Thursday, May 2, 2013
Posted by ddc under Announcements
The Department of Social Sciences is happy to invite friends and colleagues to a party that celebrates the career of Susan Rapalje Martin, who will retire at the end of May.
Our celebration will be held in the second floor of the Academic Office Building Annex from 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, May 3. Join us to congratulate Susan and mix with friends over hors d’oeuvres and beverages.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Posted by ddc under Awards and Recognition
Tess Ahlborn, associate professor of civil engineering, was awarded the 2013 Howard E. Hill award for Outstanding Faculty of the Year in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The award, which recognizes excellence and passion for teaching, was established in 1994 and is determined annually by the CEE students. Ahlborn teaches in the area of structural engineering, specifically concrete building and bridge design, and uses Dillman Hall (a reinforced concrete building) as a living classroom.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Posted by ddc under Awards and Recognition
Sarah Green, chair of the Department of Chemistry, has been named a Jefferson Science Fellow by the US Department of State. She will spend a year in Washington, DC, and in countries around the world, working with the State Department or the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on projects to integrate science and public policy.
Jefferson Science Fellows are selected not only for their excellence in science, but also for their abilities as communicators, their interest in global cultures and their concern about science policy-making.
“I congratulate Sarah for being nationally recognized as a Jefferson Science Fellow,” said Provost Max Seel. “She is eminently qualified and deserving. She has been passionately engaged in advancing science to serve society.”
The policy-making experience that the fellowship provides will benefit not only Green, but Michigan Tech as well, Seel went on to say. “We firmly believe that building strength and expertise of our faculty and students in the public policy area is of strategic importance and needs to become commensurate with our strength in engineering and science,” he said.
To read more, see Green.
by Jenn Donovan, public relations director
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Posted by ddc under Awards and Recognition
Adrienne Minerick (ChE) was elected to the American Society of Engineering Education’s Board of Directors. She will serve as the Professional Interest Council I Chair. ASEE has over 12,000 members that include deans, department heads, faculty members, students, and government and industry representatives who hail from all disciplines of engineering and engineering technology.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Posted by ddc under Awards and Recognition
Tess Ahlborn of Michigan Tech has been named Woman of the Year by the Michigan chapter of WTS, an international organization dedicated to the professional advancement of women in transportation.
Ahlborn, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, will be accepting the award and giving the keynote speech at the awards ceremony, set for March 14 in Hartland.
Also being honored is Michigan Tech’s Transportation Enterprise, which uses industry-sponsored projects as a framework for student learning. The program is receiving the Innovative Transportation Solutions Award, in part for its students’ efforts to expand transit services in the Houghton/Hancock region.
In addition, two Michigan Tech civil engineering undergraduates, Sarah Reed of De Tour Village and Ellen Nightingale of Stevensville, will be awarded scholarships.
The full story is available here:
Published in Tech Today
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Posted by ddc under Announcements, Awards and Recognition
Martha Sloan, professor and former associate chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is retiring after 43 years at Michigan Tech. A celebration in her honor will be held from 4 to 6 p.m., Monday, Dec. 17, in EERC 515, the fifth-floor social area. The University community is invited.
Sloan came to Michigan Tech in 1969, after completing her doctorate at Stanford University and spending two years with Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Palo Alto, Calif. At the time, that made her Tech’s first and only female electrical engineering faculty member.
Twenty-four years later, Sloan broke ground again when she became the first woman to be elected president of IEEE. The experience opened unusual doors, including one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: she was introduced to President Bill Clinton in the White House and played with Socks, the First Cat. “In many ways, Socks was more fun,” she recalled.
In 2012, she received Michigan Tech’s Distinguished Service Award for her efforts in the University Senate (where she served as president), her department, the College of Engineering and, overall, the University. As well, Sloan was saluted for mentoring female faculty and students and her “unflinching advocacy of women at all levels.”
She is a Fellow in IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Society of Women Engineers. Sloan is also a founding member of the IEEE Women in Engineering Affinity Group, the first student chapter in the nation; and of WISE (Women in Science and Engineering), which aims to increase the number of female faculty in the STEM disciplines at Michigan Tech.
One of her colleague’s remarked upon the “zest for life” evidenced in Sloan’s work. She will likely exhibit the same quality in her retirement: initial plans include cruising to Antarctica and then earning a master’s degree in military history.
by Marcia Goodrich, magazine editor
Published in Tech Today
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Posted by ddc under Resources and Articles
Elizabeth Hoffman, an expert in experimental and behavioral economics, will meet with several faculty and student groups at Michigan Tech, Monday and Tuesday, December 3 and 4.
Hoffman, currently professor of economics at Iowa State, will be giving four separate presentations over the two days. Her forty-plus years in academia have included stints as a university president and executive vice president and provost, and she will address different aspects of her research and experience.
At her University-wide keynote Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. in the Memorial Union Ballroom A2, she’ll address “The Evolution of Experimental and Behavioral Economics.” This event is open to the public.
“Starting in the 1950s, a small number of experimental economists challenged the economics orthodoxy of the day by studying markets in an experimental laboratory setting,” Hoffman says. “This early work helped shape our understanding of how markets work.”
Before the 1987 stock market crash, Hoffman says most economists believed that bubbles and crashes wouldn’t happen because sophisticated traders would not allow prices to deviate from intrinsic value. The 1987 crash burst that thought bubble, and more recently, behavioral economists have shown that the beliefs of unsophisticated traders can actually drive up prices, well over their intrinsic values, witness the housing bubble that burst recently.
“With my coauthor Vernon Smith [2002 Nobel Prize winner], we also looked at two-person bargaining games that feature cooperation and competition. The results revealed, among other traits, that observation leads to more fairness, equity and equality,” she says.
Hoffman will have lunch with female faculty members at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday and discuss the status of women in academia. Acknowledging that there remains underrepresentation of women in many fields, she will discuss the importance of family-friendly programs, especially as they pertain to the child-bearing years of female graduate students, postdocs and faculty. At the luncheon, she shared data about women in academia and pointed out that even though there is improvement, numbers continue to be low especially in many STEM fields. She showed data that led to many questions about the effect of having children on women in academic careers.
“While provost at Iowa State, I was able to raise the numbers of female and minority senior administrators from 20 to 60 percent,” she says. “And I was able to do so with the best people for the positions by eliminating unintended bias and ensuring that every employment pool was highly diverse.”
With the Senate Finance Committee, she will discuss “Responsibility-centered Budgeting in Higher Education.” At Iowa State, it featured decentralized budgeting with deans responsible for space and faculty benefits, including start-up costs, among other budget issues.
“Our results were dramatically positive,” she says “Even though we started it in July 2008 in the midst of the recession and lost 25 percent of our state budget, we grew our incoming student numbers by almost one quarter.” With the Senate Finance Committee at 2 p.m. Monday, she also plans to discuss faculty accountability, a subject she addressed recently in an article on the Inside Higher Ed website.
At 9:35 a.m. Tuesday, she’ll visit a class, EC4640 Natural Resource Economics, and discuss “Property Rights and the Coase Theorem.” Hoffman is an expert on the Coase Theorem, named after 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics winner Ronald Coase. It is an important basis for most modern economic analyses of government regulation.
Hoffman’s visit is part of the Visiting Women and Minority Lecturer/Scholar Series. This event is funded by the Michigan Tech President’s Office and a grant to the Office for Institutional Diversity for the State of Michigan’s King-Chavez-Parks Initiative.
by Dennis Walikainen, senior editor
Published in Tech Today
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Posted by ddc under Awards and Recognition
Michigan Tech has won a national award for its diversity initiatives. INSIGHT into Diversity, the oldest and largest magazine about diversity on college and university campuses, announced its first annual Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) award today.
The award cites Michigan Tech for “its outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion for the year 2012.” The December 2012 issue of INSIGHTS into Diversity highlights Michigan Tech.
In addition to Michigan Tech, three other Michigan colleges and universities received HEED awards. They are Michigan State and Ferris State Universities and Delta College. Nationwide, the magazine recognized 48 institutions.
For the full story, see Diversity Award.
To see the December issue of INSIGHT into Diversity, announcing the national award winners go to INSIGHT.
For more information on Michigan Tech’s diversity initiatives, contact Chris Anderson, special assistant to the president for diversity, csanders@mtu.edu, 906-487-2474.
by Jennifer Donovan, public relations director
Published in Tech Today
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Posted by ddc under Awards and Recognition
Professor Zhi “Gerry” Tian (ECE) has been named a Fellow of IEEE for her contributions to ultra-wideband wireless communications and localization.
Tian’s research interests lie in digital and wireless communications, wireless sensor networks and signal processing. She has published more than 130 journal and conference papers and several book chapters.
Tian is currently on leave with the National Science Foundation, where she is serving as a program director in the Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber System of the Engineering Directorate.
Tian has served IEEE as chair of the 2007 Symposium Technical Program Committee for the International Conference on Communications and the Globecom Conference in 2011. She is a member of the IEEE Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee and has served as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing. She received a National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2003.
IEEE fellows are chosen for extraordinary accomplishment in their field.
IEEE, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, with more than 400,000 members, is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Posted by almayer under WISEblog
Ada Lovelace Day was started in the UK three years ago to celebrate the achievements of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Ada Lovelace herself wrote one of the first computer programs, and her legacy serves as a reminder that most STEM fields would not be where they are today without the insights of many (often overlooked) women. The goal of this annual celebration is to demonstrate to women and girls why their efforts are so critical to the advancement of STEM disciplines.
2012 marks the first annual Ada Lovelace Day celebrated at Michigan Tech. We have two main events planned (both are FREE and open to the public):
Tuesday, October 17th, 7pm to 8:30pm in Fisher 139:
Professor Martha Sloan (Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Tech alumnae Mary Long and Dr. Michelle Jarvie Eggart will discuss their motivations and aspirations as women working in STEM.
Speaker biographies:
Professor Martha Sloan: Martha Sloan received a BS in Electrical Engineering with great distinction, an MS in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD in Education from Stanford University. After two years of working at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, in Palo Alto, California, Sloan joined the faculty of Michigan Tech, where she is now a professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Sloan is the author of three textbooks and more than sixty papers. She is a fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and SWE and has received numerous awards, including the SWE Distinguished Engineering Educator Award, an IEEE Centennial Medal, the Richard E. Merwin Award, and the ASEE Outstanding Young Electrical Engineering Educator Award. She has been active in engineering professional societies, having served as treasurer, vice president, and president of the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE, and AAES. She served for nine years on the board of trustees of SWE.
Mary Long: Mary Long is an engineer/project manager at Black & Veatch, with a strong background in Program and Construction Management. Her education includes BS and MS degrees in Environmental Engineering and BS in Business Administration as well, all from MTU; and she is a licensed Professional Engineer in Ohio. Her work has mainly focused on wastewater and wet weather treatment projects until recently changing from the Water Division of B&V to Telecom to serve as the Decommissioning Market Manager for Sprint’s Network Vision Program.
Dr. Michelle Jarvie Eggart: Dr. Michelle Jarvie Eggart is an environmental engineer/project manager at Barr engineering and adjunct faculty at University of Maryland University College. She works primarily on sustainability and environmental compliance issues surrounding water and wastewater for mining and other industrial clients. She received her Ph.D, in environmental engineering from Michigan Tech and is a registered professional engineer in the states of Oregon and Michigan.
Wednesday, October 18th, 8pm to 9:30pm in Fisher 135:
A screening of the documentary “The Gender Chip Project”, with a following panel discussion. Members of the panel include Mary Long, Professor Laura Brown (Computer Science), Graduate Student Kaitlyn Bunker (Electrical Engineering), Professor Sarah Green (Chemistry), Professor Nina Mahmoudian (Mechanical Engineering), and Professor Patty Sotirin (Humanities).
Panelist biographies:
Mary Long (see above)
Professor Laura Brown: Dr. Brown received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from Vanderbilt University in 2009. Her research interests include: Algorithms for learning the structure of Bayesian networks; Local causal discovery methods for identification of parents and children or Markov Blankets; and Methods for variable selection on high-dimensional data sets.
Kaitlyn Bunker: Ms. Bunker is working on her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering; she received her M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2012, and received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2010. She has intern experience with Commonwealth Associates, Inc., and General Motors Powertrain. She is currently the President of the Society for Women Engineers at Michigan Tech.
Professor Sarah Green: Dr. Green received her Ph.D. from MIT. Her research interests include: Origin and fate of DOC in terrestrial, lake, and marine environments; methods for detection of free radicals, photochemical transformations of natural and anthropogenic organic compounds in the environment; oxidative degradation reactions; response of aquatic systems to climate change; effects of electrostatic charge and ionic strength on fast reaction kinetics; behavior of metal contaminated sediments in the Lake Superior basin; fluorescence-based analytical methods; integration of biological, geological, physical, and chemical data for understanding global cycles.
Professor Nina Mahmoudian: Dr. Mahmoudian’s general research interests lie in the area of dynamics, stability, and control of nonlinear systems. Specifically, she is interested in dynamic modeling, motion planning, and developing cooperative control algorithms to autonomous vehicles. Design and control of autonomous vehicles based on the principles used by nature is another area of interest. She works on developing analytical and computational tools for the cooperative control of a network of autonomous vehicles in complex environment using nonlinear control and stochastic analysis. The application will be for air, ground, and sea autonomous vehicles.
Professor Patty Sotirin: Professor Sotirin’s research involves critical-interpretive approaches to issues of culture, relationality, and gender. Her work draws on discursive theories of communication, critical management studies, cultural studies, feminist theories and qualitative methodologies. She is Editor of Women and Language and co-author with Laura Ellingson of Aunting: Cultural Practices that Sustain Family and Community Life.
Professor Audrey Mayer (almayer[at]mtu.edu) can be reached for questions and further information. Hope to see you there!
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