Student Notes

• U-M Human Powered Submarine Team - 2006 Champions
• Student Team Second at RASC-AL Competition
• MRacing Takes Nine Top Spots in Worldwide Competition
• Major Honor for Glenda Pettway
• U-M Team Wins Grand Prize at Entrepreneurial Challenge
• AOSS Happy Greenland Campers Explore Land of the Midnight Sun
• Multiple Awards for Theta Tau
• CoE Expands Diversity with AUC-Dual Degree in Engineering

U-M Human Powered Submarine Team - 2006 Champions

The University of Michigan Human Powered Submarine (HPS) team turned in a championship performance at the 9th International Submarine Races, held June 25 - 30 in Escondido, CA. The HPS 2006 champions bested 12 engineering teams from across the United States, Canada and the Netherlands.

Team pilot, Willie Hatfield, took the day-one lead with a speed of at 3.99 knots, which stayed at the top of the board until Texas A&M posted a speed of just over 4 knots on day three. U-M went into the final day in third place, behind Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and Texas A&M, but in the third run of the team's one-hour in-water shift, Hatfield posted a speed of 4.587 knots to take back the lead and capture the championship.

Student Team Second at RASC-AL Competition

A team of six CoE undergrads captured second place in the 2006 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts - Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition. Beginning as an ENG 450 class undertaking, the Mars Balloon project carried the team to Cape Canaveral for the annual competition, which gives student design teams an opportunity to present research revolutionary design projects to peers, representatives from NASA and industry.

The CoE team designed the Mars Balloon to study the effects of the Martian environment on balloons of various materials. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Aerospace Corporation and Cameron Balloons supported the project.

MRacing Takes Nine Top Spots in Worldwide Competition

The Michigan Engineering Formula SAE team broke out of a pack of 51 teams, taking nine awards during the 2006 Student Formula SAE competition and the 2006 FISITA (International Federation of Automotive Engineering Societies) World Cup.events held September 13 - 16 at the Ogasayama Sports Park, Aino, Fukuroi city:

• Third Place: Formula SAE of Japan (overall in the competition)
• Third Place: FISITA World Cup
• Governor of Shizuoka Prefecture Award (overall points based on evaluation scores for static inspections, acceleration, skid-pad, autocross, noise, fuel economy, safety and efforts to reduce vehicle weight)
• First Place: Spirit of Static Event Award (for overall static inspection score)
• Second Place: Presentation Award (for presentation of the business plan)
• First Place: Design Award (design inspection and presentation)
• Second Place: Autocross Award (autocross performance)
• Sixth Place: JAMA Chairman Award (overall points based on evaluation scores for design safety, passive safety, efforts to reduce vehicle weight, fuel economy, noise and sportsmanship)
• Third Place: Good Frame Design Award

Major Honor for Glenda Pettway

Glenda Pettway

Glenda Pettway, a doctoral student in the Biomedical Engineering department, has received the United Negro College Fund/Merck Graduate Science Research Dissertation Fellowship based on her academic and scientific achievements and letters of recommendation.

Pettway, one of only 12 persons nationwide who received the award, took home $25,000, which she plans to use to help finance her final year of graduate studies.

Currently, she's involved in tissue-engineering research, studying the mechanisms and effects of parathyroid hormone on bone. It's a study that she said might have application in the treatment of osteoporosis.

U-M Team Wins Grand Prize at Entrepreneurial Challenge

A U-M team consisting of students from the College of Engineering (Meghan Caddihy and Jung Woo Lee) and the U-M Ross School of Business (Oleg Swintiski and Apple Chitheton) have taken the grand prize in the Entrepreneurial Challenge at the 2006 Materials Research Society Meeting.

The competition's objective is to help develop the entrepreneurial skills that get ideas out of the lab and directly into the marketplace. Entrants in the competition formed "virtual teams" to develop a 12-slide PowerPoint presentation that presented a startup technology to a panel of venture capitalists. The team's grand prize was $3,000.

AOSS Happy Greenland Campers Explore Land of the Midnight Sun

The Happy Greenland Campers arrive at Kangerlussuaq, a settlement in west Greenland. (Photo courtesy of HGC team)

Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences (AOSS) professors Perry Samson, associate chair, and Bob Clauer, traveled to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, with 10 students who called themselves the Happy Greenland Campers.

The AOSS group took atmospheric and space weather measurements, and explored one of the world's few remaining pristine locations that lend themselves to atmospheric investigation. Among other things, they found artifacts from a U-M expedition that explored Mount Evans 80 years ago.

Multiple Awards for Theta Tau

U-M's Theta Gamma chapter of Theta Tau - the largest and oldest professional fraternity in the field of engineering - returned from the 2006 National Convention in Orlando with multiple awards, including the Schrader Award, which honors the most outstanding chapter in the country for the previous two years. The co-ed fraternity also picked up the Founder's Award for its showing as the most improved chapter over the last two years; the Best Website Award; and two Third-Place finishes - for Chapter Service and for Best Newsletter.

CoE Expands Diversity with AUC-Dual Degree in Engineering

The College of Engineering has partnered with the Atlanta University Center (AUC) to create the Dual Degree Engineering Program (DDEP), an initiative that will broaden Michigan Engineering's diversity thrust. Now, undergraduate students attending AUC schools, which include long-standing historically African American colleges and universities Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University, may transfer to the College of Engineering after they complete the requirements for a degree in math, science or computer science. In doing so, they also complete core math, science and other cognate courses to transfer to the CoE. At the conclusion of the program, students receive two degrees - one from their AUC school; one from U-M.

The first group of students - Kim Lockhart, Marcus Parrott, French Thompson III - received their U-M BSE degrees in spring 2006. A second group - Ricardo Davis, Rennel Melville, Michael Pamphlet and Iyabo Williams - will receive U-M degrees in December. Twenty-four students will be enrolled in the CoE for the 2006-07 academic year. A total of 27 students have enrolled over the three-year history of the partnership.