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Graduate student in aerospace engineering wins 2023 Breakwell Award

Keziban Saloglu, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering, was awarded the 2023 Breakwell Student Paper Award, a prestigious student prize in astrodynamics. Saloglu, in her second year at Auburn, was presented the award at the Space Flight Mechanics Meeting in January in Austin, Texas, hosted by the American Astronautical Society and cohosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Saloglu’s award-winning paper, “Existence of Infinitely Many Optimal Equal-∆v (Delta-V) Trajectories in Two-Body Dynamics,” shares a breakthrough method for spacecraft impulsive trajectory optimization.

Saloglu said Auburn Engineering’s aerospace program played a key role in developing her research skills.

“I had never before worked on optimal control problems or trajectory optimization at such a fundamental level,” she said. “Most of what I learned in these areas happened at Auburn. I was able to take classes like Optimal Control of Aerospace Vehicles and Advanced Trajectory Optimization and apply what I learned to my research.”

Two students in aerospace engineering selected to DoD SMART cohort

Two students in aerospace engineering, doctoral candidate Cody Shelton and junior Megan Hayes, were among two of 10 scholars nationwide chosen for the 2023 Summer Department of Defense Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (DoD SMART) International Internship Cohort. Through this program, they will conduct advanced research at the von Karman Institute (VKI) for Fluid Dynamics in Sint-Genesius-Rode, Belgium.

VKI is a non-profit international educational and scientific organization for fluid dynamics.

“Working at VKI will help me prepare for my career, as well as let me apply what I am learning at Auburn to real-world scenarios,” Hayes said.

“This internship provides me, and other SMART scholars, the opportunity to spend the summer at an internationally renowned institute, working alongside scientists and engineers conducting aeronautics and aerospace, environmental and applied fluid dynamics, turbomachinery and propulsion and more,” said Shelton. “Ultimately, this exposure will enable me to better understand scientific cooperation between the U.S. and Europe in an emerging technology field.”

AUTRI wins national CUTC 2022 Technology Transfer Leadership Award

The Auburn University Transportation Research Institute (AUTRI) was awarded the Council of University Transportation Center‘s (CUTC) 2022 Technology Transfer Leadership Award at the CUTC Annual Awards Banquet held in January in Washington D.C. in conjunction with the 102nd Annual Transportation Research Board (TRB) Meeting. On hand to accept the award were Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Jeffrey LaMondia and AUTRI Director Larry Rilett. The CUTC Technology Transfer Leadership Award recognizes outstanding leadership in designing and delivering technology transfer programs.

The winning AUTRI T2 program was a true collaboration. Led by LaMondia, the team included graduate students Fernando Cordero and Corinne Arcenal, as well Sondra Parmer, Ruth Brock and Mitch Carter from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System (ACES).

Their work was done as part of a fiveyear, $5 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The focus was on 13 Alabama counties with some of the highest obesity rates in the country. The project centered on using transportation to improve active travel in these communities and encourage a healthier lifestyle.

Listen to our podcast with Jeffrey LaMondia at eng.auburn.edu/ginning

“We developed a multi-step program that is implemented in the communities. It takes a lot of our complex engineering tools and processes and simplifies them so that folks who work in the community can start advocating for these improvements,” LaMondia said.

Auburn Engineering hosts Future City regional finals for middle school competitors

Making the world a better place is an admirable goal and one that sixth, seventh and eighth-grade student teams from across Alabama and Tennessee aimed to achieve as they competed in the Future City regional finals held on the Auburn Engineering campus in January at the Brown-Kopel Center.

The theme of this year’s competition was “The Climate Change Challenge” and the student teams were tasked with researching ways for their future cities to adapt and mitigate the effects of weather and environmental shifts.

A team from Hampton Cove Middle School in Huntsville was awarded first prize trophies, a check for $300 and a trip to the Future City Competition international finals in Washington, D.C. in February during Engineers Week for their design of their future city, “Ankurville.”

Central School of Huntsville and Curry Ingram Academy of Brentwood, Tennessee, were awarded second and third place, respectively.

An additional 14 special awards sponsored by engineering professional societies, which included prizes of commemorative plaques and checks for $150, were awarded in categories such as “Most Innovative & Sustainable Use of Water Systems” and “Best Use of Sustainable Infrastructure.”

Graduate student in CSSE selected to attend CRA-WP women’s conference

Through her research, Prashamsa Pandey aims to introduce fundamental principles of computer science while integrating robotics and music into the rapidly growing field of technology, especially to children. Not only is she exploring new methods to reach this young audience through research, but she shared ideas and identify new ones with like-minded scholars.

Pandey, a fourth semester graduate student in computer science and software engineering, attended the prestigious Computing Research Association (CRA)Widening Participating (WP) Graduate Cohort for Women, held in April in San Francisco.

There, attendees interacted with roughly 20 senior female computing-related researchers and professionals, who shared pertinent information on graduate school survival skills and personal insights.

Biosystems senior wins Engineer Together design competition

The top two prize winners of the second annual Engineer Together design competition, hosted March 15 by the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering’s Inclusion and Diversity Committee, were recognized in front of a crowd of students, faculty and staff as part of the inaugural Engineer Together Day.

Camille Coulter, a biosystems engineering senior, took home the top prize of $300 sponsored by International Paper, and a large collegiate rug sponsored by Milliken & Co. Her design will be adopted by the Inclusion and Diversity Committee for use on select promotional items and the Engineer Together webpage for the year.

Second prize in the design contest was awarded to Ashton Stroud, a sophomore in computer science and software engineering. Stroud was awarded $100 from International Paper and a mediumsized collegiate rug from Milliken & Co.

Associate professor in ECE elected co-chair at two laser application conferences

Masoud Mahjouri-Samani, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Auburn University Laser-Assisted Science and Engineering lab, will co-chair two prestigious laser application conferences.

He will co-chair the International Society for Optics and Photonics Nanoscale and Quantum Materials Conference at Photonics West in San Francisco, as well as the International Conference on Laser Ablation in Crete, Greece.

“It was a great honor to be chosen by the conferences’ advisory boards when they were searching for a recognized U.S. representative in the field to co-chair these conferences,” said Mahjouri-Samani, who is also the elected secretary of the user executive committee at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Science. “This is a great opportunity to represent Auburn University and further enhance the college’s visibility on an international level.”

Occupational safety education and research programs renewed

The Center for Occupational Safety, Ergonomics and Injury Prevention, part of the Auburn University Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, recently had two education and research training programs renewed for five years by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

The programs are part of the Deep South Center for Occupational Health and Safety, a collaboration with the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The

Recruiting trip to national laboratory leaves lasting impression on students

Nine students — six from Auburn Engineering and three from the College of Sciences and Mathematics — toured one of the world’s largest three-dimensional particle accelerators, got an up-close view of the world’s most powerful magnet and even controlled robots.

More importantly, they were interviewed for potential internship and career opportunities.

An eye-opening visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in December, provided an introduction into an expanding scientific world with a better understanding of what working in a national laboratory might resemble.

grants supporting the programs bring approximately $2 million to Auburn. NIOSH and Auburn University have a history dating to the early 1970s, but the history of the Auburn University Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering safety and ergonomics program goes back to the late 1960s.

“Since I had never been to a national laboratory before, I had no idea what to expect,” said Lyndsey Rice, a junior in computer science and software engineering from Chattanooga, Tennessee. “LANL surprised me in that it’s filled with an attitude of curiosity, a desire to learn and try never-done methods, as well as a feeling of collaboration that extends between all experience levels of employees. This culture was exciting to experience, especially when the current researchers that met with us in informal interviews seemed genuinely interested in hearing about our education and interests, and how we could find a place in the lab.”