Graduate School Newsblog

Category: News

Interesting stories about and for our students.

Diwali Night

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The Indian Student Association (ISA) is sponsoring its annual Diwali Night this Saturday, Oct. 30. Activities begin with an Indian dinner from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., in the Memorial Union Commons. After dinner, there will be a show in the Rozsa Center at 8 p.m., featuring traditional Indian dance and songs.

Diwali is one of the biggest festivals celebrated in India. It marks the victory of good over evil and light over darkness for the Indian people.  ISA President, Sachin Joshi (Mechanical Engineering, Graduate Student) has invited everyone to, “be a part of the biggest Indian festival and join us to celebrate this gracious night of delicious authentic Indian dinner, skits, drama, music, dance and lots of fun!”

The ISA is selling tickets in the Memorial Union Commons from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., today and Friday, Oct. 29. Dinner and the show costs $19 for the general public, $16 for Michigan Tech students, $13 for ISA members. Tickets for the performance only are $9. Children under the age of 8 are free.

The celebration is open to the community.

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Science and Engineering Expo on National Mall

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Michigan Tech will have a dual presence at the first annual USA Science and Engineering Festival, Oct. 23-24, on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

The Science and Engineering Expo is the grand finale of a two-week event promoting public interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. More than 1,500 interactive activities for all ages, hosted by more than 350 of the nation’s leading science and engineering organizations, will expose attendees to a broad spectrum of science. All events are free and open to the public, and hundreds of thousands of visitors are expected to attend.

NSF Program Answers Burning Questions About Volcanoes

How can you tell if a volcano is about to blow? What tools do you use to monitor a volcano? What’s so important about volcanoes, anyway? The world–including thousands of school-age youngsters–will get hands-on answers from Michigan Tech.

Tech’s volcano exhibit is in Freedom Plaza (Section PA-13, Booth #1317). Graduate students Luke Bowman, Kyle Brill and Anieri Morales Rivera will demonstrate equipment and techniques used by field researchers to monitor volcanic activity. By doing this monitoring, volcanologists can learn more about volcanic processes and identify potential precursors to eruptions.

The team hopes its exhibit will get people interested in geology. “Geology is a science full of wonders, excitement and lots of things to discover,” says Morales Rivera, “from understanding natural processes that may become a hazard to humans, such as volcanoes, to improving our knowledge of Earth and planetary sciences.” People are “exposed to geology in a daily basis,” she points out, “from the use of mineral resources to the location of petroleum and water supplies.”

To help illustrate what they look for when monitoring volcanoes, the Tech team is bringing an accelerometer and a Forward-Looking Infrared, or FLIR, camera. To demonstrate the accelerometer, which measures seismic activity, guests will be invited to jump on the ground, creating earthquake-like vibrations that the accelerometer will pick up and display as a seismogram.

The graduate students will also show visitors pictures of themselves taken with the FLIR camera, which measures an object’s radiant energy, translates it into temperature, and displays an image using light intensity or color brightness to show levels of heat.

“Scientists can’t predict eruptions,” says Morales Rivera, “but we can talk about the probability of one based on changes in the volcano’s behavior, such as increased seismicity, changes in gas concentrations coming out of the volcano, and deformation of the volcano itself.”

The exhibit will also explain the kinds of hazards posed by a volcanic eruption, from ash clouds that can block sunlight and interfere with airline flights, to lava flows that can burn everything in their path.

The Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences is one of only 15 National Science Foundation-funded projects invited to participate nationwide. Tech’s project is part of the NSF’s Partnership for International Research and Education (PIRE) program. Tech operates PIRE programs in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Peru.

“The NSF Office for International Science and Education, which manages the PIRE program, was very excited about our selection,” says Chair John Gierke (GMES). “We were the only PIRE project that was selected.”

Does the Tech team feel intimidated? Of course not, says Bowman. “We hike active volcanoes. We can handle the Mall.”

Tech’s MindTrekkers are also traveling to the National Mall. The group, which is a traveling science road show produced by Youth Programs, will share some of the stranger mysteries of science.  Read the complete article in Tech Today

by Jennifer Donovan, director of public relations

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Two Tech Authors Win Historical Society Awards

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Two Michigan Tech book authors won 2010 State History Awards from the Historical Society of Michigan. Larry Lankton, professor of social sciences, received an award in the University and Commercial Press category for “Hollowed Ground,” a history of the copper mining industry in the Upper Peninsula. Gary Kaunonen’s “Challenge Accepted: A Finnish Immigrant Response to Industrial America in Michigan’s Copper Country” won an award in the same category. Kaunonen is a PhD student in industrial archeology.

The society presented 15 awards at its 136th Annual Meeting and State History Conference Oct. 15-17 in Frankenmuth, including a Lifetime Achievement award, which honors men and women who have dedicated themselves to preserving Michigan’s history over a significant amount of time.

The Historical Society of Michigan, which administers the State History Awards, is the state’s oldest cultural organization. Founded in 1828 by Lewis Cass and Henry Schoolcraft, it is an independent nonprofit dedicated to the preservation and presentation of Michigan’s historical story. The State History Awards are the highest recognition presented by the state’s official historical society.

Published in Tech Today

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DOD SMART Visit Canceled

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Due to a family emergency, Dr. Knox Millsaps needed to cancel his visit to Michigan Tech next week.  He apologizes for any inconvenience and encourages anyone interested in the DOD SMART program to contact him directly (millsaps@nps.edu) with any questions or concerns. 

On Tuesday, October 19th there will still be a general presentation about the SMART scholarship by Jodi Lehman, which faculty, staff, and students are invited to attend.  The luncheon for Wednesday, October 20th has been canceled.  The presentation will be from 12:00-1:00 in the Memorial Union Ballroom B1. 

Jodi is also available to work with students to identify a national lab that fits with SMART applicants’ field of interest and to mentor students in developing a competitive proposal.  She is also available to present and answers questions about the SMART program to classes, departments, and student organizations.   

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and thank you for your interest and support in helping Michigan Tech students understand more about the DOD SMART program.  We also thank those individuals and departments who went above and beyond to provide Dr. Millsaps with a campus visit that highlights Michigan Tech’s unique attributes related to DOD SMART fields. 

The DOD SMART visit will be rescheduled for spring.  Please contact Jodi Lehman (jglehman@mtu.edu) with any questions. 

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Khana Khazana Goes to India for Lunch

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This week’s Khana Khazana (food treasure), an ethnic lunch cooked by international students and served in the Memorial Union Food Court, will feature food from northern India. Lunch will be served from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Friday, Oct. 15.

The menu includes Chole Bhature (Indian fried bread with chickpea curry), Paneer Tikka (chunks of juicy Indian cheese known as paneer, grilled with vegetables) and Punjabi Lassi (sweetened yogurt).

The chef is Jaspreet Nayyar, a graduate student from Northern India who is pursuing a dual master’s degree in electrical engineering and materials science and engineering.

A full meal costs $6. Chole Bhature or Paneer Tikka a la carte is $3, and Punjabi Lassi a la carte costs $2.

Khana Khazana is a collaborative effort of international students and Dining Services. The campus and the community are welcome.

Published in Tech Today.

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Registration Opens for Tech MBA® Online

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Registration for the Tech MBA® Online 2010-11 webinar is now open. The virtual events discuss topics such as paying for the MBA (and getting your employer to help), choosing the right program, and other specifics, including how engineers and women benefit from getting MBA degrees. To view the webinar schedule or to register, see Tech MBA .

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The School of Business and Economics and the Alumni Association will host a workshop on career planning in Grand Rapids. This is the second Career Re-Tool Workshop for job seekers, those in career transitions and people who want career advancement. Attendees will have the opportunity to evaluate educational opportunities. This free event is open to the public. For more information, see re-tool .

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Arthritis, Soil, Cabaret, and DNA: Students Share their Research

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The Reading Room of the Van Pelt and Opie Library was packed recently, but it wasn’t full of students cramming. This day, more than fifty students were presenting their research via posters in the bright sunlight streaming in from a wall of windows.

It was a poster session held as part of the University’s kickoff of its Generations of Discovery Capital Campaign, coinciding with Homecoming.

Megan Killian, a PhD student in biomedical engineering, discussed her work with arthritis in knees, especially after traumatic injuries. She was looking at what can be done to stop or delay the onset of arthritis after a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a common problem in contact sports.

“I’m looking at the changes in the meniscus,” Killian said. “Specifically, how the cells behave, how the meniscus degenerates over a short period of time. I am focusing on the molecular biology and histology, and other students in my lab, Adam Abraham and John Moyer, are looking at the mechanics.”

Her advisor, Tammy Haut Donahue (associate professor of mechanical engineering), is developing a better understanding of how the meniscus behaves mechanically and biochemically, and how it responds to injury and degenerative changes.

Together, the inquiry has Killian close to completing her PhD this semester, before she “goes on to a career in research-focused academia.”

Nearby, Carley Kratz presented her research in soils. The PhD student in forestry is comparing soil in special plots of the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts and the Ford Forestry Center in Alberta, with an eye toward the effects of warming.

“I’m studying how increased heat and moisture affect the soil microorganisms,” she said. “I’m mimicking future temperature and moisture increases to look at global warming, among other areas.”

She is focusing on the fungi and bacterial concentrations, she said, especially metabolic changes over time, including increased amounts of carbon cycling (how carbon moves through the global environment). “If more carbon in the soil cycles more rapidly, then that could lead to more carbon in the atmosphere, which could increase global warming,” she says.

Her research is sponsored by a US Department of Energy Office of Science graduate fellowship. Adjunct Professor Erik Lilleskov and Associate Professor Andrew Burton (SFRES), also worked on the research.

Kratz’s hopes include a postdoc in microbial ecology and an eventual professorship in the Midwest “or wherever life takes me.”

A senior in sound design, Nicole Kirch researched potential sound effects for the play, “I Am My Own Wife.” Set in Nazi and Soviet East Berlin, the play won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor in 2004.

“I looked at the setting of the play and tried to figure out the best sounds,” she said.

That meant using items, some old and some new, from Marlene Dietrich audio to a music box to bombs and air raid sounds to John Kennedy’s Berlin Wall speech.

“I also worked with an old phonograph, with a wax cylinder,” she said. “I didn’t want to improve the sound,” aiming instead for realistic pops and scratches from the old machine.

The setting is the bar/museum Mulack Ritze in the basement of the protagonist, and Kirch had to account for a wall of shelved memorabilia that is used in the back of the stage in the play.

“I send the sounds through speakers behind it,” she said. And she had to create pre- and post-show audio, as well as the sounds that help carry the action, all for a play that was not actually being performed here.

She did “a lot of research while bored last summer.” She wants to be a sound effects editor when she graduates.

Finally, Bryan Franklin, a PhD student in computer science, was working with common subsequences of nucleotide sequences.

“This is important because, if one is a close match with another, it can be used to study viruses and illnesses in labs and then apply the findings to humans,” he said

He had one major surprise.

“The original, published algorithm I was working with was flawed,” Franklin said. “That made it really confusing at first. It was hard to debug.”

Franklin made progress, eventually, using multiple parallel processes, to get results faster.

“I was able to get results in 1/6th the time it would have taken on a single processor,” he said. “My results are also better than the previous work I based my research on, as it always produces the longest matching subsequence.”

After leaving Tech, Franklin wants to continue working as a researcher, either in academia or industry.

by Dennis Walikainen, senior editor

Published in Tech Today

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Michigan Tech Kicks Off $200 Million Capital Campaign

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by Jennifer Donovan, director of public relations

Michigan Tech is kicking off the public phase of a $200 million multi-year fund-raising campaign, President Glenn Mroz has announced. And appropriately enough on its 125th anniversary, Michigan Tech has already raised more than $125 million, he said, taking the University more than halfway to its goal.

Called “Generations of Discovery,” the campaign will enable Michigan Tech to acquire the resources to raise its recognition as a premier research university. It will focus primarily on the University’s strategic plan goal of attracting and supporting the very best faculty, students and staff by increasing the number of endowed faculty positions and increasing endowed student financial aid.

Endowments are permanently invested gifts that generate spendable income annually while continuing to grow. Endowed faculty chairs and professorships, as well as scholarships and graduate fellowships, are of particular importance to Michigan Tech’s future.

“This campaign funding will help us attract bright students and world-class professors,” said Mroz. “It will give us the resources we need to drive innovation and be counted among the nation’s finest technological universities.”

Already the “quiet phase” of the campaign, which began in 2006, has helped Michigan Tech increase its endowed faculty positions more than fourfold–from 4 to 17–and has raised nearly $11 million in new scholarships and fellowships for students.

New Gifts

At a campaign kickoff dinner, Mroz also announced two new $1 million gifts, one from Tom Shaffner and the other from John and Ruanne Opie. He also reported that the General Motors Foundation has given Michigan Tech another $160,000, bringing its support for the University this year to $244,000 and the total support from the GM Foundation and GM over the past 35 years to more than $8.3 million. The gifts bring the campaign total to $127.4 million to date.

Shaffner, a 1957 Tech alumnus with bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering and business engineering administration, is chairman of the board of Dearborn Precision Tubular Products. A highly specialized machine shop specializing in high alloy tubing, aircraft parts and oil field equipment, Shaffner’s company uses a technology he developed to produce exceptionally long, straight tubes. His company is credited with developing deep-hole drilled components for the first US Navy nuclear submarine.

Shaffner is also helping fund a new building to house the Seaman Mineral Museum. It will be built adjacent to the Advanced Technology Development Complex on Sharon Avenue.

John Opie graduated from Michigan Tech in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical and materials engineering. He spent most of his career with General Electric, retiring in 2000 as vice chair/executive director. He delivered Tech’s commencement address in 1987 and again in 2001, receiving Honorary Doctorates in Engineering and Business.

Opie and his wife, Ruanne, recently donated $1 million for the construction of ten new skybox suites in the Student Ice Arena. The new suites, all on the west end of the rink, can each accommodate eight to fourteen people, with three skyboxes for larger groups. The Opies previously funded a 54,000-square-foot addition to the library and established an endowment to support the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Other gifts have enabled the University to pursue excellence in many different areas. Thanks to various campaign donors, Michigan Tech has been able to establish the Pavlis Institute for Global Technological Leadership, positioning students to create the future for a prosperous and sustainable world. The University is expanding and improving facilities for its electrical and computer engineering and computer science and engineering programs, as well as humanities and the mineral museum. Other donors enabled Tech to install lights and artificial turf at Sherman Field and to bring varsity women’s soccer to Tech.

Alumni Role

Alumni play a key role in any capital campaign. Electrical engineering alumnus Dave House ’65, chairman of Brocade Communication Systems of San Jose, Calif., and a longtime executive at Intel, is chairing the national campaign committee.

“The nation’s best universities have grown their endowments, brought internationally recognized scholars to their labs and classrooms, and built topflight facilities where great ideas are fostered,” said House. “Michigan Tech is focused on being one of these great universities, and it needs your support to achieve this goal.”

House himself is a staunch supporter of Michigan Tech. The House Family Foundation has endowed several professorships, including one held by Tim Schulz, dean of the College of Engineering. A gift from the House Family Foundation enabled the University to purchase the Michigan Tech Research Institute in Ann Arbor in 2006. The House Family Foundation also is currently funding improvements in electrical and computer engineering labs and classrooms.

But a successful campaign depends on more than alumni. All of Michigan Tech’s partners–corporations and foundations, as well as friends on campus and throughout the community, state and nation–play a key role in helping the University reach its goal by 2013. Corporations and foundations are responsible for over $35 million of contributions in the campaign to date. Longtime corporate partner General Motors just gave the University $160,000 to support student enterprises, senior design projects, diversity programs and student groups, another in a string of multiple campaign contributions.

“While a robust endowment is essential if we are to continue moving forward, we also need ongoing support for non-endowed programs and student life initiatives,” said George Butvilas, chair of the Michigan Tech Fund Board of Trustees. “We want our alumni and friends to know that gifts of all sizes can make an enormous difference, for a single student or an entire program.”

Published in Tech Today

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Graduate Programs Assessed

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The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies has released a comparison of more than 5,000 doctoral programs at 212 universities across the nation, including Michigan Tech.

The assessment–seven years in the making–rated 12 PhD programs at Michigan Tech, giving highest marks to two in SFRES: forest molecular genetics and biotechnology, and forest science.

Other noteworthy Tech programs included chemical engineering, chemistry, environmental engineering, mathematical sciences, materials science and engineering and mechanical engineering-engineering mechanics.

“The NRC used a complex and very sophisticated statistical analysis procedure to attempt to objectively compare similar PhD programs,” said David Reed, vice president for research. “I’m very pleased that our programs in forestry–and in some of the engineering and science specialties–came out so well. It speaks very highly of the faculty and students involved.”

Although the results of the NRC study were described as “rankings,” graduate programs at different universities weren’t actually ranked or compared directly one to another. Rather, using a complicated statistical analysis of 21 variables and two sets of data, the programs were assigned “ranges.”

Both data sets were based on results of faculty surveys. In one survey, faculty members were asked what factors were most important to the overall quality of a graduate program. In the other, they were asked to rate the quality of a sample of programs in their field.

The results, which took several years to analyze, show the number of programs evaluated in each field and the range in which Tech’s programs fall. In forest science, for example, 34 programs were compared, and Michigan Tech’s were ranked between 2nd of 34 and 23rd of 34.

“The results are not rankings,” said Jacqueline Huntoon, dean of the Graduate School. “The report tells us that there is a 90 percent chance that the ‘true’ ranking of each of our programs falls somewhere within the reported range.”

“The results do have some interesting implications,” Huntoon went on to say. “We found out what is most important to a good reputation–the number of PhDs graduated, the number of publications of the faculty, and the research awards received by faculty. The results clearly show that the reputation of a graduate program depends on its size.”

“That validates the direction in which Michigan Tech has been moving–making a conscious effort to grow its Graduate School programs,” Huntoon added.

She expressed concern that the NRC data is out of date. It was collected in 2006-07 and included data from 2001-02 to 2005-06.

“We aren’t the same university or the same graduate school we were then,” Huntoon noted. “In 2005, we only had 870 graduate students. Now we have 1,241. We have made a major commitment to growing our graduate school.” The new data will be useful as a benchmark to measure future progress at Michigan Tech, she said.

The last NRC graduate program assessment was conducted in 1995. It evaluated only three PhD programs at Michigan Tech: geosciences, mechanical engineering and physics.

by Jennifer Donovan, director of public relations

Published in Tech Today

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Alumni to Share Insights at Entrepreneurship and Technology Symposium Thursday

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Former Intel executive Dave House ’65 will moderate the Entrepreneurship and Technology Symposium, set for 4 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 30, in the M&M U115. All members of the University community are invited to ask questions and listen to the insights of a stellar panel made up largely of Michigan Tech alumni.

The panelists include eight entrepreneurs and technology leaders from health care, software, clean technology and solar energy. They will share their thoughts on the direction of technology and how Michigan Tech can leverage its talent and capabilities to capitalize on those trends through research and technology transfer.

Included in the panel is Shankar Mukherjee, an alumnus of the Graduate School.  Below is a brief biography:

Shankar Mukherjee ’86 is president and CEO of Dhaani Systems Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., which he founded in 2008 to produce energy-saving technologies for electronic systems. In 2000, he founded TeraBlaze, a company that provided switch fabric subsystems, and sold it four years later to Agere Systems. Previously, Mukherjee was an engineer and project leader with National Semiconductor and the vice president for engineering of LAN at Enable Semiconductor, a company that was acquired by Lucent.

For more information on the event, visit Tech Today.

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