Dr. Barry Lawrence, director of the Industrial Distribution Program and the Supply Chain Systems Lab in the Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution at Texas A&M University, has been named a Fellow of the NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence, the long-range research arm of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW).

Dr. Barry Lawrence

The NAW is a federation of more than 100 wholesale distribution associations and thousands of individual firms that collectively total more than 40,000 companies. The NAW Institute for Distribution Excellence aims to help merchant wholesaler-distributors remain the most effective and efficient channel in distribution.

The NAW Institute established the Fellows program in 1999 to acknowledge individuals who have made and will continue to make significant intellectual contributions to the field of wholesale distribution. During their terms, NAW Institute Fellows work with the NAW Institute to develop and bring new research studies to the wholesale distribution industry.

Lawrence is the lead author of the NAW Institute 2009 book Optimizing Distributor Profitability: Best Practices to a Stronger Bottom Line. He also represents Texas A&M in its partnership with the NAW Institute in the establishment of the Council for Research on Distributor Competitiveness (CRDC). The mission of the CRDC is to create competitive advantage for wholesaler-distributors through development of new industry research and educational programs and to deliver that research and knowledge to industry executives and their management teams.

CRDC is sponsoring the 2009 Sales and Marketing Optimization consortium. At the NAW Executive Summit, Jan. 26–28, 2010, in Washington, D.C., Lawrence will share the Best Practices that made the greatest positive contributions to the sales and marketing efforts of the wholesale distribution firms that participated in the consortium.

About NAW
Established by the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) in 1967, the NAW Institute has produced a distinguished body of work, consistent with its mission of sponsoring studies of strategic management issues affecting the wholesale distribution industry.

Contact: Ruth Stadius
Director of Communications
rstadius@naw.org
202.872.0885

Popularity: unranked [?]

Researchers in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University and the Texas Engineering Experiment Station’s (TEES) Texas Center for Applied Technology (TCAT) have received a third year of funding to continue work on military helicopter rotor blade erosion technology.

Blade erosion in military helicopters continues to be an area of concern, particularly in severe environments of sand and rain. The current approach to assuring safe performance relies upon frequent inspection, repair and replacement of protection films without robust and reliable procedures. The consequence is high cost. New erosion-resistant coatings are being developed but there are no physics-based models available to guide their development.

A research program is under way at Texas A&M to systematically address the erosion problem. This program, now in its third year, is focused on polyurethane films that are mounted on the leading edge of blades to provide protection from erosion caused by sand particles.

Principle investigators for the program are TCAT’s Dr. John Ayala and Dr. Ramesh Talreja, Dr. Amine Benzerga, Dr. Zoubeida Ounaies and Dr. Tamas Kalmar-Nagy with Texas A&M’s aerospace engineering department.

For more information, contact Dr. John Ayala at john-ayala@tamu.edu or (210) 633-2427, x224.

TEES (Texas Engineering Experiment Station) is the engineering research agency of the State of Texas and a member of The Texas A&M University System.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Texas A&M University’s Real Time Distributed Systems Lab has deployed the Bivio Networks 7500 DPI networking platform to support leading-edge network defense research.

Established by Dr. Steven Liu in 1989, the Real Time Distributed Systems Lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering focuses on developing and deploying an advanced computing framework that enables next-generation network defense and protection solutions, such as an early alert system for large-scale network threats.

“We conduct high-risk, high-return research at the Real Time Distributed Systems Lab that will result in greatly improved security for large-scale networks,” Liu said. “We considered several network appliance vendors and opted for the solution that provided one of the most appropriate and flexible computing and networking architectures for us to implement our advanced algorithms for enterprise network security management.”

Prior to deploying a Bivio Networks DPI-enabled platform, Liu and his team struggled with the limitations of their legacy system, which impeded the use of ever more sophisticated algorithms used to identify and track unknown and new patterns in network traffic. The Bivio platform allows the lab to overcome this impediment and provides an architecture with multidimensional networking and computational scaling capabilities to analyze extremely large amounts of diverse network traffic at line rates.

Bivio Networks is the leader in networking systems for deep packet inspection (DPI)-enabled applications and services essential for network security, visibility, control and monetization.

“Bivio Networks is pleased to partner with Texas A&M and the Real Time Distributed Systems Lab as its research team identifies innovative, holistic approaches to today’s most pressing challenges in systems design and modeling as well as bio-medical measurement and characterization,” said Dr. Elan Amir, president and CEO of Bivio Networks. “The selection of the Bivio 7500 demonstrates that our DPI-enabled networking platforms are well-suited to operate in the most demanding research environments.”

Contact:
Tim Waters
Bivio Networks
925/924-8640
twaters@bivio.net

Popularity: unranked [?]

Dr. Erchin Serpedin, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, and Dr. Qasim Chaudhari, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Iraq University, have co-authored Synchronization in Wireless Sensor Networks: Parameter Estimation, Performance Benchmarks, and Protocols, a research monograph published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Erchin Serpedin

The book focuses on synchronization of wireless sensor networks, which play a key role in a wide range of civilian and military applications. The book summarizes the most recent advances in the field of synchronization of wireless sensor networks with special emphasis on deriving efficient clock offset estimation schemes and performance benchmarks.

Serpedin joined the Texas A&M electrical and computer engineering department in 1999. He received his Diploma of Electrical Engineer from the Poly­technic Institute of Bucharest, his Specialization Degree in Transmis­sion and Processing of Information from L’Ecole Superieure d’Electricite (SU­PELEC) in Paris, his M.S. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, ECE School in Atlanta, and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

His research interests are in the ar­eas of signal processing for wireless communications, equalization/syn­chronization of communication channels, statistical signal process­ing, spectral analysis, and antenna array signal processing.

Honors include receiving the Best Paper award at The International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: (CCCT ‘04) and a TEES Fac­ulty Fellow Award, as well as being award­ed the prestigious Faculty Early Ca­reer Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). He also is the as­sociate editor for several journals and has authored numerous jour­nals and other publications.

Written by Deana Totzke, deana@ece.tamu.edu

Popularity: unranked [?]

Dr. Prasad Enjeti, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, and two Texas A&M University at Qatar faculty members are part of a team of investigators leading a $4 million National Science Foundation project to design new materials with enhanced capabilities for efficient energy conversion.

Enjeti, who is also associate dean at Texas A&M at Qatar, along with mechanical engineering professors Richard Griffin and Annie Ruimi, will collaborate with researchers from Texas A&M, Georgia Tech and the University of Houston for the development of the International Institute for Multifunctional Materials for Energy Conversion (IIMEC). The mission of the IIMEC is to create an active network of materials researchers between the U.S. and countries of the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean.

Using state-of-the-art laboratories, computational facilities and cyber infrastructure, the IIMEC will research multifunctional materials that exhibit strong coupling among different fields. The three overarching themes of the IIMEC are thermal/magnetic and mechanical coupling (smart materials and shape memory alloys); electrical and mechanical coupling (electroactive polymers, ceramics, hybrids); and optical/thermal and electrical coupling (photovoltaics, thermoelectrics, fuel cells).

Enjeti, who holds the TI Professorship in Engineering, joined the Texas A&M electrical engineering faculty in 1988. He is the lead developer of the Fuel Cell Power Systems Laboratory and Power Electronics and Power Quality Laboratory at Texas A&M, and does consulting work in the area of power electronics, power quality and clean power utility interface issues. Enjeti’s research focuses on power electronics and power quality; advancing switching power supply designs and solutions to complex power management issues in the context of analog mixed-signal applications; exploring alternative designs to meet the demands of high slew rate load currents at low output voltages; power conditioning systems for fuel cells, wind and solar energy systems; and design of high temperature power conversion systems with wide bandgap semiconductor devices.

Enjeti holds four United States patents, has licensed two new technologies in the industry, and has written six book chapters and more than 100 journal and conference papers. Enjeti was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2000 and received a Ford Motor Co. Fellow award in 2001.

Enjeti also received a TEES (Texas Engineering Experiment Station) Select Young Fellow Award in 1992 for research contributions and a Texas A&M University Faculty Fellow Award in 2001. He received a university-level Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching from the Association of Former Students of Texas A&M University in 2004.

A registered professional engineer in Texas, Enjeti received his bachelor’s degree from Osmania University (India), his master’s from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kanpur) and his doctorate from Concordia University (Canada), all in electrical engineering.

Written by Deana Totzke, deana@ece.tamu.edu

Popularity: unranked [?]

Dr. Raffaella Righetti

Dr. Raffaella Righetti, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, and her student Biren Parmar received a second-place poster award at the National Meeting for Human Performance 2009 in Houston.

Participants at the meeting come from many different universities, including Texas A&M, Rice University, the University of Houston and University of Miami, and the top four posters are awarded each year.

Righetti’s team poster, “New Ultrasound Imaging Techniques To Visualize Bone Fractures,” detailed their study aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of using novel ultrasound techniques as alternative imaging modalities to standard X-ray imaging methods for bone imaging applications.

Righetti joined the electrical engineering department at Texas A&M in 2007 as an assistant professor. She received her Doctor of Engineering from the Universitá degli Studi di Firenze (Italy) and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Houston.

Righetti’s formal training is in ultrasound imaging with special emphasis in cancer imaging applications. She has published articles in leading journals in the area of ultrasound and elasticity imaging, and serves as a reviewer of several major journals in the field of biomedical imaging.

Written by Deana Totzke, deana@ece.tamu.edu

Popularity: unranked [?]

Flying robot fairies are joining human actors in Texas A&M University’s production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which runs through Sunday (Nov. 15) in the Rudder Forum.

A pizza-sized AirRobot helicopter used for military operations in Iraq, and six toy radio controlled helicopters slightly bigger than a fist, are part of the high-tech production directed by Amy Hopper, from Texas A&M’s Department of Performance Studies.

Besides being a fun way to introduce science to the general public, researchers from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are using the experience to learn more about how the actors and the audience react to the flying devices.

“Imagine a disaster with people unsure of where to go or how to handle a riot,” says computer science and engineering professor Robin Murphy, who is an expert in rescue robotics. “It’s now possible for these unmanned aerial vehicles to be used for evacuation or for crowd control. But what’s missing is understanding what makes a person trust or fear the robot.”

Over the month of rehearsals and during the first four performances last weekend, Murphy and her colleagues, Dylan Shell and Takis Zourntos, have documented several surprises. One was that people thought the robots were smarter and tougher than they really were. Invariably, people would initially handle the robots roughly and launch them from a variety of positions, leading to damage and crashes. The actors also showed little fear of the robots, even the larger one.

“This means people might ignore a robot’s instructions or worse walk into rotor blades on a large robot and get hurt,” Murphy says. “The robots by themselves apparently aren’t scary, so we need additional research to make them move like friendly hummingbirds or angry bees to get the desired effect.”

The roboticists quickly coached the actors and made sure anyone interacting with a robot understood the limitations, leading to another surprise: If a small robot crashed into the audience that had not been instructed on how to handle the robot, the audience members would mimic how the actors treated the robots. They learned how to react to robots by watching others.

The performers are enthusiastic about the robots.

“The idea of flying robot fairies was one I had early on, as soon as I heard about the possibility of a collaboration with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering,” Hopper says. “What’s great is that they have been a part of the production from the beginning and the robots seem more and more like characters that have always been a part of the story. To see them flying, spinning and bouncing through the air just adds to the magic and mystery of the world Shakespeare created.”

This is first known production of any Shakespeare play with mobile robots. A 2008 production of Cymbeline by the Quantum Theater and Carnegie Mellon used robotic technology but not robots.

Performances on Friday and Saturday are scheduled for 8 p.m., with a 2 p.m. performance on Sunday. A robot “petting zoo” is scheduled following the Sunday performance.

For more information contact Dr. Robin Murphy by phone 979-845-2015, or via e-mail at murphy@cse.tamu.edu.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Three longtime faculty members in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University have been granted emeritus status by the Board of Regents of The Texas A&M University System.

Dr. Leland A. Carlson, Dr. Billy L. Edge and Dr. Hans Juvkam-Wold have been granted the title  professor emeritus. The title is added to each faculty member’s current designation or rank and recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the university and the A&M System through their dedicated service.

Dr. Leland Carlson

Carlson joined the aerospace engineering faculty in 1969 after receiving his Ph.D. in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Ohio State University. At Texas A&M his primary activities involved teaching, advising and research. He served Texas A&M Engineering for three years as assistant/associate dean of engineering undergraduate programs and has devoted considerable time and effort to aerospace engineering education accreditation activities with ABET. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Society of Engineering Education, and is the recipient of many teaching awards including the AIAA/ASEE J.Leland Atwood Aerospace Engineering Education Award.

Dr. Billy Edge

Edge joined the civil engineering department in 1993. During his tenure at Texas A&M, he headed the Coastal and Ocean Engineering Division in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering and also served as director of the Reta and Bill Haynes ’46 Coastal Engineering Laboratory. He holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in civil engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Edge is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and received the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal for his commitment and contribution as a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers External Review Panel that was tasked with providing an independent and objective review of the work of the Hurricane Katrina Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force.

Dr. Hans Juvkam-Wold

Juvkam-Wold joined the faculty at Texas A&M in 1985 and began to develop the graduate program of teaching and research in drilling. He assumed the position of assistant department head and undergraduate advisor in 1993, and interim head in 1996 and 2003. He has more than 20 years of experience in the petroleum industry, from his beginnings as a field lab technician in Venezuela to supervisory positions for Gulf Oil Exploration and Production Co. in Alaska. He earned bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Juvkam-Wold is a registered professional engineer and holder of several U.S. patents.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Dr. Hong “Helen” Liang, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Dr. Hong "Helen" Liang

The Fellow grade is the highest elected grade of membership in ASME. Fellowship is conferred upon a member with at least 10 years of active engineering practice and who has made significant contributions to the profession.

ASME said Liang’s research in the field of manufacturing and materials, particularly in chemical-mechanical planarization has helped industry to optimize manufacturing processes, to develop new products and to reduce cost. Through her research and education activities, she has mentored more than 100 high school, undergraduate and graduate students throughout her career.

A Texas A&M faculty member since 2004, Liang’s research interests are in surface science and engineering, (nano)tribology, tribochemistry, bio-nanointerfaces, biomaterials, nanomanufacturing and chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP).

Before coming to Texas A&M, Liang was an associate professor at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Prior to that, she was at the microelectronic industry after two years of postdoctoral studies at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She has served as a visiting professor or scholar at the Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Ecole Centrale de Lyon in France and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Liang received an Award of Excellence from Cabot in 1997 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2002. She is a Fellow of the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers in which she also serves as a member of the board of directors; and a member of ASME, the American Society of Metals/Heat Treatment Society and the Materials Research Society.

Liang holds a bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering from Beijing University of Iron and Steel Technology, received a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

About ASME
ASME helps the global engineering community develop solutions to real world challenges. Founded in 1880 as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, ASME is a not-for-profit professional organization that enables collaboration, knowledge sharing and skill development across all engineering disciplines. ASME codes and standards, publications, conferences, continuing education and professional development programs provide a foundation for advancing technical knowledge and world safety. For more information visit www.asme.org.

Written by Lesley Kriewald, lesleyk@tamu.edu

Popularity: unranked [?]

Dr. Mahmoud El-Halwagi

Mahmoud El-Halwagi, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been named recipient of the 2009 Research Excellence in Sustainable Engineering Award.

The prestigious award is presented by the Sustainable Engineering Forum (SEF) of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and recognizes basic or applied research results relative to the sustainability of products, processes or the environment. It is annually bestowed upon a researcher who has made significant technical contributions to the advancement of sustainable engineering in research, teaching and development activities.

Holder of the McFerrin Professorship, El-Halwagi is internationally known for his pioneering contributions in the fields of sustainable design and process integration, and he has written two widely used texts on the subject. At Texas A&M, he teaches senior-level undergraduate and graduate classes, covering the areas of sustainability, process design, simulation, economics, integration and optimization.

The SEF seeks collaborative work in programming and education objectives with other professional societies, both national and foreign. Specific focus areas of the forum include using appropriate metrics for sustainability; developing approaches for designing products and processes that can be optimized to desired metrics criteria and that incorporate environmental and societal benefit factors; and assessing impacts of resource use on environmental and social benefits of products, processes and services.

Other focus areas include designing new processes or products that are comparatively benign; responding to socioeconomic measures such as emission trading; and developing educational materials related to the field.

El-Halwagi will receive the award at an awards ceremony taking place during the 2009 AIChE Annual Meeting in Nashville.

Written by Ryan Garcia, ryan.garcia99@tamu.edu

Popularity: unranked [?]