If successful, the results of this research will enable the study of a wealth of dynamic phenomena in nanometer-scale systems, thereby facilitating advances in a wide variety of fields, including molecular biology, medicine, and neurobiology. An example application is the study of the dynamics of ribonucleic acid (RNA) during the transcription process in bacterial cells. A deeper understanding of this process has important practical applications for the development of diagnostic and treatment options for diseases caused by bacterial infections such as dysentery, cholera, and tuberculosis. The project will involve undergraduate and graduate students in interdisciplinary research, ranging from the rigorous mathematics of systems and control theory to imaging and detection methods in molecular biology. Pre-university students in grades 10-12 will be engaged through nanotechnology-based science modules motivated by the project research and developed in collaboration with high school teachers.

Read more… http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2009/07/27/focus3-Five-emerging-sectors-offer-promise-with-new-technologies.html

Lutchen said the new fellowship program “honors these individuals as innovative educators in engineering and provides resources to further enhance engineering education here at Boston University in a sustainable way.”

The fellows were recommended to Lutchen by review committee comprised of members inside and outside of the College.

Wroblewski is the associate chair of the Aerospace Engineering Undergraduate Program and has been honored twice with the Mechanical Engineering Department’s Excellence in Teaching Award. His research pertains to experiments using plasma spray to develop a molten flux sensor.

Trachtenberg is a member of the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department’s Information Systems and Sciences group, and received the ECE Excellence in Teaching Award in 2003. His research focuses on security, algorithms and data synchronization, particularly in mobile devices.

Both IEEF winners plan to use their fellowships to work on practical applications that can be used to help students understand theoretical concepts.

Wroblewski will focus on a project titled “Herding CATS: Coordinate Application Threads through the ME Curriculum to Facilitate Course-to-Course Connectivity and Improve Material Retention.” By implementing specific application examples throughout the ME program, Wroblewski will attempt to increase students’ retention of significant concepts. In addition, Wroblewski plans to tackle other key academic issues, from putting engineering topics taught in the classroom in the context of the larger society, to exposing engineering students to the concept of life-long learning and new Engineering concentrations.  

Trachtenberg’s project, “Engineering Evangelism,” will introduce two methods into the engineering curriculum that integrate tangible applications for the information and skills students learn in the classroom. Trachtenberg’s first method, “Tangible Expressions,” will play on the fact that engineers react well to tangible projects, and present real-world examples that coincide with the theoretical knowledge students learn in their first year. His second method, “Novel Devices,” will extend the use of computer engineering fundamentals to show their use in commonly used devices such as smart phones and game systems. This method aims to motivate and excite students by showing them real-world applications pertaining to their learning.
 

SIAM promotes interaction among mathematicians and other scientific and technological communities that apply mathematics in their fields. It established the fellows program to recognize members who have made outstanding contributions to their disciplines and to support their advancement in academia and society. Baillieul is one of 183 Fellows named from among the more than 12,000 individual members of SIAM around the globe.

“The announcement of the first class of SIAM Fellows is an important milestone for the applied mathematics and computational science community,” said SIAM President Douglas N. Arnold. “Reflecting the diversity of the SIAM membership, these men and women come from five continents and work in academia, industry and government laboratories. Advancing the frontiers of research in branches of mathematics as distinct as number theory and partial differential equations, these professionals have applied their work to endeavors ranging from mining to medicine. Their contributions are truly outstanding.”

Baillieul joined the College of Engineering faculty in 1985 and holds professorial appointments in the Mechanical and Electrical & Computer Engineering departments. His research focuses on robotics, control of mechanical systems and mathematical system theory. He is also an IEEE fellow and has won the IEEE Third Millennium Medal for outstanding contributions to his field. In 2007, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen named Baillieul the College of Engineering’s first Distinguished Lecturer, for which Baillieul delivered a talk on “The Evolving Applications of Control Theory to Devices, Networks and Life Itself.”

Baillieul has served as editor-in-chief and on editorial boards of numerous industry journals, gaining extensive experience in editorial work and scholarly publishing. He began overseeing SIAM’s “Journal on Control and Optimization” in 2006 and will continue through 2011 to steer its transition to more online content and less print. Previously, he edited the leading journal in the same field, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

“It would be unusual for someone to do what I did, to be editor-in-chief for two very similar journals, but I did it because I am interested in learning this other system,” Baillieul said. “I am just interested in all the changes going on in scholarly publishing with the web. The whole journal is available electronically. It’s been good what’s happened, but it’s one of the tough transition this journal, and all of them, will undergo.”

In July, Baillieul will attend the SIAM annual meeting in Denver where he will be recognized for his fellowship at an awards luncheon. 
 

At the fifty-sixth annual commencement ceremony, the College recognized the three master’s of engineering, 108 master of science and 266 bachelor of science students who completed the requirements for graduation. Forty three doctor of philosophy graduates were recognized at a separate ceremony held for the first time the previous evening.

“Bittersweet,” said Donna Lavallee, summing up her son Nathan Lavallee’s reaction to graduating from the College of Engineering. “It’s a tribute to BU, he’s sad to be leaving,” she said. “He loved it.”

Although they take their initial steps into an unsteady economy, the graduates, their student speaker and guest speaker expressed confidence that they, as engineers, will be the world-changers and innovators of the future.

“It’s not really relief,” said Paolo Belfiore, as he stood near the head of a long column of red-gowned classmates waiting to proceed into their graduation. “But it’s like the ticket to a new world, a new beginning.”

Venkatesh Narayanamurti, the John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences and professor of physics at Harvard University, delivered the commencement address. He educated graduates on the illustrious history of their chosen profession and the bright prospects for its future.

“Engineering has been a driver in the advance of civilization,” said Narayanamurti, the former dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Throughout history engineering has been an agent of change …and engineering will play an increasingly central role in the 21st century.”

Their ability to solve complex problems will serve society well, Narayanamurti told the class of 2009. They will address the grand challenges of sustainability, human health, terrorism, clean water, creating better medicines and securing cyberspace. As engineers, he said the graduates will have a “life of adventure enabling the future,” and in closing, he encouraged them to innovate, quoting Alexander Graham Bell.

“‘Leave the beaten path. Dive into the woods and you are certain to see something you have never seen before.’”

Student speaker Akshay Navaladi recalled April 1, 2005, when, 8,000 miles away in New Dehli, India, he opened the acceptance letter to Boston University that changed the trajectory of his life.

“As we slogged through engineering’s rigorous curriculum, it is easy to forget the real value of the College of Engineering,” he said. “We’ve learned the ability to make real change. When we enter the real world, I’m confident we will try to implement concrete, real change.”

He ended his speech with two encouraging words to his class, borrowed from the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire. “Jai ho! – let victory prevail.”

“It feels awesome,” said graduate Rahul Ahuja. “I never thought this day would come.”

In a hooding ceremony held on Saturday, May 16, the College recognized the 43 candidates who completed their doctoral degrees.

“Your Ph.D. training goes well beyond classroom teaching, it extends to friendship, camaraderie,” said Associate Dean Selim Unlu. “Ph.D. students build strong and enduring friendships, often with strangers from diverse backgrounds. They stand here at the gates of new lives with bigger families.”

Assistant Professor Timothy Gardner addressed the graduates. On leave from the College of Engineering, he is an associate director of computational biology at Amyris, a company that uses synthetic biology to engineer microorganisms to produce renewable fuels and life-saving drugs.

Friends and families filled the Photonics Building’s 9th floor colloquium room to overflowing as Gardner imparted two key lessons: faith and action.

He told the story of his first lecture as a graduate student, when a prestigious Nobel Prize winner stood up during his talk, yelling, “This is all wrong, all wrong!”

Eventually, though, Gardner got a grant and got the genetic switch to work that he’d been speaking about when interrupted.

“The lesson is, ignore the naysayers because they really don’t know anything,” said Gardner.

As an exemplar of action, Gardner spoke about College of Engineering Associate Professor Ed Damiano, who has dedicated his research program to beating juvenile diabetes, the disease his son has.

“Ed is relentlessly optimistic,” said Gardner. “His NIH grant application was denied; they said it wouldn’t work, though he had included data specifically showing that it would.”

Instead, Damiano persevered, found other funding sources, and his diabetes control technology is now in human clinical trials.

“Ed was not the first to think of this idea. The difference between Ed and the rest of the world is that he did it. He took action to make it reality. Ideas are created through action,” said Gardner.

“Engineering is not just the foundry of the tangible, it is the foundry of the idea itself,” he said in closing. “Go forth, do the impossible and make the world a better place for us all.”

To view Venkatesh Narayanamurti’s Commencement speech, please click here.

“Disrupting the Status Quo in Electric Energy Management: A Systems Approach to a Sustainable Energy Future,” brought 168 guests from industry, venture capital and academia to the Photonics Center to hear from leaders in energy management. Lecture topics included future energy systems, building infrastructure and a panel discussion on widespread adoption of new energy management strategies.

“Sustainable energy is among the most critical problems society faces today,” said Associate Provost and Vice President for Research Andrei Ruckenstein in his opening remarks. “It may also be among our most complicated problems.”

The morning lectures and discussion focused on transforming the electric power system into a smart grid – an electricity delivery system that would incorporate technology to maximize energy and monetary savings while also increasing reliability of power delivery.

Professor Michael Caramanis, who works on combining wind-generated power with the use of electric cars, said the electric power system is the largest machine that humans have made, making it one of the most complex to overhaul.

Those responsible for modernizing the US energy grid must understand both the engineering and the economics of the finely nuanced challenge, said William Hogan, the Raymond Plank professor of global energy policy at Harvard University. To make a smart grid will require both complex technology advances and finely tuned policy changes. The smart grid must incorporate advanced sensors and automation as well as nuanced strategies for pricing electricity in real time.

“If we knew what to do today, we should do it – get out our crayons and map of the US and draw the super grid,” said Hogan. “But the uncertainty of conditions requires innovation – promoting practices not yet identified or even imagined.”

Speakers from PJM, an electricity transmission company that manages much of the eastern US, and the Boston-based energy management company EnerNOC, described their companies’ forays into smart management of energy loads. Institutions such as hospitals and universities sign up with these companies for incentive programs. The institutions get paid and then occasionally get called upon to quickly cut down electricity usage when demands are high in their region.

This type of “demand response” program by companies that stand between the utility and the consumer may become a more widespread strategy for the relatively few days that demands peak, but that utilities must be prepared for at any time.

“Most energy management these days happens by looking in the rear view mirror,” said EnerNOC President David Brewster, whose company manages 3,000 megawatts of energy at 5,000 sites. “You can create a system that’s much more efficient. We’re spending billions of dollars to build infrastructure that sits idle 90 percent of the time.”

In the US, this approach has not reached the level of individual houses, a market where the addition of some in-home automation and customer awareness of fluctuating prices could make a meaningful impact on the country’s energy use, the speakers noted.

College of Engineering professors Christos Cassandras and Tom Little spoke about energy innovations coming from their labs. Cassandras works on sensor networks, control systems and algorithms that could become powerful tools in developing smart ways to save energy. Little described his work as a member of a National Science Foundation SmartLighting Engineering Research Center, investigating the use of energy-efficient LED lights as a communication network.

“LEDs are low cost, highly controllable and adaptable lights that can be used in a wide variety of applications,” Little said. Twenty-two percent of the world’s energy use goes to lighting, he added. “There are tremendous opportunities to save energy around the world.”

College of Engineering Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen spoke about the role of engineering education in addressing the complex and highly interdisciplinary challenges in the energy field, citing flexibility and agility as the keys to training engineers for leadership roles.

“The leaders of the future have to understand that the problem is not just about technologies, not just about policies and politics, not just about sustainability,” Lutchen said, “It’s about all of those.”

The day concluded with a panel discussion in which energy industry executives, moderated by Rob Day, president of the Renewable Energy Business Network, considered widespread adoption of new electric energy management strategies.

The event was hosted by BU’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering, College of Arts and Sciences, Division of Systems Engineering, School of Management and Sensor Network Consortium.

For more information on the day’s events and to view speakers’ slide kits, visit the seminar website.
 

In 2007, Narayanamurti led Harvard’s transition from a Division of Engineering and Applied Science into the full-fledged School of Engineering. During his 10 years as leader of Harvard’s engineering arm, Narayanamurti oversaw a 60 percent increase in sponsored research, a 50 percent rise in the number of engineering faculty, a tripling in the number of graduate student applications, and greatly enhanced the visibility of engineering at Harvard.

Narayanamurti is the John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Professor of Physics at Harvard, and director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Prior to Harvard, in an academic and professional engineering career that spans five decades, Narayanamurti served as the Richard A. Auhll Professor and dean of Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, vice president of research at Sandia National Laboratories, and director of solid state electronics research at Bell Labs. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Akshay Navaladi (BME ’08) will give the student address. Graduating magna cum laude, Navaladi’s contributions to the College of Engineering include serving as president and vice president of the Biomedical Engineering Society; EK 100 student advisor; member of the University board of student conduct; member of honor societies Tau Beta Pi and Alpha Eta Mu Beta; and president and secretary of the Engineering Student Government.  A first prize winner for his research poster at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, he is the recipient the recipient of the Adam M. Miller Memorial Award for service to the Biomedical Engineering Department.

Sunday’s convocation concludes a weekend-long series of events for College of Engineering graduates and their families. New this year is a doctoral hooding ceremony on Saturday evening, replacing the hoodings that have taken place during the Sunday Commencement. For a full schedule and locations of College of Engineering activities during commencement weekend, including the hooding ceremony, baccalaureate service, and the pre-commencement reception, please click here.

First prize went to Ajay Bangla, Stephen Chao, Prakash Ishwar and Janusz Konrad for their project titled "VCon Technologies" that focuses on closing the "Security Gap" between information gathered and analyzed.

Ashish Agarwal, Matt Wool, Lonn Drucker, Thomas Little and Iain Cockburn won the Second Prize for "Route Optimization System," a company designed to limit customers impact on the environment by using technology to reduce the time wasted while stuck in traffic.

Both teams received a cash price and will be supported by BU’s New Ventures Division at the Office of Technology Development and by 20 hours of legal consulting from Foley and Lardner, LLP.

For more information, please visit the Entrepreneur Design Contest website.

For more information, please visit the DCOSS ‘08 website or read the article in the CISE publications database.