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Student Updates

Three U-M Business Challenge Awards for AOSS Team


AOSS Professor and Chair Tamas Gombosi, with
Glocer, Botkin, Bell and Welling. PHOTO COURTESY
OF MICHIGAN BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The Space Weather Forecasting Technologies (SWFT) team, consisting of AOSS doctoral students Jared Bell, Alex Glocer and Dan Welling, along with MBA student Josh Botkin, swept the final round of the 23rd Annual Michigan Business Challenge to grab the Williamson Award for Outstanding Business and Engineering Team and the Outstanding Presentation Award. The SWFT team also was runner-up for the grand prize, the Pryor-Hale Award for Best Business Plan.

Six North Campus MLK Spirit Award Recipients

MLK Spirit Awards recognize those North Campus students whose leadership and service exemplify the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Six CoE students earned that distinction in 2006. Jazmin Casas - for leading a project entitled "Race: Space -- Where will our youth go?"

  • Noha Elmouelhi - for reviving the Muslim Engineering Society.
  • Erica Gaston - for mentoring students through the Minority Engineering Program Office and for exceptional leadership and community-building.
  • Jodi Liu - for her work in an HIV/AIDS alternative spring break project.
  • Fatima Makhzoum - for helping to promote Arabic culture on campus and for co-founding a coalition of many minority groups to improve community on campus.
  • Hugo Shi - for helping to create the Detroit Asian Youth Project and improving campus climate as the political action chair for the Students of Color of Rackham.

A Weekend at the Races

CoE students from the NSF Engineering Research Center for Wireless Integrated MicroSystems (ERC/WIMS) and Women in Engineering spent a weekend at the races with the folks who make the world of high-performance cars go 'round.


Driver Danica Patrick

The group, along with a contingent of highschool students, toured the Ilmor Engineering Technology Center in Plymouth, Michigan, where they talked tech with engineers and watched a dynamometer in action. The next day, Honda Performance Development (HPD) hosted a tour of the Michigan International Speedway (MIS), including a pass through the pit lane during high-speed practice. The students continued through the HPD engineering trailer, then the Fernandez Race team garage, where drivers talked about racing and its challenges for engineers and drivers.

At lunch the ERC/WIMS group met driver Danica Patrick, the fourth-place finisher in the Indy 500 and the newly crowned Bombardier IRL IndyCar Series Rookie of the Year.

Patrick turned out to be the perfect host as the group watched the MIS race, getting a better understanding of how engineering principles and dedicated teams translate metal, sportsmanship and courage into high-performance racing.

Dahan Liao Wins Prize at URSI National Radio Science Meeting

"Modeling and Simulation of Near-Earth Propagation in Presence of a Truncated Vegetation Layer," a paper coauthored by Dahan Liao and Kamal Sarabandi, is one of three prize-winning papers that received honors during the 2006 International Union of Radio Science (URSI) National Radio Science meeting. This is the second time Liao, a doctoral student in Electrical Engineering, has won one of the top three student-paper awards at this meeting. Sarabandi, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is his advisor.

Michigan Finishes Third in 2005 World Solar Challenge

What a year for the University of Michigan Solar Car Team and Momentum, their sun-powered wonder car. After a first-place finish at the 2005 North American Solar Car Challenge, the U-M team traveled to Australia for the World Solar Car Challenge and finished third in the grueling 3000-kilometer dash from Darwin to Adelaide.

The 2007 team is already putting in long hours, hoping to have their day in the sun in October 2007, when the world's best solar cars roll into the Panasonic World Solar Challenge. The 2007 event will mark 20 years since the World Challenge began.


U-M solar car Momentum

Worming Toward a Better Environment

Cultivating Community, a group of U-M students, including a contingent from the College of Engineering, developed a system that collects food scraps from a campus restaurant, feeds them to garden worms, and uses their waste to fertilize produce and herbs that they then deliver back to the restaurant.

The group intends to link the gardens and composting program to courses, research and improvements in human and environmental health.

Academic All-Big Ten Honors for CoE Students

Michigan Engineering students do more than crack books and haunt laboratories. They're into everything that a university experience can offer - including athletics.

This year, four CoE students showed they had the right stuff, taking academic all-Big Ten honors. Mary Fox, a junior in Civil Engineering, earned her recognition in field hockey. James Bloomsburgh and Paul Sarantos, both Mechanical Engineering seniors, earned their honors in football. And Chris Glinski, a senior in Industrial and Operations Engineering, got the nod for his performance in men's soccer.

ScholarPOWER Banquet Honors Student Achievements

More than 200 underrepresented minority engineering students whose academic achievements merited special recognition received excellence awards during a ceremony at the annual ScholarPOWER Banquet. Scholar- POWER, coordinated by the Minority Engineering Program Office, supports students with training for academic, personal and professional development to improve retention.

Student achievers, families and corporate representatives packed the banquet hall.
PHOTOS BY U-M PHOTO SERVICES, MARTIN VLOET

Beta Epsilon Receives Outstanding Chapter Award 2004-05

The Beta Epsilon chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, U-M's student chapter of the national electrical engineering honor society, has received an Outstanding Chapter Award for 2004-05.

Best Student Paper Award for Christine Eun

The IEEE Sensors Council has honored Christine Eun with second prize in the Best Student Paper Award contest. Eun, a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Yogesh Gianchandani, an associate professor in EECS and Mechanical Engineering, co-authored "Broadband Wireless Sensing of Radioactive Chemicals Utilizing Inherent RF Transmissions from Pulse Discharges." The paper was one of 628 submissions.

Guthaus and Roy Win 2005 CADathlon

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science doctoral candidates Jarrod Roy and Matthew Guthaus took first place, a trophy and $2,000 in the 2005 ACM SIGDA programming contest, CADathlon, a daylong programming contest that tests knowledge in the field of Computer Aided Design and Electronic Design Automation. (ACM SIGDA is the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Design Automation.)

Jarrod Roy and Matthew Guthaus

Awwad and Cheng Honored

Rita Awwad and Min-Yuan Cheng, doctoral students in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), have received Rackham International Student Fellowships for winter 2006. Awwad works with Professor Photios Ioannou and Assistant Professor Gustavo Parra-Montesinos, both from CEE.

Fajardo Receives 2005 Yanmar/SAE Scholarship


Fajardo believes in the Yanmar Diesel America Corporation
motto: "to conserve energy is to serve mankind."

Claudia Fajardo, a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering, received the 2005 Yanmar/SAE Scholarship, which is awarded annually to a student enrolled in a post-graduate engineering (or related science) program and who is pursuing a course of study or research related to the conservation of energy in transportation, agriculture and construction or power generation.