joy the of research

JOYTHE OF RESEARCHUNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING 2009 ANNUAL REPORT

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING 2009 ANNUAL REPORT

Open Sesame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Wayward Pharmaceuticals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Bullish on Biofuel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Down Tornado Alley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Let the Info Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

News Around the Quad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

College Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Editing & Writing: Charles Creekmore

Design & Art Direction: Matt Jasiorkowski, UMass Creative Services

Primary Photography: John Solem

Contents

Nothing at UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering (COE) does more to

unlock the imgaination than the new facility the Department of Electrical

and Computer Engineering (ECE) has created in Marcus Hall Room 5. Better

known as M5, the facility encompasses 13 rooms chockablock with circuits,

chips, voltmeters, oscilloscopes, audio/video equipment, microcontrollers,

and other equipment essential for research and innovation in electrical and

computer engineering. The facility is the brainchild of ECE’s department head,

Professor Christopher Hollot, and his colleague, Professor Baird Soules. In

essence, it says “Open Sesame!” to creativity.

Open Sesame!

THE JOY OF RESEARCH COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING 2

And as if that weren’t exciting enough, a gift of $50,000 from two friends of COE will now bring M5 double divi-dends over a five-year period. The gift comes from COE Electrical Engineering alumnus Roberto Padovani ’83G, ’85PhD, who is executive vice president and chief technolo-gy officer at Qualcomm Inc., and his wife, Colleen Padovani ’75AS, ’82. Qualcomm is matching the Padovanis’ gift dollar for dollar, resulting in a collective $100,000 to buy equip-ment for M5 and pay student mentors to work there.

M5 offers ECE students a wide array of benefits: free access to electronic components and specialized test equipment, a design-oriented reference library, a “junk room” with old electronics for students to use for parts or reverse-engineering, an instructional lab dedicated to electron-ics hardware and computing, and an audio engineering workstation. It’s a place to call home during the 50 hours a week it’s open and staffed by undergraduates, and a place where, as one student says, ECE majors can go “do their Rube Goldberg thing.”

Soules explains that “M5 gives our students far greater hands-on access to the hardware they’re learning about in class than they had in the past. Our corporate friends tell us they want their engineers to be well-rounded, with engi-neering theory as well as the hands-on skills to apply that theory. M5 is an ideal setting for developing those skills.”

Hollot agrees. “The desire to tinker is a terrible thing to waste,” he grins. “Traditionally, the urge to take stuff apart and figure out how it works has been the hallmark of engineers-to-be. The miniaturization of electronics in mod-ern commercial products has made Open-Sesame activity inacessible. M5 aims to lower these barriers.”

It certainly has for freshman Josh Lowe. “Last week,” he says, “I found an amplifier for an iPod and decided to recre-ate it by rewiring the iPod’s connector cable. I came down here to M5, rewired the amplifier, and got it to play through some speakers. In the process I took apart a speaker to see how it works. Later I’ll branch off that and apply it to some-thing else. Everything down here is a work in progress.”

Lowe first came to M5 for Soules’ freshman course in Electronics and Computing Laboratory, which takes stu-dents from the most elementary circuits through digital circuits, then introduces them to Arduino, an open-source microcontroller board around which they can do computer programming. Lowe has now been hired as the course’s class assistant and one of M5’s student staffers.

M5 has inspired Lowe to combine surplus parts he found lying around the facility to build a robotic claw. “I could press a button and open or close the hand,” he says. “I was so into it that I was coming down here to fool around with it whenever I didn’t have class.”

Freshman Dan Bercht, another class assistant and M5 student staffer, has worked on M5 projects too. He used a

microcontroller to sense distances between a sensor and nearby objects and send that data to another program that creates a virtual representation of the microcontroller’s physical surroundings.

“It’s kind of like rendering a 3-D image of a real-life ob-ject,” Bercht says. “What can you do with that? Not much. You just do it to see how it works. That’s a big part of the draw here, coming down to M5 to find out how something works.”

Bercht points out that M5 also has its social component. “People are not just working on projects,” he says. “They’re also doing homework or studying or just hanging out. So we’re really getting to know each other in ways we couldn’t before, because we didn’t have a place to call home. It’s a great place for brainstorming.”

Starting in Fall 2009, ECE students will be trying their hand at teaching their peers in “M5exco,” or the M5 Experimental College. Non-credit courses such as Audio Recording with Logic Studio and Pure Data Multimedia Programming will be offered at no charge to allow students to expand their horizons.

By all indications the Padovani M5 gift will help turn all the brainstorming going on at the facility into a perfect storm of creativity, research, and innovation.

2009 ANNUAL REPORT3

Part of that research is funded with $150,000 from the Water Research Founda-tion and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. Reckhow is study-ing the water supplies of 15 public utilities to see whether existing water-purification systems are capable of filtering out drugs. He is also determining the concentrations of these medicines in drinking water.

A recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey found low levels of 130 man-made chemicals in streams and waterbeds. After treatment, about a third of the chemicals remained in processed drinking water. The most preva-lent of them were pharmaceuticals and the compounds formed when these drugs interact with one another and with naturally occurring chemicals.

“I think this is something important for us to look at and for scientists to research,” says Reckhow, “to make sure the problem isn’t serious.”

The loan of a $300,000 AquaAnalysis ma-chine from the Waters Corporation is mak-

ing Reckhow’s work a lot faster and easier. It allows him and his team to analyze trace amounts of chemicals in minutes as opposed to the eight hours such tests took in the past.

The CEE researchers will also look for new ways to treat water and remove these drugs. While local treatment plants scrub water for germs, they aren’t equipped or required to filter out trace pharmaceuticals.

Last spring the Associated Press published a series of articles on a danger COE researchers have long been studying: the “vast array of pharmaceuticals—including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers, and sex hormones—found in the drinking water of at least 41 million Americans.” Over the past few decades, millions of tiny doses of prescription medications have been consumed, excreted, and flushed down toilets to eventually end up in drinking-water supplies across the U.S. The AP investigation found pharmaceuticals in the water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas.

That wasn’t news to Professor David Reckhow of our Civil and Environmental Engineering Department (CEE). He leads a team studying the drinking-water supplies in areas throughout the Northeast to deter-mine whether they contain unsafe levels of pharmaceuticals.

“The amounts are small but, during a lifetime of exposure, people are coming into contact with hundreds of pharmaceuticals,” Reckhow says. “It’s important that we try to under-stand the long-term effect on people, as well as what happens when these compounds interact with the chemicals used in water treatment.”

Wayward Pharmaceuticals

Any researcher asked to write a cover story for Scientific American has got to be hot—and George Huber is hot. The John and Elizabeth Armstrong Professional Development Professor in UMass Amherst’s Department of Chemical Engineering (ChE), Huber co-wrote “Grassoline at the Pump,” the magazine’s July 2009 cover story.

“By now,” the article noted, “it ought to be clear that the U.S. must get off oil. We can no longer afford the dangers that our dependence on petroleum poses for our national security, our economic security, or our environmental secu-rity. Yet civilization is not about to stop moving, and so we must invent a new way to power the world’s transportation fleet. Cellulosic biofuels—liquid fuels made from inedible parts of plants—offer the most environmentally attractive and technologically feasible near-term alternative to oil.”

Huber and co-author Bruce E. Dale went on to point out that available farmland for such edible crops as corn, soybeans, and sugarcane can at best produce only about 10 percent of first-generation biofuels needed by developed countries. But second-generation biofuels—colloquially called “grassoline”—can be made from dozens of cellulosic materials, including wood residues such as sawdust and construction debris, agricultural residues such as cornstalks and wheat straw, and fast-growing “energy crops” such as grasses and woody materials produced specifically as gras-soline feedstocks. According to a study by the U.S. Depart-

Bullish on Biofuel

ment of Agriculture and the Department of Energy, the country can produce at least 1.3 billion dry tons of cellulosic biomass every year without decreasing the amount of bio-mass available for food, animal feed, or exports. This much biomass could produce half the current annual consumption of gasoline and diesel in the U.S.

“The Scientific American article,” says Huber, “shows the critical importance of chemical engineering in alleviating our dependence on petroleum oil. Chemical engineering evolved around converting petroleum resources into a range of fuels and chemicals. We’re now using chemical engineer-ing to convert renewable resources into a range of fuels and chemicals.”

The article was one of several coups for Huber this year. Among the others: He and his research team received nearly $4 million in funding from the Department of De-fense, and Huber took part in “The Road to the New Energy Economy,” a June 18 Congressional briefing sponsored by Discover Magazine, the National Science Foundation, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

2009 ANNUAL REPORT5

Even a seeming break like spotting a twister can have its downside. “On one hand,” Venkatesh says, “it’s good for our research if we see a tornado. On the other hand, I was at Greensburg, Kansas, a year after it was wrecked by the EF-5 storm. While we were there a severe-storm watch was on, and you could see the concern on the faces of the local folks. It was natural for us to hope we didn’t see anything that day.”

This summer Venkatesh was one of a team of four from the Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory (MIRSL) that played a critical role in the largest attempt in history to study the origin, structure, and evolution of tornadoes. Before setting off for the Midwest, Profes-sor Stephen Frasier, director of MIRSL, said that this year’s research would be different for the team “in that we’re part of a huge ex-periment that’s going to involve 50 different scientists all traveling in a herd following the storms.” Frasier led a research team com-

posed of research engineer Pei-Sang Tsai and graduate students Venkatesh and Krzysztof Orzel. They operated two mobile Doppler radars: a mobile W-band and a mobile, pola-rimetric, X-band.

The project, the Verification of Rotation in Tornadoes EXperiment 2 (VORTEX2), in-volved more than 40 chase vehicles, includ-ing 10 mobile radars. VORTEX2 was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminis-tration (NOAA), and included scientists from NOAA, 10 universities, and three nonprofit organizations. The researchers sampled wind, temperature, and moisture environ-ments within tornado-spawning storms in greater detail than ever before, while chasing some of the super-cell thunderstorms that

often form over a more-than-900-mile-wide swath of the central Great Plains.

MIRSL primarily seeks to provide a bet-ter understanding of “the dynamics and kinematics of severe convective storms and the tornadoes they sometimes spawn.” The MIRSL team used the truck-mounted Dop-pler radars they’ve developed to “see” inside the violent storms at ground level. They are among the most precise radars ever used for tornado detection and are far more accurate than units mounted on high towers or satel-lites. But the art of deploying these radars, as Orzel quips, is being “in the right place at the wrong time.”

Down Tornado AlleyECE graduate student Vijay Venkatesh has been down Tornado Alley and knows that it’s not an easy ride. Tornado chasing means spending 15 hours a day tracking storm cells, gobbling fast food in truck cabs because there’s no time to stop at local diners, and checking into motels at 2 or 3 a.m. to grab a few hours of sleep.


Let the Info Flow!“What we got here,” Strother Martin famously said in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “is failure to communicate.” Assistant Professor Jenna Marquard of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) is exploring ways to apply inexpensive health-information technology to link patients much more directly into the healthcare system, improve their treatment, empower them to take charge of their health—and, to the greatest extent possible, eliminate failures to communicate in healthcare.

Marquard’s methodology is based on health informatics, the electronic applications at the intersection of information science, computer science, and healthcare. Health informat-ics combine resources, devices, and methods to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine.

“Most informatics applications,” Marquard explains, “are very high-cost and not integrated across institutions. Each hospital tends to develop its own informatics system specif-ic to its needs and not transferable to other hospitals. That’s a very high-cost approach to developing health information technology.”

Enter a new, free application called Microsoft HealthVault. It lets patients electronically enter their own health information into their own medical files using devices such as electronic blood-pressure monitors that link directly into the system. It then retrieves medical feedback from healthcare providers to help patients make smart, informed health decisions.

Marquard wants to see healthcare providers “create an information bridge between this kind of free application and their clinical health records.” In one case she is working

with Kavita Radhakrishnan, a nursing doctoral student and Hluchyj Fellow who is a member of Marquard’s interdisci-plinary research team, to develop an informatics system to help 30 post-bariatric-surgery patients from Baystate Health in Springfield, Mass., manage their diet and exercise regimens and get direct feedback from nurses and doc-tors. This gives healthcare providers objective data on how patients are doing while giving patients direct email access to their providers, positive feedback, and a feeling that somebody is watching over them.

As an essential part of her work Marquard is seeing whether healthcare providers and institutions are willing to learn the subtleties of the new technology, modify their workflow procedures to integrate all of this new informa-tion, and make appropriate responses to help patients. “The hope,” she says, “is that when you actually put these tools in place, patients dealing with such problems as high blood pressure or post-bariatric surgery will develop a continuous awareness of their self-care routine and make regular posi-tive changes. It empowers them to see the effects of their behavior on their health.”

2009 ANNUAL REPORT7

Tang HonoredEmeritus Professor Ting-Wei Tang received the Distinguished Faculty Award from UMass Amherst during an awards ceremony held April 16, 2009, at the State House in Boston. Professor Tang recently completed a remarkable 38-year career at ECE. An internationally recognized expert in the numerical modeling of semiconductor devices, Tang was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 1999 for contribu-tions to the hydrodynamic transport modeling of semiconductor devices.

Rothstein Wins Metzner AwardMIE faculty member Jonathan Rothstein is the first recipient of the newly created Arthur B. Metzner Early Career Award, presented by the 1,700-member Society of Rheology, an affiliate society of the American Institute of Physics. Rheology is the science of the deformation and flow of matter. The award recognizes a young member who “has distinguished him/herself in rheological research, rheological practice, or service to rheology,” and consists of a medal and a $7,500 honorarium.

Diversity Outreaches During the 2008-09 academic year the Diversity Programs Office expanded its tutoring program to service 175 engineering students, hosted more than 250 female students for its annual Women in Engineering Program Career Day, fed more than 250 hungry engineering students during monthly “First Friday” socials, and sent 25 students to national conferences of the Society of Women Engineers, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and National Society of Black Engineers.

News Around the Quad



QD Tech Wins Innovation ChallengeQD Tech won the $35,000 grand prize in UMass Amherst’s Innovation Challenge Final Business Plan Competition. The winning team plans to produce quantum-dot based materials that will increase solar-cell power output by adding a quantum-dot active layer for greater efficiency while keeping production costs near current levels. Among others, the team consists of MBA student Mike Deschamps, Chemistry doctoral student Kevin Early, and ChE doctoral student Tracy Heckler Panzarella. The $25,000 second-place prize went to Bug Power, a biotech company planning to produce a strain of bacteria that can clean up waste, eliminate odor, and generate electricity in portable toilets.

Chancellor’s CitationCheryl Brooks, director of Career Planning and Student Development at the College of Engineering, was honored this May with a Chancellor’s Citation. COE Dean Mike Malone commended Brooks for working “very successfully to build strong ties with the Campus Career Network, the college’s four academic de-partments, engineering alumni, prospective employers, faculty, and students.” Malone also praised Brooks for her work in the Junior Year Writing Program teaching engineering students the basics of résumé-writing, and for presenting required departmental seminars on job- and internship-hunting.

Designs for LifeOn May 1, the 19th annual ECE Senior Design Project Day gave visitors to the College of Engineering a chance to see a variety of potentially life-saving devices demonstrated by talented ECE seniors. Among the projects: devices to help find and rescue firefighters in distress, allow teleconferencing between ambulances and emergency-room doctors, and enable cars to communicate automatically with one another to avoid collisions.

9 2009 ANNUAL REPORT

Su Wins Goldwater ScholarshipChemical Engineering major Gregory Su, a Commonwealth College junior, is one of just 278 students nationwide to win a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship for the 2009-10 academic year. Su has recently been researching the adhesion effects of nanoparticles on polymer interfaces, work that could lead to the development of stronger, more functionally advanced materials. Goldwater Scholars are selected on the basis of academic merit and a declared intention to pursue careers in science, mathematics, or engineering. The scholarship covers the costs of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to $7,500 a year.

Labbe Wins DoD FellowshipChemical Engineering PhD student Nicole Labbe was selected for a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship to pursue her research in modeling hypergolic rocket fuels. The three-year fellowship—$30,500 the first year, $31,000 the second, and $31,500 the third—is the Department of Defense’s premier recognition of outstanding graduate students. Selection is highly competitive and is based on the candidate’s academic record, recommendations, personal application statements, and research relevance to national defense needs. Hypergolic fuels react on contact rather than having to be ignited and are used in spacecraft thrusters.

Brack Receives Distinguished Achievement AwardRobert Barker Brack, who earned his BS in Civil Engineering from the college in 1960, was one of three recipients of UMass Amherst Distinguished Achieve-ment Awards at the undergraduate commencement on May 23. Brack is a business owner, mentor, and philanthropist who long oversaw Barker Steel, a fourth-generation family business where he currently serves as chairman of the board. Distinguished Achievement Awards honor individuals from outside the immediate campus community who have made significant contributions in a given profession, industry, or creative domain.


Pishro-Nik, Polizzi Receive NSF Grants The National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program has awarded ECE faculty members Hossein Pishro-Nik and Eric Polizzi $400,000 grants, the 23rd and 24th such honors given to College of Engineering professors. Pishro-Nik’s award will fund the creation of the theo-retical and mathematical frame-work for an electronic anti-crash system for cars. Polizzi’s will help fund the creation of a new suite of computer simulation methods to tackle the challenges of ever-more-miniaturized nano-devices.

Precision Slip Wins Executive Summary CompetitionPrecision Slip, a business headed by MIE graduate student Robert Daniello, has won the UMass Amherst Entrepreneurship Initiative’s fifth Executive Summary Competition. Precision Slip plans to manufacture a drag-reducing marine coating capable of slashing a typical merchant ship’s fuel consump-tion by at least 40 percent. The company’s faculty advisor is MIE Professor Jonathan Rothstein.

Schmidt Wins Teetor AwardThe 90,000-member Society of Automotive Engineers has named MIE Professor David Schmidt the 2009 recipient of the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award for exceptional younger engineering educators. Last year’s Teetor Award went to another MIE faculty member, Robert Hyers.


Breña Named Fellow of American Concrete Institute CEE Associate Professor Sergio Breña has been named as a Fellow of the American Concrete Institute for his “outstanding contributions to the production or use of concrete materials, products, and struc-tures in the areas of education, research, development, design, construction, or management.” Breña has more than ten years’ experience in the laboratory and field testing of structures and structural systems, and more than six years of structural design experience in such areas as tunnel liners and the rehabilita-tion of existing buildings to improve earthquake performance.

2009 ANNUAL REPORT11

21st-Century LeadersThree College of Engineering students are among the 13 seniors presented with 21st-Century Leader Awards during UMass Amherst’s 139th undergraduate commencement on May 23: Laurene Dykiel, a Chemical Engineering major; Robert House, a Civil Engineering major; and Ivan A. Bercovich, an Electrical Engineering and Mathematics major. The awards recognize academically accomplished students who have contributed to the university through exceptional achievement or have enhanced the reputation of the campus.

Krishna Named IEEE FellowECE Professor C. Mani Krishna has been elevated to the honorary rank of Fellow in the IEEE “for contributions to the design and evaluation of real-time systems.” The nonprofit IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology.

Lajoie Wins International Poster CompetitionJason Lajoie, a senior Chemical Engineering major and Engineering Business Management minor, won first prize in the poster competi-tion run by the International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineering and Life Sciences during its annual meeting in Boca Raton, Florida. Lajoie’s poster described protein-engineering research on a new cystic fibrosis treatment conducted for ChE Professor Lianhong Sun by Lajoie and others over the past two years. Lajoie received a plaque and a $500 prize for his presentation.

Big Year for PanzarellaTracy Heckler Panzarella, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Chemical Engineering, was a member of the QD Tech team that recently won the $35,000 grand prize at the UMass Amherst Innovation Challenge Final Business Plan Competition for a venture to produce quantum-dot materials designed to improve solar cells. Panzarella is also one of eight UMass Amherst gradu-ate students chosen to receive a $10,000 Eugene M. Isenberg Award for the 2009-10 academic year and is a past recipient of a prestigious $30,000 Clare Boothe Luce Fellowship.


Federal 58%

State & Local 18%

Industry 14%

Other 10%

TOTAL COLLEGE REVENUE SOURCES FY09 ($42.6m)

FUNDING SOURCES ($22.9m)RESEARCH EXPENDITURES FY09

Faculty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Undergraduate Enrollment . . . . . . . . . . 1334

Graduate Enrollment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350

B.S. Degrees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

M.S. Degrees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Ph.D. Degrees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

FY09 Research Expenditures by Department

FY09 College Numbers

TOTAL COLLEGE EXPENDITURES FY09 (42.6M)

CHE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,490,399

CEE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4,850,228

ECE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9,302,610

MIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5,012,747

DEAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237,180

Federal/State/Local Grants 41%

State/GOF/RTF 37%

Industry/Private/Other Grants 13%

Fee/Cont. Ed./Other 5%

Gifts 4%

Salaries/Fringe 56%

Student Support 16%

Overhead 11%

Admin/Tvl/Postage 5%

Equipment/Leases 4%

Supplies/Maintenance 4%

Scholarships/Fellowships 2.5%

Information Technology 1.5%

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College of EngineeringUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst130 Natural Resources RoadAmherst, MA 01003Phone 413.545.0300

www.ecs.umass.edu

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