

Very few people get to list “guided a spacecraft to Mercury” on their resumes. On the hierarchy of potential life experiences, it sits in the “rarest of the rare” category.

Yet, it’s prime accomplishment real estate Dan O’Shaughnessy can lay claim to. O’Shaughnessy — who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from MU in 1996 and 2000, respectively — is the mission systems engineer for the “MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging,” or MESSENGER, mission.

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