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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