Engineering Spotlight Spotlight

"College is what you make of it. You can do anything you want, from working all day to just having fun, but an even balance is what is best in the end."

- Brian Gerard ‘07
materials science and engineering major

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ti_eng_facultyupdate

March 2008

“Faculty”

  • Samir Ghadiali, the Frank Hook Assistant Professor of bioengineering in the department of Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics, has received a 2008 CAREER Award from the NSF. His project, entitled “Mechanobiology of Microbubble Induced Cellular Injury in the Pulmonary System,” seeks to combat ventilator-induced lung injury in patients suffering from lung disease.
  • Eugenio Schuster, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics, and his collaborators have been named as finalists for the Best Paper Award from the 2008 American Control Conference. The conference is the annual meeting of the American Automatic Control Council, attracting over 1200 participants from the controls community worldwide. Lehigh Ph.D. candidates Yongsheng Ou and Chao Xu are main contributors to this work, along with Schuster and a team of research scientists from General Atomics in San Diego, CA. The paper and associated research explores the operation of a tokamak fusion reactor in a highly-efficient, steady-state mode.
  • Three Lehigh professors were interviewed for a two-hour show on the History Channel that debuted in late January. “Life After People” explores what would happen to the Earth if all human beings disappeared from the planet. Richard Sause, director of the ATLSS Center; Alan Pense, former Lehigh provost and professor emeritus of Materials Science & Engineering; and Stephen Pessiki, department chair of Civil & Environmental Engineering; were interviewed for the program.
  • Nenad Sarunac, associate director of the Energy Research Center, gave presentations recently at two international conferences devoted to emissions monitoring and to the cleaner, more efficient use of coal. At the Eighth International Conference on Emissions Monitoring (CEM 2007), which was held in Zurich, Switzerland, Sarunac opened the proceedings with a technical presentation titled “Field Experience with Mercury Monitors.” Sarunac also co-wrote two papers that were presented at the Third International Conference on Clean Coal Technologies for Our Future (CCT 2007), which was held on the Italian island of Sardinia.
“Students”

  • Through their summer 2006 internship abroad, Computer Science & Business undergraduate students Kyle Shapiro, Bryan Auslander, and Timothy Britt of the Class of 2008 helped the Budapest branch of PriceWaterhouseCoopers comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. At the time, the team was successful in streamlining the software systems used to monitor its clients’ financial systems. Through his involvement with PwC, Kyle has been offered a position with its Systems Process Assurance (SPA) department in New York City. The main focus of this department is to audit the software systems used to produce the financial documents on behalf of PwC’s corporate clientele.
“Programs”

  • In January, the NSF-funded International Materials Institute for New Functionalities in Glass at Lehigh University sponsored the US-Japan Winter School on New Functionalities in Glass. The two-week program was held at the Fukui Institute for Fundamental Chemistry at Kyoto University in Japan, and was also supported the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The program exposed interested students to the some of the world’s top researchers in this area, discussing the crucial role played by specialized forms of glass in current and emerging technologies. 15 students from the US were paired with 15 students from Japan in what was described as an intensive research and cultural exchange that promoted the future of research in this field by allowing tomorrow’s top researchers to network with each other and learn about shared scholarly interests.