All students completing a masters’s thesis or doctoral dissertation must submit their work to ProQuest. This tutorial is divided into four sections, which match the sections on the ProQuest submission webpage:
Alex Guth, a PhD student in geology, will be featured in an upcoming National Geographic Channel television series at 9 p.m., Sunday, July 25. Guth was interviewed in Kenya last year regarding the Rift Valley, and will appear in one of two back-to-back episodes of “Clash of the Continents.”‘
Published in Tech Today.
Nominations for fall Finishing Fellowships are now open. Applications must be submitted to the Graduate School no later than 4pm on July 29th.
Students are eligible if all of the following criteria are met:
- Must be a PhD student.
- Must expect to finish in fall.
- Must have submitted a Petition to Enter Full-Time Research Only Mode. No Finishing Fellowships will be awarded to students who fail to receive approval of their petition.
- No source of support for fall semester. (ex: GTA, GRA, etc.)
Previous recipients of a Finishing Fellowship are not eligible.
Please see our application page for details on the materials needed to nominate a student. Please direct any questions to Dr. Debra Charlesworth.
Midway up the Keweenaw, just south of Phoenix, the cliffs rise precipitously above the tableland. Years ago, a company town, a mining operation, and two cemeteries were tucked in, on, and around the bluff–all of it providing the needs of a lifetime: a place to live, work and die.
This is the location of what’s left of Upper Michigan’s storied Cliff Mine, and Tech faculty and students are taking the measure of this legacy, pinpointing the remains, unearthing the past.
The Cliff opened in 1844. At its peak, it employed 850 workers. Over 25 years, the miners wrested 34 million pounds of copper from its 1,500-foot-deep shafts, drifts and stopes.
Michigan Tech Professor Tim Scarlett and Assistant Professor Sam Sweitz are overseeing a field school at the mine. Students, with pencil, paper, tape measure, and GPS, attempt to locate features of a mining operation that Scarlett describes as “fascinating”–“one of the most important mines in nineteenth-century America, historically, socially, technologically, and economically.” He says it was the first successful mine–that is, the first to pay a return on investment. Production stopped in 1878. Exploratory shafts were dug later, but unsuccessfully, for the lode was exhausted.
Scarlett is in his element with this kind of work. Ghost towns and mining ruins have substance, he says. “What they represent has fallen from the public consciousness. People are almost entirely divorced from the work needed to produce the materials we consume.” Turn the lights on? You need copper wire. “It’s not magic,” he says. “It’s based on an extraction and production process that meets a demand. It teaches us. It reminds us. We look to the past to think about the future.”
Amid their duties, faculty and students have been giving tours of the mining site. The word has spread, and people from as far as Indiana and Illinois have shown up this summer. Upwards of 50 people enjoy tours on Saturdays. “There’s a sense of excitement in the community broadly,” Scarlett says.
As well as in the person of Sean Gohman, who is 34. He is working on his master’s in industrial archeology and is the project manager for this enterprise. A native of Minnesota, he says the past is an irresistible tug. “I like anybody’s local history. I like spending time in the woods. I like historic preservation. So this is the perfect place to be. It’s not what I thought I’d be doing, but I’m glad I’m here. I lucked out.”
The footprints of the past that he searches for are scattered on and around the bluff. Pictures of the historic area show the base of the bluff bare of vegetation. Now the resilience of nature obscures the resourcefulness of man, for evergreens and white birch have reclaimed the landscape. Tucked into their embrace are the remnants of adits (there were seven), shaft houses, chimneys, walls, and buildings. “Stuff–material culture–is our bread and butter,” Gohman says.
Wednesday sees 15 faculty, students, volunteers, and tourists gather at the Cliff. The day is cool, the sky is grey, the breeze knocks the bugs down, and a half-hearted rain isn’t a bother.
The group ventures up a poor rock pile and into the woods, where the path is marked with orange ribbons. They discover one wall, twenty feet high and fifteen feet long, that is made of mine rock, with not a drop of mortar. It has stood the test of time—about one hundred and fifty years in this case. “Amazing,” says one person. He likens it to Inca ruins rising above the jungle. “An exaggeration,” he says, “but not by much.”
The watchword is safety. The students and faculty have identified some filled shafts. “We don’t walk on them,” Scarlett says. But the group can only guess where adits and underground workings were. The students point out dangerous depressions and questionable areas as visitors move around. Everybody treads carefully.
The students have been working at the site for six weeks. Some of what they’ve found is a riddle.
“The more we do, the more we don’t get answers,” Gohman says.
Tech has a world-renowned program in industrial heritage and archaeology, and Gohman likes to be a part of it. He plans to pursue a PhD here.
He is especially interested in how landscape fashions technology, and he likes to piece together what this mining operation was like. “That big cliff decided what they could or could not do,” he says. Huge pieces of ore, weighing tons, were unique to the Cliff Mine, so the whims to raise them were first were cranked by men, then pulled by horses, then powered by steam.
The leftovers at the site impresses one observer, who says, “It takes your breath away.”
After two hours of negotiating rock and ruin, beneath a lowering sky, the group breaks up–tourists to continue their travels, students to do their work.
The long-range goal at the Cliff is historic preservation: “Before you do that,” Gohman says, “you have to know what’s there.”
Perhaps the prospects of showing it all off some day will assuage the concerns of one person in the group. “It’s sad,” he says at the conclusion of the tour, “that people drive by and don’t see it.”
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The mapping project at the Cliff Mine is being funded by the Keweenaw National Historical Park Advisory Council and the LSGI Technology Venture Fund LP.
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For more information, visit these websites:
http://cliffmine.wordpress.com.
http://www.industrialarchaeology.net.
http://www.ss.mtu.edu/people/scarlett.htm.
http://www.ss.mtu.edu/people/srsweitz.htm.
Published in Tech Today.
Associate Professor Chunxiao Chigan, electrical and computer engineering, had two of her PhD students, Congyi Liu and Zhengming Li, win the 2010 ITS-Michigan (Intelligent Transportation Society) Student Paper Silver Award .
Liu’s paper is “Reliable Structure-less Message Aggregation and Robust Dissemination in VANETs,” and Li’s paper is “On Resource-Aware Message Verification and Privacy Issues in VANETs.” Liu and Li presented their papers at the ITS-MI Annual Program May 13 in Dearborn.
Industrial archaeologists from the Department of Social Sciences will conduct three tours of the Cliff Mine site on the next three Saturdays, June 12, June 19 and June 26.
The storied mine is just west of Phoenix, on Cliff Drive, a half mile from the intersection of Cliff Drive and US 41. The Cliff Mine operated between 1845 and 1870 and is often referred to as the nation’s first great copper mine.
Michigan Tech students and faculty have been mapping the site since early May. They have removed some brush to facilitate measuring, mapping, photographing, documenting, and otherwise assessing the condition of the ruins of the mine’s industrial core–including the stamp mill and washing house; engine, hoist, and rock houses; blacksmith shop; and other buildings.
The Tech team is giving the tours while working the three remaining Saturdays in June. Tours will start on the hour, with the first at 10 a.m. and the last at 4 p.m.
Sean Gohman, a graduate student and the project assistant, is putting all the maps and documents of the site into a digital Geographic Information Systems format, which will allow the research team to understand the changes to the Cliff Mine’s landscape through time. Gohman has been blogging about his work at: http://cliffmine.wordpress.com .
The site is unimproved, and visitors should expect a moderately difficult hike to see the mill and principle ruins. The site has no drinking water or toilet facilities. Extended hikes to the Cliff’s No. 3 and No. 4 shafts atop the bluff–or to the cemeteries and town sites–are generally self-guided, although members of the research team may be available, depending on each day’s work schedule.
Visitors who choose to climb to the top of the bluff should expect a short, but strenuous climb up and down a poor trail. For more information, contact Timothy Scarlett, associate professor of archaeology and director of graduate programs in industrial heritage and archaeology, at 414-418-9681 or at scarlett@mtu.edu .
Published in Tech Today.
For their pioneering work to improve water management in low temperature fuel cells, Jeffrey Allen and his PhD student, Ezequiel Medici, have been named the first winners of the Bhakta Rath Research Award at Michigan Tech. Allen is an associate professor of mechanical engineering-engineering mechanics.
The award, endowed earlier this year by 1958 Michigan Tech alumnus Rath and his wife, Shushama Rath, recognizes a doctoral student at Michigan Tech and his or her faculty advisor for “exceptional research of particular value that anticipates the future needs of the nation while supporting advances in emerging technology.” Allen and Medici will share a $2,000 prize.
“We are delighted to recognize Professor Jeff Allen and his accomplished student, Ezequiel Medici, for their outstanding research contribution in the field of mechanical engineering and engineering mechanics,” said Rath, who is associate director of research and head of the Materials Science and Component Technology Directorate at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. “We have no doubt that their seminal contributions will advance the frontiers of our knowledge in the field and contribute to development of new technologies. My wife and I wish to join their family members, friends and colleagues in congratulating the recipients of this award.”
When he endowed the award in April, Rath said he hoped it would promote and reward research excellence in the physical and natural sciences and engineering, fields in which Michigan Tech is emerging as a world leader in research and education.
“I am honored and grateful to be one of the inaugural recipients of this prestigious award,” Allen said. “However, the credit for the success of this research belongs to Ezequiel.”
His graduate student added, “I feel really honored to have our research recognized because of its potential impact on the fuel-cell industry.”
Medici and Allen’s research focuses on improving the management of the water produced during the operation of a fuel cell, liquid that leads to performance loss and rapid degradation of the fuel cell, significantly reducing the life of the system. They developed a new technique for optimizing fuel cell electrodes and a simple, reliable computational tool that captures the nature of liquid water movement in fuel cell electrodes. Their work, sponsored by the US Department of Energy and conducted in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology and General Motors, will reduce the research and development time and cost of improving fuel cell performance and durability.
Bill Predebon, chair of ME-EM, noted the potential importance of Allen and Medici’s work. “The research being conducted by Ezequiel Medici and his advisor Dr. Jeffrey Allen on the improvement of water management in low temperature fuel cells will have a significant impact in the fuel cell industry in the design of the porous materials used in fuel cells.”
by Jennifer Donovan, director of public relations
Published in Tech Today
The Graduate School is pleased to announce the following thesis and dissertations are now available in the J.R. van Pelt and Opie Library:
Nicholas Krom
Doctor of Philosophy in Biological Sciences
Advisor: Ramakrishna Wusirika
Dissertation title: An Arrangement of Gene Pairs, Retrotransposon Insertions, and Regulation of Gene Expression in Plants
Russell Lutch
Master of Science in Civil Engineering
Advisor: Devin K Harris
Thesis title: Capacity Optimization of a Prestressed Concrete Railroad Tie
Jason Sommerville
Doctor of Philosophy in Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics
Advisor: Lyon Bradley King
Dissertation title: Hall-Effect Thruster-Cathode Coupling: The Effect of Cathode Position and Magnetic Field Topology
The BRC announces the recipients of its 2010 Spring Travel Grants:
- Adam Abraham, (graduate student in ME-EM) will receive $500 toward a podium presentation at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers–Summer Bioengineering Conference, to be held in June in Naples, Fla.
- Rachel Bradford (graduate student in Biomedical Engineering) will receive $500 toward a poster presentation at the 31st American Society for Bone and Mineral Research held in September in Denver, Colo.
- Shurong Fang (graduate student in Mathematical Sciences) will receive $500 toward a podium presentation at the 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings to be held in August in Vancouver, British Columbia.
- Kasra Momeni (graduate student in ME-EM) received $500 toward a poster presentation at the 2010 MRD Spring Meeting Symposium held in April in San Francisco, Calif.
- Duane Morrow (graduate student in ME-EM) will receive $500 toward a podium presentation at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers–Summer Bioengineering Conference to be held in June in Naples, Fla.
- Saikat Mukhopadhyay (graduate student in Physics) received $500 toward a podium presentation at the American Physical Society 2010 Meeting held in March in Portland, Ore.
- Christopher Schwartz (graduate student in Biological Sciences) received $500 toward a poster presentation at the Experimental Biology 2010 Conference held in April in Anaheim, Calif.
- Sarah Stream (graduate student in Biological Sciences) received $500 toward a poster presentation at the Experimental Biology 2010 Conference held in April in Anaheim, Cali.
- Echoe Bouta (undergraduate in Biomedical Engineering) will receive $500 toward a poster presentation at the Molecular Mechanisms in Lymphatic Function and Disease Conference to be held in June in Lucca, Italy.
- Connor McCarthy (undergraduate in Biomedical Engineering) will receive $500 toward a poster presentation at the Molecular Mechanisms in Lymphatic Function and Disease Conference to be held in June in Lucca, Italy.
- John Moyer (undergraduate in ME-EM) will receive $500 toward a poster presentation at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers–Summer Bioengineering Conference to be held in June in Naples, Fla.
- Eli Vlaisavljevich (undergraduate in Biomedical Engineering) received $500 toward a poster presentation at the Orthopaedic Research Society Meeting held in March in New Orleans, La.
Graduate School forms submitted by students are electronically stored in Perceptive Content (formerly known as ImageNow). All member of the graduate faculty and authorized staff may access these forms by opening the Perceptive Content program, and logging in with their Michigan Tech ISO ID and password. Students do not have access to Perceptive Content. Dissertation, thesis, or report reviews are available to students through Canvas (for pre-defense documents) or Digital Commons (for post-defense documents).
Faculty can also choose not to utilize Perceptive Content to access the student’s review. These faculty may ask their student to share the review file with them, or contact the Graduate Program Assistant for access to the file. The email notification lets the faculty member know that the review is available.
Perceptive Content may be installed on any University computer running the Windows operating system; contact IT for assistance. There is no longer a web client for Perceptive Content.
If your computer is unable to have Perceptive Content installed, the software can also be accessed on the University’s remote server, remote.mtu.edu. See information from IT on how to connect using a Windows or Mac computer and note that a VPN will be needed to access from off campus.
Once logged in, click on the “Documents” icon. If you have access to more than one set of documents, click on the arrow next to the “Documents” icon and select “Graduate School.” Note that the name of the software is now Perceptive Content, some windows in the program may still list ImageNow in the title bar of the window.