PointsUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst Spring/Summer 2006

College of Engineering

Engineers Without Borders Chapter Goes to Kenya

The campus chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-UMass Amherst) is working in western Kenya on a vital engineering project to provide a reliable, healthy water supply for a village of 1,000 sub-sistence farmers. In every way, the Kenyan project lives up to the motto of Engineers Without Borders-USA, the parent organization of our local chapter: “Building a better world, one community at a time.”

EWB-UMass Amherst is a group of engineering and non-engineering students, both graduate and under-graduate, whose mission is to help disadvantaged communities improve their quality of life by developing environmentally friendly and eco-nomically sustainable engineering projects.

The project will provide a reliable source of potable water for the

community of Namawanga in the Western Province of Kenya. This community currently relies on water located more than two miles from the village. For now, villagers must fetch their water on foot from a stream that’s often contaminated with animal and human waste and runs dry during part of the year. The EWB-UMass Amherst project will impact the village by creating a reli-able water source near Namawanga

that reduces the villagers’ chances of contracting wa-terborne diseases. The new water source will also allow the residents more time to look for food, participate in income-generating activi-ties, and attend school.

“It’s powerful to think that our student chapter will help provide clean drink-

ing water to a village in Kenya, a country currently experiencing its worst drought in 20 years,” said se-nior mechanical engineering student Chris Arsenault.

The assessment trip in March of 2006 was the first step in giving Namawanga an uncontaminated self-sufficient water supply. The implementation follow-up trip will take place in early 2007, staffed by as many as 10 members of EWB-

UMass. The goals of this trip will be to put into effect a well-designed engineering plan, created from the findings of the first trip.

“Water is one of humanity’s most ba-sic needs,” said senior civil engineer-ing student Tameron Josbeck. “This project represents my belief that everyone in the world has an inher-ent right to clean water.”

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CASA Launches Groundbreaking Weather Monitoring System

On March 9th in Chickasha, Okla-homa, the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) unveiled the first end-to-end test site for a revolutionary new radar net-work that promises to transform the way human beings monitor weather and track storms.

Called a DCAS (Distributed Collab-orative Adaptive Sensing) radar net-work, the four-radar system located in and around Chickasha can beam into a critical blind spot – the lowest mile and a half of the atmosphere that conventional NEXRAD radar

systems cannot monitor — thus sensing the crucial area where storms actually form.

DCAS technology is the brainchild of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded CASA, a partnership among 19 different institutions, including four universities: UMass Amherst, the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, the University of Oklahoma, and Colorado State Uni-versity. Counting all its academic, industrial, and government partners, CASA now represents more than $40 million in funding.

“This system-level test bed repre-sents a very significant milestone toward realizing CASA’s vision of revolutionizing the human response to weather hazards by creating DCAS networks that sample the atmosphere where and when the end-user needs are greatest,” says David McLaughlin, CASA director and a faculty member in the UMass Amherst Electrical and Computer

Engineering Department. “It’s taken an extraordinary effort by our stu-dents, faculty, staff, and practitio-ners from across CASA’s extended partnership.”

such as planes, trains, and cars. The work will use FEA to create virtual skeletal models that will make it eas-ier, faster, more accurate, and more cost-effective for scientists to study a myriad of issues in comparative and medical biology including the study of bat skulls.

Each year some 300 students, teach-ers, and guidance counselors from high schools representing more than 130 towns and cities throughout Massachusetts converge on the Col-lege of Engineering for the Women in Engineering and Multicultural Engineering Program Career Days.

Neil Forbes, chemical engineering, heads a team of researchers that re-cently received a two-year, $330,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health for a new approach to making chemotherapy more tai-lored to each patient, better targeted to specific cancer cells, and more ef-fective in general.

New research at the College of Engi-neering will explore how the gov-

Highlights

The NSF has awarded Jonathan Rothstein, mechanical and industrial engineering, a five-year, $400,000 grant as part of the Fac-ulty Early Career De-velopment (CAREER) Program. CAREER is the NSF’s most pres-tigious program for new faculty members and is geared toward supporting the academic leaders of the future.

Donald DeGroot, civil and environ-mental engineering, is the princi-pal investigator for a collaborative project that received nearly $2.4 million from the NSF to develop worldwide protocols for identify-ing and studying offshore geo-

hazards, including earthquakes that can trig-ger tsunamis. In addition to helping engineers,

geologists, and geophysicists under-stand the nature of geohazards and identify where they might occur, pro-tocols established by the project will also help governments and regula-tory agencies make more informed decisions about shoreline develop-ment with populations located in harm’s way.

The NSF has awarded principal in-vestigator Michael F. Malone, dean of the College of Engineering, and co-principal investigator Kathleen

Rubin, assistant dean for college outreach, a three-year, $298,000 grant to create a Research Experi-

ence for Undergraduates program that will support 12 students each summer for nine weeks of research. Through complementary fund raising, the College expects to support at least 20 students in the program each summer.

The Center for Advanced Sensor and Communication Antennas and the Antennas and Propagation Laboratory recently showcased antenna

R&D at the Gunness Student Cen-ter, a high-level forum attended by more than 70 scientists from industry, academia, and the mili-tary.

Susan Roberts, chemical engineer-ing, and other researchers recently received a $428,000 grant from the NSF to start a new flow cytometry facility on campus.

Elizabeth Dumont, biology, and Ian Grosse, mechanical and indus-trial engineering, have received a $333,000 grant from the NSF to

do groundbreaking research using Finite Element Analysis (FEA), a computer-based engineering method typically utilized for predicting the behavior of manufactured systems

Massachusetts. For example, Mass-Safe recently determined that the number of severe crashes with either fatalities and/or incapacitating inju-ries decreased six percent between 2003 and 2004.

James Douglas, chemical engineer-ing, was chosen to receive the 2006 ASEE/CACHE Award for Excel-lence in Computing in Chemi-cal Engineering Education. This award, sponsored by the non-profit CACHE Corporation, is presented for significant contributions in the development of computer aids for chemical engineering education.

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ernment can best allocate its future R&D funding in the most cost-ef-fective way while choosing among various alternative energies to counteract the negative effects of climate change. The U.S. Depart-ment of Energy has awarded a two-year, $347,000 grant for this project to a team led by principal investi-gator Erin Baker, mechanical and industrial engineering, and co-princi-

pal investigator Jeffrey Keisler of the UMass Boston College of Manage-ment. Phillip Westmoreland, chemical engineering, is one of a team of researchers awarded the David A. Shirley Award “for the surprising and far-reaching discovery of enols in flames.” The award recognizes the outstanding achievement of the past year at the Advanced Light Source

of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Westmoreland and the rest of the team do research.

The Massachusetts Traf-fic Safety Research Pro-gram (MassSAFE), part of the UMass Transpor-tation Center, performs numerous studies and surveys of traffic safety in