Interesting stories about and for our students.
Peace Corps Masters International Environmental Engineering Program graduate Cara Shonsey has published a paper titled, “Quantifying available water supply in rural Mali based on data collected by and from women,” in a special issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production on Water, Women, Waste, Wisdom and Wealth. Her advisor, John Gierke (GMES), co-authored the paper. See online.
Published in Tech Today.
It’s become a popular and successful strategy. Graduate School staff venture to Thailand to recruit, and they get a lot of help from alumni over there.
Jacque Smith, director of graduate enrollment services, and Kristi Isaacson, assistant director of graduate enrollment services, have just returned from another trip, replete with 30-hour airplane rides both ways.
While there, they attended the Royal Thai Scholar event, which featured Thailand’s best and brightest, according to Smith.
Michigan Tech alumnus Otha Thornton ’01, president of the National PTA, has been named one of Ebony magazine’s Power 100, the country’s African American leaders. See online.
The University is closed on Thursday, November 28th and Friday, November 29th. When the University is closed, the “two week” rule for submitting drafts is relaxed to the next available business day. The Graduate School does not expect students to submit drafts to the committee or the Graduate School when the University is closed (but the Pre-defense form will still calculate these dates as the “due” dates).
Additionally, the University is scheduling campus wide home directory maintenance from Thursday Nov. 28, 7 p.m., through Sunday Dec. 1, 11 p.m. During this time:
To track progress during the upgrade please visit http://status.it.mtu.edu.
If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, about the planned upgrade, please call the User Services help desk at 487-1111 or email it-help@mtu.edu for assistance.
Mechanical engineering faculty from a private Indian university will soon be pursuing their PhDs from Michigan Tech.
The new agreement with Vidya Prathisthan, located in Baramati, India, creates a 2-plus-2 PhD program in mechanical engineering for faculty, plus a 1-plus-1 master of science program for students.
Qualifying faculty will complete the first two years of their PhD program in India, where they can take Michigan Tech courses online and graduate courses from any of the Indian Institutes of Technology (ITTs). Then they will travel to the US and spend the final two years of their program conducting research with Michigan Tech faculty advisors.
Published in Tech Today
The Biotechnology Research Center announces its Fall 2013 Travel Grants. Recipients include:
Post doctoral Research Scientist Presentation:
Graduate Student Presentations:
Published in Tech Today
Today at the Library: Grand Opening of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center.
Even if you were not able to register for the day’s events, please consider joining some of the events including the ribbon-cutting in the Opie Reading Room at 11 a.m. Lunch to follow offers the opportunity to meet representatives from the U.S. Patent Office as well as representatives from the offices of Michigan’s congressional delegation. The full schedule of events may be found online.
The Van Pelt and Opie Library’s new distinction as a patent and trademark resource center was featured on the US Patent and Trademark Office website.
Published in Tech Today.
Through collaboration between the Graduate School and the Center for Diversity and Inclusion underrepresented minority students at Tech were given the opportunity to travel to the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities campus) to attend the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science Inc. (GEM) GRAD Lab last weekend.
This event was co-sponsored by the Graduate School at Michigan Tech and the University of Minnesota, and presenters ranged from current graduate students (including Michigan Tech’s GEM fellow, PhD student Sterling Prince) to senior managers, to faculty and senior administrators. They were selected from diverse communities and disciplines and presented on the following topics:
*Why graduate school?
*How to prepare for graduate school
*Understanding the GEM fellowship
*Voices from the field: real life research and internship experiences
In addition to the GRAD lab, students were treated to a reception, dinner and presentation by GEM alum/3M corporation scientist, Stan Rendon at the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul.
Diamonds, usually forged in overwhelming heat and pressure miles deep in the Earth’s mantle, have now been made at atmospheric pressure and 100 degrees Celcius—the boiling point of water.
No one will be wearing these diamonds on their ring finger, however. They are nanodiamonds, just two or three nanometers across, invisible to all but electron microscopes. But their properties could be as alluring as crown jewels. Unlike the other form of carbon, graphite, diamond is a semiconductor, similar to silicon, which is the dominant material in the electronics industry, and gallium arsenide, which is used in lasers and other optical devices.
The discovery, by project leader Mohan Sankaran, Associate Professor of chemical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, was aided by Physics Professor Yoke Khin Yap and graduate student Boyi Hao of Michigan Tech. Using ultraviolet Ramen spectroscopy in Yap’s lab, they confirmed that Sankaran’s group had indeed made nanodiamonds.
Find out more at the Michigan Tech news site.
Published in Tech Today.
Seventeen students from the Michigan Tech Rail Transportation Program (RTP) traveled to Indianapolis to attend the 2013 Railway Interchange Exhibition and American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA) 2013 Annual Conference. Students attended technical sessions and committee meetings. The students also provided support for the National University Rail Center (NURail) booth at the Exhibition. Michigan Tech is a member of the seven university NURail consortium.
Michigan Tech students, Antonio Passariello and Tanja Mattonen, were invited to be two of the four student interns of the Conference Operating Committee. Seven Michigan Tech RTP students were identified as AREMA scholarship winners, pulling in over $7,000 in scholarships and 20 percent of the winners nationwide. Congratulations to: Dylan Anderson, Chris Blessing, Antonio Passariello, Sean Pengelly, Hamed Pouryousef, Irfan Rasul, and Nicholas Lanoue. Click here for a complete description of the scholarships.
Pasi Lautala, 2007 PhD graduate, received the second prize in the AREMA Member-Get-A-Member Campaign, awarded at the annual conference.
Published in Tech Today.
