Engineering Spotlight Spotlight

"I have been blessed with the opportunity to play the sport that I love, at a university where I can further my education to obtain a career that I will love."

-Michelle Schwendenmann '07
civil engineering major

Read More

     
ti_eng_facultyupdate

December 2007

“Faculty”
  • In late October, professor Henry Baird of Computer Science & Engineering gave the keynote lecture at KJPR2007, the second Korean-Japanese joint workshop on pattern recognition, organized by leading scientific societies the first steps towards an Asia-wide collaboration on pattern recognition. Professor Baird’s talk examines strategies, algorithms, and software tools for versatile document image analysis (DIA) applicable to a wide range of documents in many scripts and languages. During his trip, he also visited and gave invited lectures at the University of Korea, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and Hitachi Central Research Lab.
  • Yujie Ding, professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the most prestigious honor bestowed on researchers in the fields of optics and photonics. Ding was cited by OSA for “key contributions to the efficient generation of widely-tunable, high-power, monochromatic terahertz pulses and terahertz frequency upconversion using parametric frequency mixing.”
  • John Spletzer of the department of Computer Science & Engineering led a team of Lehigh engineers who worked with colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania and Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Laboratories, to successfully design and operate one of just six vehicles to navigate and drive itself through the entire 60 miles of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. The car – the so-called “Little Ben” -- was equipped by Spletzer and his team with video-camera “eyes” and laser range-finder systems called lidar, an acronym for light detection and ranging. The goal of the Urban Challenge is to promote the development of sophisticated, driverless, ground-combat vehicles for the U.S. military and thus meet a congressional mandate that one-third of such vehicles be unmanned by 2015.
“Students”
  • Civil engineering students Chris Trautner ’07, Tim Cullen ’07, Cliff Jones ’07 and Tanya Wulf ’07 won the Innovative Design portion of the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute (PCI) Big Beam Contest over the summer. The team, advised by Clay Naito, assistant professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, received $2,000 and other prizes. The objective of the contest is to fabricate and test a prestressed concrete beam with help from a precast concrete producer. Prestressed concrete is concrete that is compressed with heavily loaded wires or bars to reduce or eliminate cracking and tensile forces.
“Programs”
  • The “Balancing Energy and the Environment: An Exploration of Future Research Needs” workshop, sponsored by the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science and the College of Arts and Sciences, was held October 31-November 1, 2007. The workshop was a resounding success, with more than 180 faculty, students and experts from Lehigh and all over the U.S. gathering at Lehigh's Iacocca Hall to discuss policy, technology, and social issues surrounding sustainable energy and related environmental concerns. Presentations on topics ranging from the improvement of coal-based power plants to the political ramifications of Middle Eastern oil imports to the construction of more environmentally-friendly buildings and homes spurred two days of exploring research connections and interest areas among the assembled participants. Included among the speakers were several Lehigh faculty members and alumni, including Ann Murtlow ’82 and Bill Hecht ’64/‘70M (vice-chair of the Lehigh Board of Trustees). To review the session presentations, as well as the complete set of abstracts and bios of the invited speakers, visit http://www.lehigh.edu/energy2007.
  • Thompson Scientific has determined that, of the top 100 federally-funded U.S. universities whose researchers published papers in its indexed journals of materials science and engineering between 2000 and 2004, Lehigh University is ranked highest with 177. Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, Virginia Polytechnic, and the University of Delaware round out the top 5.