Engineer Spring 2015

SPRING 2015

IN SID E AUTOMATING THE EYE EXAM ­

Boston University College of Engineering

TACKLING SUSTAINABILITY AT WALMART

DON’T JUST SIT THERE. Boston University College of Engineering

College of Engineering

PLAY. Online prep + active classroom learning = better engineers.

message from the dean

How Can Digital Technologies Transform On-Campus Engineering Education?

New digital and online technologies have the potential to improve not just the quality of engineering courses, but their capacity to excite and engage students so they will be more likely to remain in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

W

hen the national media fervor over Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) reached its peak two years ago, I argued they were, in fact, not destined to be the magical elixir that would dramatically and instantly reduce the cost of a college education.

Instead, I saw them as another tool for educators that might complement residential college education. Since then, the clamor has settled down, and we are, indeed, finding ways to make advanced educational technologies realize their potential to transform the quality of pedagogy and engineering education in general.

Used wisely, these new digital and online technologies have the potential to improve not just the quality of engineering courses, but their capacity to excite and engage students so they will be more likely to remain in science, technology, engineering and math fields. This is important at a time when employers are starved for qualified graduates and engineering schools nationally are trying to retain students, particularly in the demanding first two years of the program.

As highlighted in this issue’s cover story, more and more of our faculty are experimenting with these technologies in the classroom. They have enabled a change from the traditional lecture-­followed-byhomework model. In several sections of our core required courses, students now are expected and motivated to engage the fundamental concepts of the lecture topic before class via carefully designed digital content, such as short videos and questions to assess initial understanding. They then look forward to solving problems during class time, typically in small groups seated around tables as both the instructor and a set of upper class learning assistants roam this new “studio” classroom offering guidance and answering questions. Early indications are that this approach is working terrifically.

As educators, we are looking at two primary metrics to gauge the effectiveness of these new

techniques. One is student performance, and we are seeing that students are performing at least as well as—and in the cases of struggling students, much better than—they did in conventional classes. But even more important, I believe, is the shift in attitude we are seeing. Students are clearly more engaged in the studio classroom and are conveying an increased interest and enjoyment of these courses. All of this stands to benefit not just themselves, but also society, as students are more likely to stick with their engineering majors.

We have also begun sharing our experiences with colleagues in other STEM departments at BU— such as math, physics, chemistry and biology— where our students take several of their courses. I believe students in other STEM fields have as much to gain from these new technologies as engineering students do.

As with anything new, there are challenges associated with this approach; one is the technology itself. We need to improve the formats so faculty can use them comfortably and creatively without having to become IT experts. We will need faculty who are successful with these new technologies to mentor others and show them the way, while giving faculty the time they need to develop these courses.

One of the more immediate challenges is creating the physical space the studio classroom requires. Packing students into neat, stadium-like rows is space efficient, but not conducive to peer learning and roving instructors. Converting conventional classrooms to the more effective studio format is now one of our fundraising priorities.

I believe these challenges can and will be met.

As with the best engineering, education requires us to push into new territory and use our experiences to improve. I believe that the future of engineering education will look much different, and produce more and better engineers ready to move our society forward.

PHOTOGRAPH BY KALMAN ZABARSKY

BY DEAN KENNETH R. LUTCHEN

CONTENTS • SPRING 2015 FEATURES

12

UPENDING THE LECTURE

How online teaching methods are enhancing on-campus learning

22 Teched-up surgical training for thousands

BME alum changes the way the world trains in minimally invasive techniques.

26 Sustainability: Just one more thing you can get at Walmart

ECE alum Kathleen McLaughlin takes on the global challenge of sustainability at the retail giant.­

DEPARTMENTS 3

inENG

30

Faculty News

34

Alumni News

HIGHLIGHTS

10

Student group preps rocket

PHOTOGRAPH BY CONOR DOHERTY

30

Pal wins metallurgy award

cover photography by conor doherty. correction: the photographs for the new transformers (engineer, fall 2014, pages 1 and 10) were by mike pecci.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

1

engineering leadership advisory board John E. Abele Founder & Director, Boston Scientific

Joseph Healey ’88 Senior Managing Director, HealthCor Management LP

Policy; Former Dean, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, Harvard University

Gregg Adkin ’86 Managing Director, EMC Ventures, EMC Corporation

Jon Hirschtick Founder & Chairman, OnShape Inc.

Girish Navani ’91 CEO, eClinicalWorks

Adel Al-Saleh ’87 Group Chief Executive, Northgate Information Solutions

William I. Huyett Director, McKinsey & Company Inc.

Stephen N. Oesterle, MD Senior Vice President—Medicine & Technology, Medtronic Inc.

Alan Auerbach ’91 CEO, President and Chairman, Puma Biotechnology Inc. Adam Crescenzi ’64 Founding Partner/Owner, TELOS Partners Roger A. Dorf ’70 Former Vice President, Wireless Group, Cisco Systems Ronald G. Garriques ’86 CEO and Chairman, Gee Holdings LLC

Amit Jain ’85, ’88 President and CEO, Prysm Inc. Dean L. Kamen, Hon.’06 President & Founder, DEKA Research & Development Corp.

Peter Levine ’83 General Partner, Andreesen Horowitz Nick Lippis ’84, ’89 President, Lippis Enterprises Inc. Venkatesh Narayanamurti Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology & Public

Anton Papp ’90 Vice President, Corporate Development, Teradata Inc. Richard D. Reidy, SMG’82 Former President and CEO, Progress Software Corp.

Binoy K. Singh, MD’89 Associate Chief of Cardiology, Lenox Hill Hospital, North Shore LIJ John Tegan ’88 President and CEO, Communication Technology Services LLC

eng west coast alumni leadership council Bettina Briz Himes ’86 Director, Technology Alliances, GoPro

Roger A. Hajjar ’88 Chief Technical Officer, Prysm Inc.

Christopher Brousseau ’91 Global Commercial Director, Accenture Inc.— Spend Management Services

Kent W. Hughes ’79 Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, Verizon

Gregory Cordrey ’88 Partner, Jeffer Mangles Butler & Mitchell LLP

Michele Iacovone CGS’86, ’89 Vice President, Chief Architect, Intuit Inc.

Gregory Courand ’79 President, Founder and Chief Methodologist, Synergia LLC Mark Deem ’88 Partner, The Foundry Inc.

Martin Lynch ’82 Executive Vice President, Operations, Xicato Inc.

Vanessa Feliberti ’93 Partner, General Engineering Manager, Microsoft

Rao Mulpuri ’92, ’96 CEO, Viewglass Inc.

Richard Fuller ’88 Head of R&D, OmniTrail Technologies

Sandip Patidar, MD ’90 Managing Partner, Titanium Capital Partners Sanjay Prasad ’86, ’87 Principal, Prasad IP

Timothy Gardner ’00 Founder & CEO, Riffyn Inc.

Daniel C. Maneval ’82 Vice President, Pharmacology & Safety Assessment, Halozyme Therapeutics

Solomon R. Eisenberg

senior associate dean for academic programs Catherine Klapperich

associate dean for research & technology development Thomas D. C. Little

associate dean for educational initiatives 2 Please recycle B U C O0315 LLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Gregory Seiden ’80 Vice President, Applications Integration, Oracle Corp.

Dylan P. Steeg ’95 Director of Business Development, Skytree Inc. Francis Tiernan ’70 President, Anritsu Company Joseph Winograd ’95, ’97 Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Verance Corp Jamshaud Zovein ’95, GSM’99 Chief Operating Officer, Algert Coldiron Investors

Gretchen Fougere

Mark Dwortzan

Bruce Jordan

assistant dean for development & alumni relations ENGineer is produced for the alumni and

friends of the Boston University College of Engineering.

Please direct any questions or comments to Michael Seele, Boston University College of Engineering, 44 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215.

Phone: 617-353-2800 Email: engalum@bu.edu Website: www.bu.edu/eng

Join the ENG online community!

Post, tag, tweet, ask questions, reconnect with alumni and learn about networking opportunities, job fairs, seminars and other news and events.

facebook.com/ BUCollegeofENG

@BUCollegeofENG

John Scaramuzzo ’87 Senior Vice President, Scan Disk Inc.

Michael Seele

associate dean for outreach & diversity

dean

George M. Savage ’81 Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, Proteus Digital Health

Richard Lally

associate dean for administration

Kenneth R. Lutchen

Sharad Rastogi ’91 Vice President, Strategy and Marketing, Cisco Systems

STAY CONNECTED TO THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

editor

managing editor Jan Smith

staff writer contributors

Rich Barlow, Leslie Friday, Gabriella McNevin, Barbara Moran, Sara Rimer and Susan Seligson

design & production

Boston University Creative Services

photography

College of Engineering, except where indicated

youtube.com/ BUCollegeofENG

Making nanomanufacturing viable

7

Revolutionizing the eye exam

9

Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE, BME, MSE) (left) and Associate Professor John Connor (MED) have developed a rapid, chip-scale photonic device that can detect viruses, including Ebola, on site.

Containing Ebola With Nanotechnology

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE PRUE

BU TEAM’S DEVICE DETECTS VIRUS QUICKLY AND ON SITE

O

ne of the big problems hindering containment of Ebola in the current epidemic is the cost and difficulty of diagnosing the disease when a patient is first seen. Conventional fluorescent label-based virus detection methods require expensive lab equipment, significant sample preparation, transport and processing times, and extensive training to use. One potential solution may come from researchers at the College of Engineering and the School of Medicine, who have spent the past five years advancing a rapid, labelfree, chip-scale photonic device that can provide affordable, simple and accurate on-site detection. The device could be used to diagnose Ebola

and other hemorrhagic fever diseases in resource-limited countries.

The first demonstration of the concept, described in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters in 2010 and developed by Professor Selim Ünlü’s (ECE, BME, MSE) research group in collaboration with Professor Bennett Goldberg (Physics, BME, ECE), showed the ability to pinpoint and size single H1N1 virus particles. Now, after four years of refining the instrumentation in collaboration with Associate Professor John Connor (MED) and other hemorrhagic fever disease researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch, the team has demonstrated the simultaneous detection of multiple viruses in blood serum samples—including viruses genetically modified to mimic the behavior of Ebola and the Marburg virus.

Mentioned in Forbes magazine as a potentially game-changing technology for the containment of Ebola, the device identifies individual viruses based on size variations due to distinct genome lengths and other factors. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the research is showcased in ACS Nano.

“Others have developed different label-free systems, but none have been nearly as successful in detecting nanoscale viral particles E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

3

Containing Ebola with Nanotechnology

CON TIN UED

in complex media,” said Ünlü, referring to typical biological samples in which a mix of viruses, bacteria and proteins may be present.

“Leveraging expertise in optical biosensors and hemorrhagic fever diseases, our collaborative research effort has produced a highly sensitive device with the potential to perform rapid diagnostics in clinical settings.”

Whereas conventional methods can require up to an hour for sample preparation and two hours or more for processing, the current Boston University prototype requires little to no sample preparation time and delivers answers in about an hour.

“By minimizing sample preparation and handling, our system can reduce potential exposure to healthcare workers,” said Connor.

“And by looking for multiple viruses at the same time, patients can be diagnosed much more effectively.”

The shoebox-sized prototype diagnostic device, known as the Single Particle Interferometric Reflectance Imaging Sensor (SP-IRIS), detects pathogens by shining light from multi-color LED sources on viral nanoparticles bound to the sensor surface by a coating of virus-specific antibodies. Interference of light reflected from the surface is modified by the presence of the particles, producing a distinct signal that reveals the size and shape of each particle. The sensor surface is very large and can capture the telltale responses of up to a million nanoparticles.

In collaboration with BD Technologies and NexGen Arrays, a BU Photonics Center-based startup run by longtime SP-IRIS developers David Freedman (EE, PhD’10) and postdoctoral fellow George Daaboul (BME, PhD’13), the research team is now working on making IRIS more robust, field-ready and fast—ideally delivering answers within 30 minutes— through further technology development and preclinical trials.

SP-IRIS devices are now being tested in multiple labs, including a Biosafety Level-4 (BSL-4) lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch that’s equipped to work with hemorrhagic viruses. Other tests will be conducted at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) once the facility is approved for BSL-4 research. Based on the team’s current rate of progress, a field-ready instrument could be ready to enter the medical marketplace in five years.

4

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

EPIC Design Studio Named for Lorraine A. Tegan college of engineering dean kenneth r.

Lutchen welcomed John Tegan (MFG’88) and several members of his family to campus on November 24 for the dedication of the design studio in the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC) in honor of Tegan’s mother, Lorraine A. Tegan.

Noting that Tegan recently made a substantial gift to the College, Lutchen said, “John Tegan’s support for EPIC and the College of Engineering will impact literally every undergraduate who comes through the College for many years to come. All undergraduates will work in the Lorraine A. Tegan Design Studio during their time here.”

Tegan, who serves on the Dean’s Leadership Advisory Board, said, “My mother, Lorraine Tegan, was a lifelong educator and mathematician. Supporting EPIC is a wonderful way for me to honor her memory and all that she meant to me.”

EPIC opened earlier this year as a cuttingedge facility that allows students to learn the entire concept-to-deployment innovation process. At EPIC, students can develop their

ENG Grads Pursue Internships With New Engineering Practice Option the college of engineering has introduced a new Engineering Practice option for Master of Science (MS) and Master of Engineering (MEng) students in all concentrations.

Students may now add the designation— which is widely recognized by employers and research institutions— “with Engineering Practice” to their degree by completing an approved internship in their field of study.

The Engineering Practice option recognizes the power of combining rigorous academic coursework with supervised

ideas for new products, design them, create prototypes and learn the advanced manufacturing process. The Lorraine A. Tegan Design Studio will serve as the space where students can work out their design ideas using paper and pencil or computers.

John Tegan is CEO of Communication Technology Services (CTS), a Marlboro, Massachusetts-based leader in the design, engineering and installation of distributed antenna systems. For more than two decades, he has helped transform CTS from a small family business into a national telecommunications services corporation with more than 500 employees. More than 5,000 CTS systems can be found in hospitals, hotels, college campuses, stadiums, theme parks, government buildings, airports and other venues across the country. —michael seele College of Engineering Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen and John Tegan (MFG’88) at the naming of the Lorraine A. Tegan Design Studio

real-world research or industrial applications.

Participating students enhance classroom learning with practical experiences that enable them to both develop and apply technical, project management and leadership skills.

The new designation formalizes and recognizes graduate-level internships, which several engineering students have pursued in recent years. Some, like Abhinav Nair (MEng’14), who last summer helped develop a major, new online educational curriculum for the educational publisher Pearson, have parlayed internships into full-time jobs.

“My internship helped me transition from being a student in a nest to spreading my wings as a professional engineer,” said Nair.

“I wouldn’t think twice before recommending it to my peers.”—jan smith for more information, visit bu.edu/ eng/academics/masters/internships.

BU-Brigham and Women’s Hospital Partnership Celebrates First Year JOINT RESEARCH FOCUSED ON LESS INVASIVE, MORE ACCURATE MEDICAL IMAGING AND IMAGEGUIDED INTERVENTIONS

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF BRIGHAM & WOMEN’S HOSPITAL

B

oston University College of Engineering Assistant Professor Darren Roblyer (BME) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital radiologist Srinivisan Mukundan are exploring a strategy that combines a new optical imaging device developed

by Roblyer with emerging magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to probe malignant brain tumors during chemotherapy treatment.

Their research could enable clinicians to monitor the effectiveness of chemotherapy over the course of treatment and implement changes to chemotherapy drugs and dose levels as needed.

The project is one of five now receiving funding through an ongoing partnership between Boston University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. On September 12 at the BU Photonics Center, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen and Dr. Steven Seltzer, Chair of the BWH Department of Radiology, announced the second year of the partnership, which has already provided one year of seed funding to projects ranging from image-guided cancer drug delivery to early detection of heart disease.

“The goal is to leverage synergies between the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Radiology Department’s expertise in imaging and image-guided interventions and the College of Engineering’s strengths in developing new materials and technologies as well as novel techniques for processing images and large data sets,” said Associate Professor Tyrone Porter (ME, BME, MSE), who is coordinating

BU-BWH researchers may use BWH’s Advanced Multimodality Image-Guided Operating Suite (AMIGO) to develop less invasive, more accurate medical procedures.

the partnership. “The hope is to stimulate research collaborations between the two campuses and develop a National Institutes of Health training program in clinical imaging and image-guided interventions.”

The brainchild of Lutchen and Seltzer, the BU-BWH partnership brings together worldclass expertise and equipment from Boston University entities such as the BU Photonics Center and the BU Center for Nanoscience & Nanobiotechnology, and from the BWH Department of Radiology, home to the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Image-Guided Therapy and the Advanced Multimodality Image-Guided Operating Suite

Five projects are now receiving funding through an ongoing partnership between Boston University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

(AMIGO). Joint research between the two campuses could result in less invasive, more accurate medical imaging and image-guided interventions.

First-round projects include the engineering of a new “molecular imaging” MRI contrast agent for detecting early calcification of the aortic valve; the combination of ultrasound and MR data to evaluate the elastic properties of tissues, which are associated with pathological indicators of disease; a clinical decision support system for patient-specific cancer diagnosis and management; and ultrasound-guided delivery of chemotherapy drug-laden nanoparticles to metastasized lung cancer cells in the brain.

Applications for second-round projects are now underway.

Participating ENG faculty include Professors Joyce Wong (BME, MSE), Paul Barbone (ME, MSE), Venkatesh Saligrama (ECE, SE) and Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, SE); Associate Professor Porter; and Assistant Professor Roblyer.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

5

METHOD COULD SPUR NEW APPROACHES TO DISEASE

C

ell traction forces, or the tugging of individual cells on their immediate environment, play an important role in fundamental biological processes such as cell division, differentiation and migration, and more complex ones such as embryonic development and inflammation. When receptors on the cell surface called integrins adhere to the cell’s surrounding network of protein scaffolding known as the extracellular matrix, the forces they exert signal to the rest of the cell that important cellular processes are underway.

Measuring those forces over time could reveal more about the inner workings of normal and abnormal cellular development, and enable clinicians to more effectively diagnose and treat cancer, scarring and inflammation. Overcoming several limitations of conventional approaches, a new method developed by Professor Christopher

Cantilever Detects Bacterial Motion SHOWS PROMISE AS SCREENING TECHNOLOGY FOR ANTIBIOTICS

determining the most effective treatment for a bacterial infection can take several days as clinicians culture bacteria from a sample of the infected site, test their response to different antibiotics, and home in on the best choice. Meanwhile, patients receive broadspectrum antibiotics that could be far less effective, leaving them prone to spreading the infection and generating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Now, a new technique developed and evaluated by a team of researchers from the Boston University College of Engineering, 6

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Chen (BME) and collaborators at several institutions—including Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)—promises to measure cell traction forces at unprecedented resolution in space and time.

The researchers described and demonstrated this advance in the online edition of Nature Methods.

“Traditional methods that rely on watching cells pull on soft, synthetic materials could only resolve these forces at the micron or cellular scale, but the new method can do so at the nanoscale level where individual integrins adhere to the extracellular matrix, enabling researchers to obtain a much clearer picture of these forces,” said Chen, a world leader in tissue engineering and mechanobiology, the study of how physical forces and changes in cell or tissue mechanics contribute to development, physiology and disease.

TP Fluorescein

Stress

With funding from the National Institutes of Health and HHMI, the research team engineered a new class of cell traction force probes consisting of single strands of DNA shaped as hairpins of different lengths and DNA sequences—each tuned to unfold when subject to a specific amount of force, and attached to a light-emitting fluorophore (a fluorescent chemical compound) and a “quencher” that effectively dims the fluorophore’s emitted light. When a cell’s integrin pulls on the extracellular matrix (ECM), the force that it exerts causes one of the DNA hairpin probes to unfold, thereby separating the quencher from the fluorophore and freeing it to emit light.

Based on the intensity of this light, a microscope measures the forces exerted by clusters of integrins at each site where a cell adheres to the ECM, and shows how these forces are distributed throughout the cell. As microscopy advances, the new method will enable measurement of cell traction forces at the single integrin level as well.

8 6

Integrin clusters at the edge of a cell

4

2 kPa

Stanford University School of Medicine and Virginia Tech may ultimately reduce antibiotic susceptibility testing time to a matter of minutes and thus enable more precise and effective prescriptions.

The technique centers on a silicon microcantilever designed by Professor Kamil Ekinci (ME) that’s sensitive enough to reveal whether or not onboard bacteria—captured on the surface by a chemical that bonds to their cell walls—are still “alive and kicking” rather than stilled forever by a successful antibiotic. A laser beam continuously reflects off the surface, indirectly detecting subtle, low-frequency vibrations of the diving boardlike cantilever that are caused entirely by bacterial motion.

In recent experiments funded by the National Science Foundation and National

Institutes of Health, the researchers attached a layer of E. coli bacteria to the cantilever, applied the antibiotic streptomycin and observed a cessation of bacterial motion within 30 minutes. They published their results in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

The study introduces a new platform for improving our understanding of the mechanisms behind the motion of and communication among microorganisms—key factors in bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance— and for developing a disposable, microfluidic chip to diagnose bacterial infections and pinpoint suitable antibiotics.

“Ultimately, the cantilever and optical measuring instruments could be incorporated into a compact, user-friendly device that clinicians could use to test a patient’s bacteria sample for antibiotics susceptibility,” said Ekinci.

GRAPHICS BY BRANDON BLAKELY, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Chen Advances Molecular Probe to Track Cellular Forces

Downtyme Wins Beantown Throwdown

Professor David Bishop (ECE, Physics, MSE) and collaborators have developed a low-cost, microelectromechanical systembased method that directs atoms onto a surface through tiny holes in silicon plates that move with nanometer precision.

Making Nanomanufacturing Viable

PHOTOGRAPH (RIGHT) BY SONIA SU (COM’15 ) (DOWNTYME)

MSE’S DAVID BISHOP OFFERS ROAD MAP IN PHYSICS TODAY COVER STORY

bu researchers envision mass-producing high-speed nanoscale devices ranging from integrated circuits to biosensors, but their aspirations have been hampered by a persistent inability to precisely manipulate nanomaterials to build reliable, functional products at a reasonable cost. In a nutshell, the key challenge has been to pattern extremely small materials at exact locations in a repeatable manner over relatively large surfaces—all within a very short time frame. Current nanomanufacturing processes are likely to become wasteful and/ or expensive if applied on a commercial scale, potentially costing orders of magnitude more than the value of the devices or systems they’re designed to build.

“Absent major breakthroughs in nanomanufacturing, the current trend in smartphones, laptops, PCs and other electronic devices toward smaller, faster, better and cheaper models may grind to a halt,” says MSE Division Head and Professor David Bishop (ECE, MSE, Physics). But Bishop is confident that with sufficient investment, nanomanufacturing can evolve from a laboratory technology to one capable of generating commercial products on a massive scale within the next decade or two. In the December 2014 Physics Today cover

STARTUP FOUNDED BY CE JUNIORS WOWS INNOVATION DISTRICT AUDIENCE

story, he and coauthor Matthias Imboden, an ECE postdoc, explored three potential pathways—each requiring further research to overcome current limitations—to the highspeed, low-cost and scalable manufacture of devices with nanoscale features.

They include resist-based nanolithography, a nanoscale version of photolithography, commonly used today in the manufacture of semiconductor devices. This technique passes light, x-rays or electron beams through a mask in which the features or holes are on the order of one-billionth of a meter, resulting in similarsized features on the manufactured device layer. The second approach is nanoimprinting or nanostamping, a process akin to using a nanoscale rubber stamp, and could be ideal for manufacturing memory chips and magnetic displays.

The third strategy is to apply a direct writing technique, controlling the placement of atoms with nanoscale precision. An example of this is dip-pen lithography, which deploys atoms at precise locations on a device surface just as a ballpoint pen’s inkball deposits ink on a piece of paper. Another direct writing technique invented by Bishop at BU, atomic calligraphy, effectively spray-paints atoms at desired locations on a surface through precisely positioned holes in a mask.

“This is not a one-size-fits-all proposition,” he said. “One technique will probably not end up ‘the winner,’ but they’ll all have regions of optimal applicability. Nanomanufacturers of the future may place different technologies on a chip that can be activated at different times to achieve different purposes.”

downtyme, a startup co-founded by barron Roth and Luke Sorenson (both CE’16) based on their final project in ENG EC 327, Introduction to Software Engineering, won the second annual Beantown Throwdown entrepreneurial business pitch competition. Held on November 18 at Boston’s District Hall and organized by the MIT Enterprise Forum, the competition featured three-minute pitches from local college student entrepreneurs. Edging out teams from Harvard, MIT, Northeastern and five other Boston-area colleges and universities vying for votes from a sellout audience of more than 400 students, sponsors and investors, Downtyme received more than $20,000 in in-kind legal and marketing services, mentoring and office space.

The winning project in last year’s ENG Imagineering Competition, the Downtyme app enables users to meet up with other users who are available and nearby. Users identify their friends by linking the app to their Facebook account and indicate their availability by entering or importing their calendars. To bring up a list of nearby Facebook friends, they may either press “Now” or “Later,” depending on when they want to get together. Launched in beta mode in March 2014, a full version of the app was released in February.

Downtyme team members Barron Roth (ENG’16), Luke Sorenson (ENG’16), John Moore (ENG’15), Nick Sorensen (SMG’14), Darryl Johnson (ENG’17), Ben Pusey (CAS’16) and Tufts University senior Nikki Dahan placed first in the Beantown Throwdown. The trophy will be etched with their names and passed on to future competition winners.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

7

ATTENDEES CELEBRATE NEW IEEE JOURNAL EDITED BY ENG’S PASCHALIDIS

microbes are all around us—even inside us—and that’s a good thing. Left alone, these tiny organisms have a huge impact on everything from human health to wastewater treatment. But with a little engineering, they could do even more. In certain environments, their metabolic processes could be exploited to make biofuels, vaccines and other useful products and services. To tap their potential, Associate Professor Daniel Segrè (Biology, BME, Bioinformatics) and collaborators have developed mathematical models to both predict the metabolic interactions that occur among different microbial species under varying environmental conditions, and to design new microbial networks with desired properties.

Segrè presented his research at the first Symposium on the Control of Network

Reducing Highway Congestion Through Software BELTA CO-LEADS $1 MILLION STUDY

traffic congestion is a waste of time, energy and money. In 2011, it caused Americans in metropolitan areas to spend 5.5 billion extra hours on the road and pump 2.9 billion extra gallons of fuel into their gas tanks, with associated costs reaching $121 billion—a nearly sixfold increase since 1982. Municipalities have attempted to mitigate traffic congestion through highway on-ramp metering and fees at peak travel times, but the problem continues to worsen.

Now a research team led by Professor Calin Belta (ME, SE) and University of California, Berkeley Associate Professor Murat Arcak (EECS) is advancing a novel solution that could considerably reduce traffic congestion.

Supported by a three-year, $1 million grant 8

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Systems (SCONES) on October 27-28 in the Photonics Center Colloquium Room.

Sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society and the Center for Information and Systems Engineering at Boston University, SCONES celebrated the inaugural March 2014 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (TCNS), a new IEEE Transactions journal edited by Professor Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE) focused on problems related to the control, design, study, engineering, optimization and emerging behavior of network systems.

“We live in a world that is extremely interconnected,” said Paschalidis, the journal’s editor-in-chief. “This is also true of systems, biological or manmade, that support our modern way of life. Networks, which both connect system components and influence how they function as a whole, are increasingly the focus of leading-edge research, and this is the impetus for TCNS and SCONES.” One author of each paper in the inaugural issue presented at the symposium, along with talks and posters from several other researchers in the field. Representing major research institutions from around the world, SCONES presenters explored the analysis,

from the National Science Foundation, the researchers plan to develop algorithms for a data-driven traffic management software system that optimizes the timing of traffic lights at both highway on-ramps and roadway intersections in real time.

The work represents a novel application of “formal methods,” a discipline within computer science focused on efficient techniques for proving the correct operation of systems ranging from computer programs to digital circuits, thus ensuring their reliability and robust performance.

“We want to develop a system in which we can guarantee specifications for traffic networks just as we do for computer programs,” said Belta. “These specifications will include

Whereas current systems reduce traffic congestion within small networks of freeways and arterial roads, this approach promises to do so across much larger networks.

TCNS Editor-in-Chief Professor Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, SE, BME) (center) with MIT PhD student Andras Gyorgy (left) and another SCONES participant (right) during a poster session.

control and optimization of communication, transportation, electric power, biological, social and other networks. Bringing the TCNS journal to life, the 23 featured speakers—including Professors Christos Cassandras and Lev Levitin (both ECE, SE) addressing challenges in resource allocation and routing—illustrated complex concepts with a flurry of equations, algorithms, graphs and diagrams.

“SCONES is playing a key role in coalescing a community of researchers around the journal,” said Paschalidis.

minimizing traffic jams and maximizing the flow of traffic, all while ensuring that pedestrians don’t have to wait a long time to cross the street.”

Whereas current systems reduce traffic congestion within small networks of freeways and arterial roads, this approach promises to do so across much larger networks. In their algorithms, the researchers plan to partition a large road network into small sub-networks and establish specifications so that enforcing desired traffic patterns in small sub-networks (and on roads linking one sub-network to another) guarantees desired traffic patterns in the original network.

The proposed techniques will be tested in current and upcoming traffic management projects in California sponsored by Caltrans, the state transportation agency. Applications include a prototype decision support system to be deployed along the Interstate 210 corridor north of Los Angeles, and coordinated ramp metering, arterial intersection and variable speed limit management on a freeway in Sacramento and a freeway-arterial interchange in San Jose.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE GREEN

CISE Hosts International Symposium on Control of Network Systems

Vision Quest TWO BU GRADS SEEK TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE EYE EXAM

A

ccording to the World Health Organization, about 90 percent of the world’s visually impaired people live in low-income settings and often there are no eye doctors or eyeglasses available. In Rwanda, for example, there are about 10.5 million people—and 14 vision specialists. Without access to an eye exam or glasses, simple nearsightedness becomes debilitating.

Now two ECE graduates, Yaopeng Zhou and Marc Albanese, are trying to change those bleak statistics. They’ve invented a handheld device called Smart Vision One (SVOne) that scans a person’s eyes, instantly determines whether he or she needs glasses, and decides what their prescription should be. Bolstered by a $1 million, 2013 Powerful Answers award from Verizon, their company, Smart Vision Labs, is poised to start manufacturing and delivering SVOne devices this year.

“This could be big,” said Professor Thomas Bifano (ME, MSE), director of BU’s Photonics Center, who advised both Zhou and Albanese on their theses at BU and now serves on their board of directors. “If this catches on, it could be so cheap that

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CONOR DOHERTY

LEFT: ECE graduates Marc Albanese (left) and Yaopeng Zhou, founders of Smart Vision Labs.

BELOW: The SVOne shines light into the eye and instantly calculates an eyeglass prescription.

“All you have to do is look straight,” said co-creator Marc Albanese.

everyone has one, like a thermometer. It has the potential to be hugely disruptive.”

The device is a small block of plastic (a little larger than a deck of playing cards) that slips over an iPhone. To perform an exam, one person holds the device up to a patient’s eye and presses a button. Light shines into the patient’s eye, bouncing off the retina and back out the front of the eye. Curves and imperfections in an eye will cause beams of light to bend, bouncing out of the front at slightly different angles. A sensor collects this information, the computer in the iPhone interprets it, and the result is a prescription specific to that eye.

Traditionally, optometrists have determined eyeglass prescriptions by asking patients to look through a phoropter, a bulky device on a swivel arm containing multiple lenses. A patient looks through lenses of different strengths and reports which ones make his or her vision the sharpest.

“It’s a big, clunky, subjective measure,” said Albanese. “What we have is a small, portable device that offers you an objective number. It gives you the answer! All you have to do is look straight.”

The device costs $3,950 including an iPhone, a bargain compared to other similar devices on the market that go for between $15,000 and $40,000.

“I’m really excited to see this thing go,” said Bifano. “These two guys took what we taught them at BU and just ran with it. It’s been a thrill for me to see them build something from scratch. They just buckled down and made it happen.”—barbara moran, bu research

MEng Student Develops Wheelchair Health Monitoring Device a man in a wheelchair is home alone when he accidentally maneuvers too close to a staircase. One wheel passes over the edge of the top stair, and the wheelchair teeters on the brink.

Instinctively, the man jerks his arms upwards to regain balance, but he can’t. He and the heavy wheelchair tumble down the steps. Fortunately, the wheelchair and the man are connected to a device that transmits information through the internet to the man’s health care provider. The caretaker is alarmed to see the chair’s abnormal degree of orientation, its acceleration, and The team the man’s rapid heartdeveloped beat. The health care technology provider jumps into that attaches action and rushes to the man’s aid. to the chair Although the above and the user story is fictitious, the to collect technology is not. and send During a 12-week information. internship at Intel, Master of Engineering student Anish Shah (CE) and a team of Intel interns focused on creating a practical gateway device to improve the wheelchair experience and benefit health care monitoring.

The team linked the wheelchair to the “Internet of Things” by developing technology that attaches to the chair and the user to collect and send information. The device can monitor fluctuating physiological and mechanical data such as heart rate, skin temperature and chair orientation and battery power, and transmit it to a health care provider via an Internet application.

It also includes a geo-location monitor enabling users to find wheelchair-accessible venues.

The new technology has received press coverage around the world, including praise from world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. Shah, who came to Boston University with an interest in embedded systems, is currently working under Professor Thomas Little’s (ECE, SE) guidance in the National Science Foundation Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center at Boston University.

—gabriella mcnevin and donald rock (com’17), ece E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

9

Rocket Propulsion Group on a Mission UNDERGRADS AIM TO MAKE BU THE FIRST UNIVERSITY TO LAUNCH A ROCKET INTO SPACE

W

orking long hours in the basement of 110 Cummington Mall, the Boston University Rocket Propulsion Group’s (BURPG) 35 undergraduates—33 from the College of Engineering, one from the College of Arts & Sciences and one from the College of Communication—are designing, building, testing and publicizing Starscraper, a 30-foot-long, 12-inch-diameter rocket designed to propel a 100-pound payload into space and land it safely back on Earth. Assembly and testing is planned for the Spring 2015 semester, with a tentative launch date in July in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

If all goes well, Starscraper will be the first university-based rocket to breach 10

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

the 100-kilometer altitude Kármán Line, commonly regarded as the border between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

BURPG will also become the first nongovernmental and non-corporate entity to do so using a hybrid propulsion system, in which solid fuel reacts with a liquid oxidizer— a combustive mix that provides sufficient thrust to get the rocket off the ground. The current BU system consists of a six-segment structure made of tire rubber (the solid fuel) and a tank of nitrous oxide (the liquid oxidizer), commonly used to sedate dental patients. Its payload will include a GPS tracking system, but future versions could carry everything from telescopes to drug manufacturing experiments into space.

An amateur rocket enthusiast who launched several small-scale rockets before he arrived at Boston University, Armor Harris (ME’15) wowed the judges at the College of Engineering’s first Imagineering Contest with a sounding rocket designed to reach a 100,000-feet altitude that he had partially built in the Imagineering Lab. In many ways, Starscraper is a follow-up to this achievement and the capstone of three years helming the BURPG. Funded in part by GE, Raytheon, FloDesign and SpaceX, and donations through the ENG Annual Fund and the group’s own Kickstarter crowdfunding site, the BURPG rocket is about 10 times cheaper to develop than a comparable NASA hybrid rocket. Several BURPG members have netted internships or job offers from the three corporate sponsors and other companies in the spaceflight industry, including Harris, who is on his second internship as a propulsion development engineer with SpaceX. More importantly, participants are gaining invaluable experience in hands-on engineering, building a solid foundation for their entire careers.

“In the classroom, students can learn how to derive Bernoulli’s equation (which governs fluid flow in pipes), but down here they can build a high-pressure fluid system,” said Harris. “The real value of this mission is that it can serve as a model for engineering education in which students apply theoretical concepts as they learn how to design, build, test and integrate components of a working system.” follow the bu rocket propulsion group’s progress on this mission at burocket.org.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAT GREENHOUSE/BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES (TOP)

clockwise from top: Members of the BU Rocket Propulsion Group test fire a stationary rocket motor/engine.

Armor Harris (ME’15) measuring components during fabrication of the oxidizer tank for Starscraper. Doug Lescarbeau (ME’18), Tom Halstead (ME’16), Joe Beaupre (EE’17) and Jarrod Risley (ME’17) pose with the Active Stabilization Test Rocket, used to test the control system that will guide Starscraper into space.

A Paper Strip Test for TB? BME POSTDOC DEMOS PROMISING PORTABLE DIAGNOSTIC

D

iagnostic tests for tuberculosis (TB) usually involve chest x-rays, which require heavy, expensive equipment, or phlegm samples, which can take weeks to culture. In resource-limited countries where TB is endemic, such tests are hard to come by outside of major cities, leaving health care workers with few good options. The simplest is a TB test that works like a home pregnancy test, which diagnoses the disease based on the detection of lipoarabinomannan (LAM), a biomarker for TB

present in the urine of TB-infected individuals. Although the test is cheap, easy to use and can be administered at the point of care, it produces accurate results only for patients who are also infected with HIV, since LAM is more abundant in their urine.

Now Sharon Wong, a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Catherine M. Klapperich’s (BME, ME, MSE) lab, is working toward a similar, inexpensive user-friendly test that can overcome this limitation and serve the general TB population at point of care. By applying heat to a strip of chromatography paper dipped in a urine sample, the device would concentrate LAM while evaporating most of the liquid sample. As a result, the low levels of LAM in non-HIV patients’ urine, which don’t register in the commercially available test, are increased and can be more easily detected.

Described in November in the American Chemical Society journal Analytical Chemistry, the new test is the first to demonstrate the use

Heat

Paper Strip

Unconcentrated Sample

Concentrated Sample

Scaling Up Synthetic Biology ECE RESEARCHERS DEVELOP POWERFUL NEW SOFTWARE TOOLS

in the past 15 years, synthetic biology researchers have rewired and reprogrammed genetic “circuits” in living cells and organisms to enable them to perform specified tasks, both to improve our understanding of biology and to solve critical problems in health care, energy and the environment, food safety, global security and other domains. While practitioners dream of engineering each new organism as expeditiously as today’s new

By applying heat to a strip of chromatography paper dipped in a urine sample, the TB test Sharon Wong is developing will evaporate most of the liquid and concentrate a TB biomarker at the heated portion of the strip, thereby enhancing downstream detection of the biomarker.

mobile phone apps are produced, serious obstacles remain. Genetic parts are hard to find and tune, the final behaviors of engineered organisms are difficult to predict, and few tools exist that can handle the scale and complexity of the enterprise.

Recently, however, two researchers at the College of Engineering, Assistant Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE, BME, Bioinformatics) and Research Assistant Professor Swapnil Bhatia (ECE) have joined forces to streamline synthetic biology from concept to design to assembly, encoding solutions in a rich suite of software tools. In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology, they and collaborating researchers at MIT showed how their tools can be used iteratively to help synthetic biologists specify, analyze and

of heat on a paper-based device for the purpose of quickly concentrating biological material for clinical analysis. Wong developed the test in collaboration with Klapperich, Research Assistant Professor Mario Cabodi (BME) and Jason Rolland, the former director of research at Diagnostics for All, a Cambridge-based nonprofit.

“This protocol that Dr. Wong has developed has the potential to increase the utility of one of the most simple and inexpensive methods to detect TB,” said Klapperich. “Strip tests are easy to use and understand and could positively impact patient care in many lowresource settings.”

In lab tests, Wong diluted a small quantity of LAM in a sample of synthetic urine in a beaker and inserted one end of a piece of chromatography paper into the sample. The urine wicked up the paper until it reached the other end, which was warmed to 220 degrees Celsius by an electric heater. Most of the urine evaporated off within 20 minutes, leaving a concentrated amount of LAM at the tip of the paper strip. Using an antibody that binds to LAM, Wong then determined that the biomarker was 20 times more concentrated at the tip than at the end submerged in the sample.

“I can now envision, in the foreseeable future, a TB diagnostic that can be used on anyone, by anyone, anywhere in the world,” said Wong, who next plans to optimize the system, validate it on clinical samples and identify batteries and other power sources to make it portable.

improve large-scale designs for engineered biological organisms.

The researchers, who were funded by a $3.6 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant, demonstrated the first instance in which synthetic biologists ported a large gene cluster from one organism into another. It’s a process Bhatia likens to persistently tinkering with an app that runs on an iPhone to make it work on a Kindle, and believes will pave the way for many synthetic biology applications.

Densmore and Bhatia are now focused on developing software that will automatically learn biological design rules, propose genetic circuit designs, plan DNA assemblies and automate much of the pipetting labor involved in the assembly of engineered biological systems.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

11

PLAY. DON’T JUST SIT THERE.

UPENDING THE LECTURE

12

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

HOW ONLINE TEACHING METHODS ARE ENHANCING ON-CAMPUS LEARNING

BY MARK DWORTZAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY CONOR DOHERTY

Guided by the instructor and learning assistants, EK127 students spend class time solving problems.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

13

PLAY. DON’T JUST SIT THERE.

A

t the front of one classroom in the Photonics Center, instead of a lecturer or PowerPoint presentation there’s just an old-school wall clock whose hands sweep out 120 minutes while students essentially conduct the class from their seats.

Collaborating with their peers at 10 clusters of rectangular tables in this well-lit, oblong “learning studio,” and guided by Assistant Professor Stormy Attaway (ME) and three learning assistants (specially trained undergraduate teaching assistants), 75 students in EK127: Introduction to Engineering Computation solve computer programming problems that apply concepts from online course videos that they viewed from the comfort of their dorm rooms and apartments. Some problems are chosen based on common trouble spots pinpointed via mandatory quizzes that accompanied the videos.

Students share their work on whiteboard-painted walls (slated to be replaced by electronic whiteboards by Fall 2015) and with Attaway and her learning assistants, who dart from table to table throughout the two-hour class.

“I’m constantly roaming around the room,” says Attaway, who has spent most of her academic career standing in front of amphitheater-style lecture halls, directing her remarks at the average student rather than tailoring them for individual students. “I’m now talking to every student multiple times per class, and student engagement is through the roof.”

Welcome to the flipped classroom, College of Engineering-style.

Rather than delivering a lecture to row after row of students dutifully taking notes, with little or no interaction between lecturer and note-takers, and then assigning problem sets for students to solve at home—the model for science and engineering for more than a century—Attaway is leveraging leading-edge digital learning technologies to essentially do the opposite. So far she’s found the approach has paid off, yielding substantial improvements in student engagement, understanding and performance.

EK127 blends the best of the virtual world—state-of-the-art web hosting and video production technology from edX, a nonprofit online platform offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from Boston University and other member institutions—and the residential classroom, where dedicated faculty and teaching assistants guide students through the problem-solving process. The goal is to enhance the quality and value of the undergraduate engineering learning experience on campus.

“Blended learning” experiments like this one are revolutionizing engineering education, and Boston University, which launched its Digital Learning Initiative (DLI) in 2013 to spearhead 14

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

innovative projects in online learning at all of its schools and colleges, is fully on board. Last year the DLI awarded $80,000 to fund a College of Engineering proposal to enhance EK127 and another core undergraduate engineering course, EK307: Electric Circuits, with a suite of online technologies and techniques. In both courses, instructors and teaching assistants funded by the DLI grant have developed online content not as a vehicle, like MOOCs, to reach large numbers of students via the Internet, but rather as a tool to free up precious time to focus on the application of knowledge in the classroom.

Professor Thomas Little (ECE, SE), the College of Engineering’s associate dean for Educational Initiatives, sees these and other

“I’m constantly roaming around the room,” says Attaway. “I’m now talking to every student multiple times per class, and student engagement is through the roof.” ongoing pilot projects as part of a broader College-wide effort to combine the most effective active learning techniques with the latest digital learning technologies—from tablets to MOOCs—to bring engineering education into the 21st century.

“Inspired by the success of these technologies in other disciplines and energized by the support and training DLI is providing, we are developing new ways to improve what’s important to the student: learning, retention and career preparation,” says Little, who heads a team of seven ENG faculty members spearheading digital learning innovations at the College.

Little walks his talk. After teaching EC/ME/SE 544: Networking the Physical World the conventional way for five years, he flipped it two years ago, replacing lectures with active learning modules and hands-on challenges that develop and apply concepts assigned as preparatory exercises. The course is comprised of eight challenges of increasing complexity, leading to the demonstration of self-driving cars that navigate the fourth floor of the Photonics Center using wireless communications and indoor positioning technology.

“Restructuring the course in a blended learning format has enabled students to have more time in class to solve problems and develop working systems that demonstrate their command of the theory,” he says.

In effect, Little, Attaway, Horenstein and other innovative ENG faculty are reengineering their courses so that their students can spend more time practicing engineering.

EK127: STORMY ATTAWAY

EK127: REPLACING PASSIVE LEARNING WITH PROBLEM SOLVING Attaway, who in 2014 received the Metcalf Cup and Prize, Boston University’s top teaching honor, has been gradually flipping the course over the last three years. Supported by DLI funding, she produced course videos using Camtasia as the screen capture technology, and, thanks to “course builder” Declan Bowman (BME’15)— one of the first students in the College’s STEM Educator-Engineer Program (STEEP)—posted them on the webhosting platform edX edge. With all course content (documents with goals for each class meeting, short videos and questions to assess student understanding of the material) placed online, class time is now exclusively reserved for active learning in Photonics Room 117.

In the spring of 2014, Attaway began flipping the course in its usual amphitheater-style classroom, testing out the approach in one of the course’s three sections.

A student in the experimental section, Lauren Etter (ME’17), found that the combination of online lectures and active learning in

In EK127, students share their work on whiteboard-painted walls (slated to be replaced by electronic whiteboards by Fall 2015) and with Assistant Professor Stormy Attaway (ME) and her learning assistants, who dart from table to table throughout the two-hour class.

Inset: Rather than work on conventional homework assignments, EK127 students view online lectures that prepare them to solve problems in the classroom.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

15

PLAY. DON’T JUST SIT THERE.

the classroom enabled her to grasp the course material much more effectively than the traditional method.

“When studying for a quiz or exam, it was easy to go back to the videos and refresh what I had learned without having to rely on notes, which may not have been entirely correct. In addition, working with other people in the classroom helped me to learn the material more thoroughly. For example, when I was struggling to understand graphical user interfaces, the other students in my group helped clear up my misunderstandings, and when all three of us got stuck, the learning assistant was there to help us.”

Continuing her experiment into the summer, Attaway invited a class of 23 EK127 students to go online and view the first course module (four to five approximately seven-minute lecture videos, primarily consisting of PowerPoint slides with a voice-over by Attaway) before coming to the first class meeting. Once in the classroom, students gathered at small round tables and worked on three or four assigned problems, first as individuals and then in groups of three as a graduate teaching fellow and several teaching assistants milled about, sitting with groups as necessary to explain concepts ranging from data structures to numerical methods.

“The students were actively engaged from the beginning,” says Attaway. “The peer-to-peer instruction worked very well. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “not at all” and 5 being “very,” the average response on how much the group in-class exercises enabled them to learn was 4.5. Of the 23 students, 16 earned grades in the A range, 6 in the B range and one in the C range, and there were no D, F, or W grades. In my opinion, the class was a smashing success.”

Building on that success and adding more learning materials for the course site on edX edge, Attaway has now delivered essentially the same experience to her 225-strong Fall 2014 class (three sections of approximately 75 students each) in the new, more flexible Photonics 117 studio space. Compared to the Spring 2014 class, where only one-third of the students learned in a partially flipped classroom, the average grade point average rose from 2.9 to 3.6, and average attendance increased from 89.8 to 95.2 percent.

Chris Mullen (ME, MS’15), who has served as a learning assistant for EK127 for the past three semesters, has seen a dramatic improvement in class preparedness since Attaway started flipping the course.

“In previous semesters, students would be required to complete a reading assignment before coming to lecture, and then lectures would present material covered by the reading. By halfway through the semester, most students would decide that they could get away without doing the reading and just listen to lecture, so instead of having the lecture to ask questions and clarify their understanding of the material, they were hearing everything for the first time. Because the students are now watching the videos and getting the ‘lecture’ before class time, they have time to figure out what they don’t know, and what to ask.”

EK307 AND EK210: FREEING UP TIME FOR HANDS-ON ­ENGINEERING Supported by DLI funding, Professor Mark Horenstein (ECE) has developed a series of 30-minute course modules on circuit analysis and design to prepare EK307 students for the course’s weekly lab.

16

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Always available to students and consisting of animated, voice-over PowerPoint lectures and lab demonstrations produced with Camtasia and uploaded to a video hosting service, the modules function as tutorials that present essential concepts and practical information to help students get the most out of each lab.

In the course, students design and construct circuits and test their results in the ECE Department circuits and electronics teaching facility. Aside from a basic introduction they get in their physics classes, this is the first course in which they are immersed in the details of circuit design, and the amount of material they’re expected to absorb can be daunting. The lab videos help students to master often-complex concepts, illustrating them with images, diagrams and schematics.

The modules function as tutorials that present essential concepts and practical information to help students get the most out of each lab.

“Mark’s videos have been a hit with our students,” says Aleks Zosuls, the course’s lab instructor. “Even without Mark physically in the lab, his voice emanates from speakers and headphones as students use the videos in a self-paced manner to help them with their lab work. It’s like having a personal TA over your shoulder while working, with the added benefit that you can pause the video while you digest an aspect of the material.”

“The videos have been helpful in giving you an overview of what your circuits might look like before you get to the lab,” says EK307 student Fritz Jolivain (EE’17). “They’ve helped me feel more confident in translating a circuit to a breadboard to see how it works.”

Another College of Engineering course using videos to prepare students for hands-on engineering is EK210: Introduction to Engineering Design, a two-credit class aimed at giving sophomores a basic understanding of how to develop a product from concept through design and deployment. Meeting in the Engineering Product Innovation Center’s (EPIC) Lorraine A. Tegan Design Studio, students work in multidisciplinary teams with time and budget constraints on externally sponsored design projects. By viewing web-based lectures at home on topics concurrent with specific phases of the projects rather than receiving this information via in-class lectures, students are able to devote most of their class time to working on their projects in the design studio.

“We’re trying to teach students hands-on engineering design, but we only have them two hours a week,” says EK210 instructor and

EK307: MARK HORENSTEIN

Prepped and guided by an online course video, EK307 students use an oscilloscope, volt meter and other lab equipment to compare the input and output of a circuit.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

17

PLAY. DON’T JUST SIT THERE.

In this in-class problem presented in EK301, students analyze forces acting on a horizontal beam and enter their work on iPads. Their solutions are wirelessly uploaded to the file-sharing service Dropbox.

18

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

EK301:CALEB COLINFARNY FARNY EK301:

Lecturer Caleb Farny (ME) has dramatically increased active learning in the classroom without producing videos or redesigning the lecture hall, both of which can be expensive and time-consuming. His approach enables immediate access to digital learning technology when studio learning space is not available.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

19

PLAY. DON’T JUST SIT THERE.

THE PROOF IS IN THE GRADING In a study that Lecturer Caleb Farny (ME) and Associate Professor Sean Andersson (ME) presented to the American Society for Engineering Education in 2013 comparing EK301 mean quiz and exam scores for classes using the traditional approach with those enhanced by active learning, they found that students achieved significantly higher scores with the new active learning format, regardless of grade point average.

assessment performance

90

70 60 50

spring ‘12 spring ‘12 fall ‘12 spring ‘13

SCORE (%)

80

QUIZ

EXAM 1

EXAM 2

FINAL

new active learning class

what does it all mean?

The performance in the sections with an active learning format was higher for all assignments and semesters.

Professor of the Practice Gerry Fine (ME), who directs EPIC. “When we started working on the course we assembled an ad hoc committee and quickly came to the realization that flipping the classroom was the best way to solve the problem.”

Produced using Echo 360 and hosted by BlackBoard Learn, each online module contains about an hour of required video material consisting of five to six segments of about 10–12 minutes each delivered by Fine, other ENG faculty or sourced externally, and one or two brief quizzes to ensure the material is understood. Students then implement what they learned in the Tegan Design Studio while Fine and his teaching assistants roam the room to respond to individual and team questions as they arise.

Hannah Zengerle (ME’17) found the online videos useful in covering topics that didn’t get addressed in class.

“For our first project involving reverse engineering, the presentation itself was about half of the grade,” Zengerle recalls. “One of the videos showed exactly what to include in the presentation as well as 20

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

traditional lecture class The figure shows comparison of mean scores per assignment based on section. The quiz scores were the mean of the nine quizzes given throughout the semester, and the multiple sections for the Fall 2012 and Spring 2013 sections were each pooled together.

how to present it, and answered questions I had not had time to ask in class.”

For Alexander Moyse (ENG’17), the videos’ principal advantage is their accessibility.

“Unlike in most classes, I can watch the video as much as I want, whenever I want, until I understand all of it,” he says.

EK301: ENERGIZING THE CLASSROOM WITH IPADS The two DLI pilot projects, EK127 and EK307, leverage pioneering work by faculty members in the Physics Department, including Professor Bennett Goldberg (Physics, ECE, BME), in peer-based learning and the use of studio space. The projects also apply lessons learned in ongoing, digital technology-­enabled, classroom-flipping efforts by Fine in EK210, Assistant Professor Martin Steffen (BME, MED) in BE 209: Principles of Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology, and Lecturer Caleb Farny (ME) in EK301: Engineering Mechanics.

EK301: CALEB FARNY

As the College’s team of digital learning enthusiasts expands the use of blended learning technologies and techniques on campus, it also recognizes that one size does not fit all.

With funding from a BU Redesigning the Undergraduate Learning Experience (RULE) grant, Farny has shown that one can dramatically boost active learning in the classroom without having to produce videos or redesign the physical space. Since the Spring 2012 semester edition of this required engineering course intended for sophomores, much of the lecture has been replaced by interactive problem-solving sessions and class discussions, all in a conventional lecture hall.

Twice during each 110-minute class meeting, the instructor pre­ sents a 15-minute overview of a new concept and students work in groups of four on an example problem. Over 15 minutes, each group uses an iPad and stylus to show each step of its solution—including diagrams that depict the forces acting on a structure—and wirelessly uploads it to the file-sharing service Dropbox, where it may be accessed after class. Meanwhile, the instructor and three graduate teaching fellows and learning assistants circulate about the room to answer questions. When time is up, the instructor projects selected work on an overhead screen and invites a representative of the group to show how it solved the problem, using its iPad entries to highlight correct steps and common errors.

Class discussions of student solutions are strictly focused on helping students to become better problem solvers, says Rebecca Rucks (ME’16), an EK301 learning assistant and former student of the course. “There’s no judgment when something is done incorrectly. It’s all seen as a learning experience.”

Farny evaluated the new approach to EK301 the first semester it was introduced, offering one section in the old format and a second section in the new, but keeping all quizzes and exams the same. In a study that he and Associate Professor Sean Andersson (ME) presented to the American Society for Engineering Education in 2013 comparing mean quiz and exam scores, they found that students achieved significantly higher scores with the new format, regardless of grade point average.

“This showed that our new, active learning approach worked well, and it’s been the format of the course ever since, unifying the course across multiple sections and improving test scores,” says Farny, who seniors voted Mechanical Engineering Professor of the Year for 2012.

Higher test scores stem from improved engagement with and understanding of the course material, observes Pantelis Gkaliamoutsas (ME/Economics’15), a learning assistant for EK301.

“In a group format like the one in EK301, students are free to ask questions amongst themselves or call on a learning assistant or graduate teaching fellow for help,” he says. “This is important since many students feel more comfortable talking to the assistants rather than to the professor. I realized from my experience as a student in EK301 that I understood the problems we did in class more thoroughly, and was thus able to perform better on exams and quizzes.”

Inspired by the success of EK301, Farny started flipping a seniorlevel course, ME 310: Instrumentation and Theory of Experiments, in the Fall 2014 semester, replacing ten hours of lecture with 18 course videos on the edX edge platform for home viewing and in-class measurement exercises in which student groups use plug-in sensors and portable data acquisition devices to conduct experiments and share their results onscreen.

GOING DIGITAL, AMONG OTHER THINGS While digital learning has been a resounding success in courses that have tried it, the method is only beginning to gain traction at the College of Engineering.

“At this point there is ample evidence that flipped classes with active learning environments work; the focus is now on how to get faculty to adopt these best practices,” says Attaway, noting that transforming a traditional lecture into an online course module— breaking it into bite-sized chunks, recording the video and hosting it on the edX platform—can take up to 20 hours. Simply letting go of the familiar lecture format can be challenging for some faculty.

“Although my primary goal is to improve the learning experience for my students, my secondary goal is to be a resource for my colleagues so that I can help them transform their courses.”

Toward that end, a College of Engineering faculty committee on digital learning initiatives is sharing best practices among faculty, redesigning courses (including ongoing efforts to flip EK127 and EK307), and purchasing new digital learning technologies, from electronic clickers that students can use to relay instant responses to questions posed during a lecture, to large, overhead projection screens to display solutions uploaded from student groups at active learning tables.

As the College’s team of digital learning enthusiasts expands the use of blended learning technologies and techniques on campus, it also recognizes that one size does not fit all.

“In my experience, students learn in myriad ways,” says Horenstein. “Some students thrive in the traditional lecture/homework environment, while others learn best in a hands-on setting, for example, when a small group works with a professor during office hours on specific problems and concepts. Still other students learn best in the laboratory, where they can transfer lecture/discussion concepts into the hands-on design of electric circuits that solve a problem or meet a desired specification. The hope is that digital learning will service all of these learning styles and more.”

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

21

TECHED-UP SURGICAL TRAINING FOR THOUSANDS BME ALUM CHANGES THE WAY THE WORLD TRAINS IN MINIMALLY INVASIVE TECHNIQUES

BY MARK DWORTZAN

F

ALUMNI PROFILE

rom a high-tech suite of instructional operating rooms in Houston, Texas, Brian Dunkin, MD, serves as emcee of an unprecedented four-hour program on novel abdominal wall reconstruction surgery.

As he and other leading hernia experts lecture and field questions on the latest surgical technologies and techniques before 24 surgeons in the room, their remarks are also broadcast to 48 others at training centers on both coasts, and streamed live to hundreds of participating surgeons around the globe.

22

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MITIE

Dr. Brian Dunkin (BME’85) answers questions from the online audience during a multisite training program on advanced abdominal wall hernia repair. The program was broadcast from a studio in MITIE to an international audience.

All in a day’s work for Dunkin (BME’85), medical director of the Methodist Institute for Technology Innovation and Education (MITIESM), which, since its inception in 2007, has trained nearly 30,000 practicing health care professionals in the use of leading-edge surgical technology and techniques encompassing 24 specialties. Affiliated with Houston Methodist Hospital, MITIE seeks to transform how surgery is done internationally by spearheading and disseminating innovations that incorporate technologies such as robotics, MRI, CT-scans and computer-aided decision-making (CADM) into the operating room. The Institute has already significantly improved patient outcomes: its clinical CADM algorithm, which enables nurses to detect infections earlier in post-surgical patients, has reduced post-surgical infection mortality by 50 percent.

Yet this is only half of what Dunkin does every day. He is also chief of Endoscopic Surgery at Houston Methodist Hospital, where he develops and clinically applies novel, minimally invasive, highly accurate surgical technologies and techniques to treat gastrointestinal diseases. Since joining Houston Methodist in 2007, he has introduced eight such technologies and techniques into clinical practice.

Dunkin stresses that his engineering training is critical to his success.

“My field is technology-intense, and my background in engineering has been invaluable, especially my senior project at BU,

where I learned how to define a problem, apply new concepts and move toward a solution as part of a team,” he says.

In his clinical work and in courses he teaches at MITIE and as a professor of clinical surgery at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York (the academic affiliate of Houston Methodist Hospital), Dunkin combines leading-edge expertise in flexible endoscopy—the use of a medical instrument with a flexible tube, light source and fiber-optic cameras to examine the inside of a hollow organ—and laparoscopic surgery, a surgical technique enabling operations within the abdomen to be performed through very tiny incisions, thereby reducing pain, blood loss and recovery time. For example, whereas open gall bladder surgery requires three to five days in the hospital and six to eight weeks recovery time, the laparoscopic procedure is done on an outpatient basis and requires only one week recovery time. One of the few surgeons with advanced knowledge and skills in both flexible endoscopy and laparoscopic surgery, Dunkin applies that expertise to surgically treat GI issues from acid reflux to kidney removal.

His passion for biomedical engineering and surgery was sparked by two things—his older brother’s infectious enthusiasm for engineering, and an orthopedic surgeon’s dedicated and effective treatment of a shoulder injury Dunkin sustained in high school football. Seeking a course of study that would bridge E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

23

engineering and medicine, Dunkin found his way to the College of Engineering. When he graduated cum laude in 1985, he was the only member of his BME senior class to attend medical school.

It was while earning his medical degree at the University of Nevada that Dunkin began to connect the dots between his two current fields of expertise.

“While training in general abdominal surgery, I saw that there was a revolution going on in minimally invasive surgery, from doing open surgery to laparoscopic surgery,” he recalls. “I felt if I wanted to be on the cutting edge of minimally invasive surgery, I’d have to combine laparoscopy with flexible endoscopy.”

After receiving his MD in 1989, Dunkin completed a surgery residency at the George Washington University and fellowship in advanced laparoscopic surgery and flexible endoscopy at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. He subsequently served as assistant professor of surgery at the University of Maryland and associate professor at the University of Miami, where he was director of the Center of Excellence for Laparoscopic and Minimally Invasive Surgery.

Today Dunkin is widely recognized as a leader in minimally invasive gastrointestinal surgery. A fellow of the American College of Surgeons, he is president-elect of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Surgical Laparoscopy Endoscopy & Percutaneous Techniques. Active in several other medical organizations and publications, he is continually coming up with new ways to share his expertise.

Dunkin’s latest innovation is a tele-mentoring program, in which he provides intensive training to surgeons at MITIE and subsequently uses telecommunications technology to guide them through actual surgeries back at their home hospitals.

24

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

The ultimate goal of the program, which currently focuses on laparoscopic colon surgery, is to make it easier for surgeons to learn and adopt new procedures.

“No longer does a surgeon have to go to a short course to learn a new procedure and then return to his or her own operating room alone to try to work through the learning curve,” says Dunkin. “At MITIE, we developed a sophisticated hands-on training curriculum that uses at least four unique measurement tools to assess competence while allowing learners to rehearse in a simulated OR. After this hands-on experience in MITIE, we provide a telementoring infrastructure and method of communication back at the surgeons’ own hospitals that helps them move through their learning curve safely and efficiently.”

The ultimate goal of the program, which currently focuses on laparoscopic colon surgery, is to make it easier for surgeons to learn and adopt new procedures. Just as he has done for many other MITIE training initiatives, Dunkin aims to leverage the multiplier effect of communications technology and expand this program to serve surgeons across the US and around the world.

Previous page: Dunkin (on screen) uses the VisitOR1 telementoring system to mentor two Houston community surgeons during laparoscopic colon surgery training in the MITIE Procedural Skills Laboratory.

Above: Dunkin teaches a new procedure to a surgeon in the MITIE Procedural Skills Laboratory.

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF MITIE

Below: Based at the Medical Presence Suite in MITIE—an immersive audiovisual auditorium custom-built to view live surgery—surgeons view a broadcast from an operating room in the Houston Methodist Hospital.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

25

ALUMNI PROFILE

SUSTAINABILITY: JUST ONE MORE THING YOU CAN GET AT WALMART.

ECE ALUM KATHLEEN MCLAUGHLIN TAKES ON THE GLOBAL CHALLENGE OF SUSTAINABILITY AT THE RETAIL GIANT.

BY MARK DWORTZAN

26

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

T

he problem is daunting, to say the least.

Somehow, the world will need to find a way to boost food supplies by 70 percent by 2050, when the global population is expected to reach 9.5 billion. Achieving that goal will require better distribution systems and farmers who can increase yields considerably while reducing water consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Enter Walmart, the world’s largest food retailer, serving 27 countries in 11,000 stores around the world. Working with its global network of suppliers and applying funding through the Walmart Foundation, its philanthropic arm, the company is taking a leading role in providing safe, affordable, accessible, healthy food for hundreds of millions of people. Walmart’s efforts include applying a “sustainability index” to suppliers to measure their progress in boosting yields while cutting water consumption and GHG emissions, and helping to train one million farmers. Through such initiatives, the company aims to ramp up the adoption of best practices in sustainable agriculture, thereby reducing the real cost of food—not only to the planet but also to the farmers and customers upon which its business depends.

Leading the team behind this ambitious program is Kathleen McLaughlin (ECE’87), who serves as president of the Walmart Foundation and senior vice president of Walmart in charge of social and environmental initiatives, including energy efficiency, hunger relief and healthy eating, and women’s economic empowerment.

“We’re taking a holistic approach in which we look at the problem as a system and partner with others to address it,” she says. “The problem-solving training I got in engineering, in systems thinking and feedback loops, is highly relevant in our efforts to rewire how the food system works.”

On any given day, McLaughlin applies that training to several Walmart programs designed to simultaneously serve the needs of the business and the communities it serves—what she calls the “double bottom line.” A case in point is the Closed Loop Fund, a $100 million industry-funded program launched in 2014 with the help of the Walmart Foundation. The Fund provides zero- and low-interest loans to build recycling plants in municipalities across the US, with the ultimate goal of making recycling

available to all Americans. Cities and towns pay down the loans with sales of scrap metal and other recycled materials to local businesses (including Walmart suppliers), and savings from reduced landfill fees.

McLaughlin routinely applies the double bottom line to sustainable agriculture, recycling and other social and environmental commitments by Walmart and the Walmart Foundation. Among the most ambitious are pledges to achieve zero waste to landfills in its operations by 2025, and to source an incremental $20 billion from female-owned companies for its US business through 2016.

As McLaughlin pursues these commitments, she repeatedly asks herself, “How can we continue to improve what we’re doing so it’s sustainable for the business and its suppliers, employees and customers, and strengthens the communities in which we operate?”

MAKING A DIFFERENCE Concerned with global environmental issues from a young age and inculcated with a passion for social justice at the Catholic elementary school she attended, McLaughlin has devoted her career— and much of her free time—to seeking and finding ways to make a difference.

Taking after her father, an electrical engineer, she developed an early affinity for math and science, and felt naturally drawn to undergraduate programs in engineering. But she also maintained several other interests, from vocal music to international affairs, which she found ample opportunity to explore by pursuing her engineering studies at Boston University, where she was a Trustee Scholar. It was a University Professors Program course in the multinational politics of business—on how collaborations among businesses, governments and nonprofit organizations could thrive in an emerging era of globalization—that opened McLaughlin’s eyes as to how she might combine her passions for engineering and societal impact.

“The course made me realize I had this passion for technology, but I wanted to pursue it in development, and I needed to learn more about economics and politics,” she recalls.

When then-College of Engineering Dean Louis Padulo suggested that she might spend two years pursuing that knowledge at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, she applied and was accepted. Upon graduating from BU summa cum laude, she earned a BA/MA degree in politics, philosophy and economics and a diploma in theology at Oxford. Initially setting her sights on a job at the World Bank, she instead spent the next two decades engaged in global commerce and development issues as a consultant for McKinsey and Company, a global management consulting firm, where she became a senior partner based in Toronto.

IMPACTING THE GLOBE At McKinsey, she worked with multinational companies that were expanding their operations into the Americas, Europe and Asia, and spent one-third of her time as director of the firm’s Social Innovation Practice, partnering with corporate, philanthropic and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on programs to improve global health, nutrition and agricultural practices in developing countries. Among other things, she led efforts to spur more E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

27

efficient government responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa, and helped government agencies and NGOs in Namibia strategize on how to reduce maternal mortality. In her spare time, she also served as director of the Toronto Community Foundation for 10 years, supporting Toronto NGO programs on poverty, hunger, housing and immigrant concerns.

In 2013, she seized the opportunity when Walmart offered her the chance to apply her development expertise on a much broader scale, and moved with her husband Tim Costigan and their three children to northwest Arkansas, home to Walmart headquarters.

“My experience at McKinsey allowed me to understand more about the private sector, and the fact that we live in a very interconnected world. The private sector has resources that are critical to addressing important global challenges,” says McLaughlin, now one year in at her Walmart post. “I believe we have limited time on the environmental and

McLaughlin at a December volunteer event at the Northwest Arkansas (NWA) Food Bank, which serves more than 700,000 people annually and is affiliated with Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger relief organization and beneficiary of the company’s fall hunger campaign. Walmart teamed up with six of the nation’s largest food companies to distribute $3.7 million, the monetary equivalent of more than 37 million meals, to Feeding America’s food banks and local agencies throughout the US. 28

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF WALMART

“The problem-solving training I got in engineering, in systems thinking and feedback loops, is highly relevant in our efforts to rewire how the food system works.”

social inequality fronts, and companies can collaborate with governments and NGOs to shift the system more rapidly.”

Charged with effecting social and environmental change on a global scale and in a timely manner, McLaughlin works with a team of Walmart associates to design and execute an ambitious portfolio of Walmart and Walmart Foundation initiatives. A recent week on the job included reviews of philanthropic programs, meetings with Walmart suppliers, executives and partners, and a speaking engagement in Toronto on the role of companies in driving social and environmental change. At the same time, she oversaw multiple Walmart teams focused on energy efficiency, hunger, sustainable agriculture and other domains, and worked on improving sustainability of selected consumer product categories such as electronics and apparel.

“Kathleen’s brought a level of knowledge about the issues, analytical thinking, energy and passion to the job of leading sustainability at Walmart that I’ve not seen before,” says Elizabeth Sturcken, managing director of the Environmental Defense Fund, which since 2008 has worked closely with Walmart to help the company develop its sustainability agenda. “You can’t fail to feel her passion and smarts when you talk to her about her work. If anyone can lead the big change that Walmart and the environment need, she can.”

To tackle such complex challenges at Walmart and McKinsey, McLaughlin has turned, time and time again, to her grounding in engineering, which she calls “the perfect underpinning” for everything she’s done since graduating from BU. “It has served me very well in structuring ambiguous problems, taking them apart, dissecting them and solving them,” she says. “It’s such a fantastic foundation for pretty much anything you want to do in life.”

To tackle such complex challenges at Walmart and McKinsey, McLaughlin has turned, time and time again, to her grounding in engineering, which she calls “the perfect underpinning” for everything she’s done since graduating from BU.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

29

32

MOUSTAKAS, FIVE OTHERS NAMED DISTINGUISHED PROFESSORS

MSE graduate student Xiao Han, Yihong Jiang, Yiwen Gong, Professor Soumendra Basu (ME, MSE), Adam C. Powell, IV, Professor Uday Pal (ME, MSE) and MSE graduate student Shizhao Su with a solid oxide membrane reactor used for green metals production.

Pal wins Prestigious Metallurgy Award RECOGNIZED FOR CLEAN METALS PRODUCTION METHOD

T

he American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) has named Professor Uday Pal (ME, MSE) the winner of its 2015 James Douglas Gold Medal Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement in nonferrous metallurgy, the extraction, purification, production and utilization of metals other than iron. Pal will receive the award at an AIME meeting in 2015.

“It is very gratifying when recognition comes from one’s peer group in the same field,” said Pal, who has authored more than 200 publications and holds 23 patents on high-temperature chemical and electrochemical processes, including metals extraction and refining. “This award is special and humbling, considering the list of past awardees, many of whom are regarded as pillars of our field.”

Pal is the inventor of solid oxide membrane (SOM) electrolysis,

30

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

an inexpensive, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly, one-step method that he has developed over the past 15 years to separate pure metals from their oxides. SOM electrolysis continuously feeds metal oxide into a molten salt bath, where electricity splits it into metal and oxygen gas in separate chambers.

Conventional metals production technologies employ a lot of carbon-based energy sources to reduce oxides, and generate significant amounts of pollutants, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. SOM electrolysis promises to substantially decrease energy consumption and eliminate carbon and other environmentally harmful emissions associated with reducing oxides to metals, all for lower cost. So far Pal has developed and applied his patented SOM electrolysis technology to produce magnesium, titanium, silicon, aluminum and other energy-intensive metals from their oxides.

Infinium, a Natick-based company spun off from Pal’s lab, is now working toward a scale-up of this technology.

“Uday is an outstanding practitioner of chemical metallurgy and materials science, bridging the gap between fundamental understanding and direct industrial relevance,” said Adam C. Powell, IV, CTO and co-founder of Infinium. “He has been a pioneer in the new sub-discipline of green metallurgy and materials, and has launched the careers of dozens of engineering graduate students, including my own.”

W. Clem Karl, ECE Department chair

Catherine Klapperich, associate dean for Research and Technology Development

John A. White, incoming BME Department chair

Three Faculty Members Join ENG Leadership Team APPOINTMENTS TARGET EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

D PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL D. SPENCER (KARL, KLAPPERICH); COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH (WHITE); CYDNEY SCOTT (DAMIANO)

ean Kenneth R. Lutchen has announced the appointment of several individuals to round out the College’s leadership team.

Catherine Klapperich (BME, ME, MSE) is the new associate dean for Research and Technology Development. John A. White (BME, MED) has been recruited from the University of Utah to

Creating a Bridge to a Cure for Diabetes DAMIANO DISCUSSES BIONIC PANCREAS IN UNIVERSITY LECTURE

now being tested in human trials amid worldwide media coverage, a bionic pancreas co-developed by Professor Ed Damiano (BME) and BME Research Assistant Firas El-Khatib would regulate

serve as chair of the Biomedical Engineering Department, effective May 1, succeeding Solomon Eisenberg (BME), who remains senior associate dean for Academic Programs. W. Clem Karl (ECE, BME, SE) is the new chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

“All of these faculty members are world-renowned researchers in

glucose levels in type 1 diabetes patients, even when they sleep.

Damiano discussed his research and personal motivation for combating type 1 diabetes in BU’s annual University Lecture last November at the Tsai Performance Center.

Tested in dozens of adults and children in a series of inpatient and outpatient trials, the device consists of a glucose monitor and two pumps—one for insulin and another for glucagon—as well as an iPhone that runs the algorithm that computes how much insulin or

their respective disciplines, leaders in their professional communities, and outstanding educators,” Lutchen said. “They will provide extraordinary and visionary leadership as the College embarks on its continuous commitment to growth in excellence.”

Klapperich, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for Future Technologies in Cancer Care at BU, develops robust, inexpensive, handheld, microfluidic plastic chips and devices that extract nucleic acids from complex human samples— technologies that could enable rapid, point-of-care diagnostics for infectious diseases and cancer without the need for electricity or refrigeration and help facilitate the use of molecular diagnostics in developing countries. Klapperich is also advancing devices to more efficiently apply systems biology techniques to improve understanding of TB and other complex diseases.

A BME faculty member for 13 years before he joined the University of Utah in 2007 as a professor of bioengineering, White served as BME chairman ad interim and as associate chair for undergraduate and graduate studies during his tenure at the

College of Engineering. White has used engineering approaches to better understand how information is processed in the brain.

Combining computational modeling, electrophysiological and optical techniques, and imaging methods, he has worked to advance new biomedical devices to treat memory disorders and epilepsy.

A leading researcher in information science and systems and past recipient of the ECE Award for Excellence in Teaching, Karl is a member of the Information and Data Sciences research group and the Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE). He has served on the BU faculty since 1995. Karl’s research centers on statistical signal processing and image reconstruction. He has developed several statistical models for the efficient extraction of information from diverse data sources in the presence of uncertainty and applied them in projects that include automatic target detection and recognition for synthetic aperture radar; locating oil deposits and analyzing the earth’s atmosphere; and monitoring medical conditions using tomography and MRI. —rich barlow, bu today

glucagon to administer. Damiano hopes it will be available in three years. —rich barlow, bu today

Professor Ed Damiano (BME) (center), with Research Assistant Firas El-Khatib (right) and Research Fellow Catherine McKeon, said a cure for type 1 diabetes is perhaps two decades away.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

31

HOLDS ENG’S FIRST ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP

Boston University Provost Jean Morrison has named Professor Theodore Moustakas (ECE, MSE, Physics) as the inaugural Distinguished Professor of Photonics and Optoelectronics, the College of Engineering’s first fully funded, named endowed professorship. Intended to honor and support a BU faculty member for outstanding achievement in research, teaching and service in the fields of photonics and optoelectronics, the professorship will be

jointly funded by the College of Engineering, the Boston University Office of the Provost, and the BU Photonics Center.

Upon Moustakas’ retirement, the professorship will be renamed the Theodore Moustakas Professorship of Photonics and Optoelectronics. The College has begun an unprecedented international search for a senior faculty member in this area of engineering science to be selected as the inaugural holder of the Moustakas Professorship.

“Photonics and optoelectronics form the backbone of today’s information technology, and the College of Engineering and the BU Photonics Center are world leaders in both domains,” said Moustakas, who has developed a wide range of novel optoelectronic materials and devices ranging from diamond thin films to nitride semiconductors. “The establishment of this Distinguished Professorship will help the University in maintaining its leadership role in these areas.”

Since Moustakas joined BU in 1987, the primary focus of his research has been the development of nitride semiconductors for high-performance optoelectronic devices

ENG Selects Inaugural Term Distinguished Professors of Engineering

5

College of Engineering professors—John Baillieul (ME, SE), Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE), Christopher Chen (BME), Selim Ünlü (ECE, BME, MSE) and Joyce Wong (BME, MSE)—have been selected as the inaugural Term Distinguished Professors of Engineering. Each will carry the title of “Distinguished Professor of Engineering” and receive a stipend of discretionary funds throughout their term. Thereafter, the title will be retained throughout their career at Boston University.

“Each of these faculty members has had a lengthy, distinguished record of impact in research and service to the College of Engineering and their profession,” said Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen.

32

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

1 john baillieul Baillieul studies robotics, the control of mechanical systems and mathematical system theory. He has served as chair of both the Manufacturing Engineering and Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering Departments, the associate dean for Academic Programs, the director for the Division of Engineering & Applied Sciences, and a founding member of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering. He was the College’s inaugural Distinguished Lecturer.

2 christos ­cassandras Cassandras’ research centers on discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems and transportation systems. He is head of the

c­ overing the spectral region from the deep ultraviolet (UV) to terahertz, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs), photo detectors and solar cells. Renowned for developing the nucleation steps for the growth of blue/green LEDs widely used in flat panel displays on smartphones and televisions as well as for general illumination, he has also developed highly efficient, deep UV LEDs expected to provide environmentally friendly water and air purification as well as food sterilization and various medical applications.

A professor of electrical and computer engineering since 1987, professor of physics since 1991, and the current associate head of the Division of Materials Science & Engineering, Moustakas played a leading role in propelling the ECE Department’s PhD program into the nation’s top-ranked programs, putting the MSE Division on the map and helping establish BU as a national center of photonics research. He was the 2011 College of Engineering Distinguished Scholar Lecturer and winner of Boston University’s 2013 Innovator of the Year award.

Systems Engineering Division and a co-founder of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering, and was also a Distinguished Lecturer.

3 christopher chen A member of the BU faculty since 2013, Chen is widely recognized as a world leader in tissue engineering and mechanobiology— the study of how physical forces and changes in cell or tissue mechanics contribute to development, physiology and disease.

He seeks to identify underlying mechanisms by which cells interact with materials and other cells to build tissues, and to apply this knowledge to better understand the biology of stem cells, tissue vascularization and cancer.

4 selim ünlü Ünlü investigates the development of photonic materials, devices and systems focused

on the design, processing, characterization and modeling of semiconductor optoelectronic devices, and high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy of semiconductor and biological materials. He has served as the College’s associate dean for research, graduate programs and technology development.

5 joyce wong Wong focuses on elucidating fundamental molecular, cellular and interfacial processes, and applying these principles to guide tissue engineering and develop in vitro engineered model systems to study disease progression. She is director of the Provost’s Initiative to Advance Women in STEM, co-director of the Affinity Research Collaborative in Nanotheranostics and former associate director for the Center for Nanoscience & Nanobiotechnology.

PHOTOGRAPH BY VERNON DOUCETTE

Moustakas Named Distinguished Professor of Photonics and Optoelectronics

NEWS BYTES FACULTY BU President Robert A. Brown, who is also a professor in the ECE Department, received the National Academy of Engineering’s Simon Ramo Founders Award in September in Washington, DC. The award, which confers a commemorative medal on recipients whose achievements better society, recognized his leadership at BU and MIT, where he previously served as provost. Brown was also named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in December. He is one of 170 new fellows in the NAI and one of a total of 414 fellows currently representing more than 150 research universities and governmental and nonprofit institutions. An induction ceremony for all incoming NAI Fellows was scheduled for March at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE) is researching “smart” traffic lights capable of sensing when there’s no cross-street traffic and staying green for motorists on a main thoroughfare. His research is part of Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform & Ecosystem (SCOPE), a BU faculty effort funded by a three-year, $850,000 grant from the NSF with the goal of developing cloud computing– based services and products to solve urban problems.

Boston could benefit from “smart” traffic lights moving traffic efficiently, safer bike paths and other improved services that BU aims to develop through a new online platform. Graphic by Rob Colonna Assistant Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE, BME, Bioinformatics) was elevated to the grade of IEEE Senior Member, an honor bestowed on members who have made significant contributions to the profession. Densmore’s research focuses on automating the specification, design and assembly of synthetic biological systems.

Assistant Professor Ahmad (Mo) Khalil (BME, Bioinformatics) was selected as one of 77 innovative early career educators to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s

(NAE) sixth Frontiers of Engineering Education symposium on October 26–29 in Irvine, California. Chosen from a highly competitive pool of applicants who are actively teaching in US engineering programs and have recently implemented significant innovations in their classes, the attendees were nominated by NAE members or deans.

With funding from his 2013 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Khalil is now piloting a synthetic biology “bootcamp” for high school students—the first of its kind— that combines interactive lesson plans, hands-on lab experiences and an independent project.

Mo Khalil (Photo by Kalman Zabarsky) The Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC) was featured in a September US News & World Report article on how businesses seeking a better-prepared workforce are supporting technical education initiatives.

Timothy Jackman (ENG’15) running a surface grinder, one of several tools ENG students are using at EPIC to create innovative new products. (Photo by Michael D. Spencer) Assistant Professor Timothy Gardner (Biology, BME) was among academic, industry and philanthropic leaders invited to the White House on September 30 for a conference announcing stepped-up efforts to advance the president’s BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Neurotechnologies) Initiative.

In Paris last October, Assistant Professor Vivek Goyal (ECE) and his coauthors received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2014.

“Computational 3D and Reflectivity Imaging with High Photon Efficiency” bested 2,818 submitted papers to share the honors with another group.

Goyal’s paper proposed the field’s

most efficient imaging methodology in terms of the number of detected photons needed to produce an image.

Assistant Professors Emily Ryan (ME, MSE) and Cara Stepp (SAR, BME) were selected as 2014–2016 Junior Faculty Fellows by the Hariri Institute for Computing at BU. Ryan uses stateof-the-art computation modeling to advance solutions for efficient, lowcost energy storage, a major obstacle in in the widespread deployment of alternate energy sources; Stepp uses engineering tools to rehabilitate sensorimotor function.

STUDENTS & ALUMNI Shannon Anderson (BME’16) received a Beckman Foundation Scholar Award, which allows students to conduct part-time research during two academic years and full-time research over two summers in Irvine, California. Anderson is researching the use of silk to create novel scaffolding biomaterials to serve as the framework for regenerating human tissue.

Davis Borucki (BME’16) won a Provost’s Scholars Award, which recognizes juniors who have stretched and tested their boundaries in their first two years at BU. Recipients are awarded funds to travel to conferences or conduct research in their field of interest.

Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE) PhD candidates Theodora Brisimi (ECE’16), Yasaman Khazaeni (SE) and Sepideh Pourazarm (SE) represented the CISE at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing Conference in October in Phoenix, Arizona. The world’s largest conference for women in technology, GHC brings together more than 4,500 participants from 53 countries to celebrate achievements, discuss career interests and present research.

A team comprised of BU PhD candidates Brisimi, Wuyang Dai (ECE’14), Setareh Ariafar (SE’18) and Yue Zhang (SE’18), and MIT MBA student Nicholis Baladis (’15) was among the five winners of the IEEE/IBM Smarter Planet Competition for its presentation, “Street Bumps and Big Data Analytics: Crowdsourcing Our Way to Better Roads.”

Isabela Haghighi (ME’15) and Emily Lam (EE’14, ’16) received Clare Boothe Luce Scholar Awards, which support

summer research projects for women focused on science, mathematics and engineering. Haghighi’s research involves the use of graphene in nanoelectromechanical systems; Lam is studying how to increase lighting efficiency and productivity.

Annie Lane (CE’16) published an article on data center power and cost management in Circuit Cellular in November. Lane, who received a Clare Boothe Luce Scholar Award earlier in 2014, studies data center power and cost optimization strategies at the Performance and Energy-Aware Computing Lab. Marissa Petersile (EE’15) won an IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Scholarship. PES is the world’s largest forum for technological developments in the electric power industry, and the $2,000, up-to-three-year scholarship program recognizes outstanding undergraduate electrical engineering students who are committed to exploring the power and energy field.

Marissa Petersile (EE’15) Vying with nearly 3,000 entries in the Poster Session competition at the 2014 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting and Exhibit in Boston in December, former LEAP student and ME PhD candidate Steven Scherr’s poster, “Real-Time Digital Virus Detection for Diagnosis of Ebola Virus Disease,” took second place.

MSE PhD candidates Shizhao Su and Yihong Jiang won the MRS University Chapter Program’s “Sustainability @ My School” contest with their poster, “Carbon-free Solid Oxide Membrane (SOM) Based Electrolysis for Metals Production and Sustainable Energy Applications.”

Shivem Shah (BME’15) received a Case Scholarship, which recognizes juniors who are both excellent scholars and active participants in Boston University life. by mark dwortzan, with contributions from rich barlow, leslie friday and susan seligson (bu today); gabriella mcnevin (ece); and sara rimer (bu research)

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

33

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! SEND YOUR CLASS NOTES SUBMISSIONS TO ENGALUM@BU.EDU OR VISIT WWW.BU.EDU/ENG/ALUMNI.

college of engineering faculty, ­students and alumni from across the country converged on Cummington Mall September 18–20 to celebrate the College’s first 50 years. They learned about high-impact ENG research and entrepreneurial achievements, toured new facilities, participated in a design challenge and held spirited conversations about the past, present and future of the College. Additional ENG 50th Anniversary celebrations were planned for Palo Alto on January 28 and New York City on April 15.

34

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

ENG 50TH ANNIVERSARY GALA BANQUET

More than 200 alumni, friends, faculty and students attended the ENG 50th Anniversary Gala Banquet on September 19 at the Trustees Ballroom. After a cocktail hour and dinner that featured a video presentation on the College’s history and current research, Professor Edward Damiano (BME) discussed his efforts to develop a bionic ­pancreas that could vastly improve the quality of life for those with type 1 diabetes.

Peter Cocolis, Ruth Hunter, Al Brothers and Berl Winston (all ENG’64) and Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen with a generous check from the ENG Class of 1964.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MELISSA OSTROW

ENG 50th Anniversary Celebrations

ENG 50TH ANNIVERSARY GALA BANQUET (continued) Associate Professor Ted de Winter (ME), an ENG faculty member since the College’s founding in 1964; Martha Ebner (daughter of Professor Merrill Ebner, who chaired the Manufacturing Engineering Department); former Cisco Systems VP Roger Dorf (MS, MFG’70); ENG Professor of the Practice and EPIC Director Gerald A. Fine (ME); and Dean Lutchen presenting a check for funds raised to name the EPIC Advanced Design and Manufacturing Laboratory in memory of Merrill Ebner.

ENG VIDEO WALL UNVEILING

Prysm Inc. President, CEO and co-founder Amit Jain (ECE’85, ’88) helped unveil the new Prysm video wall in the lobby of 44 Cummington Mall on September 18. The wall displays images of recent high-impact ENG innovations.

Jain describes the video wall to ENG Leadership Advisory Board members, administrators and faculty members.

ENG CLASS OF 1964 GOLDEN TERRIER RECEPTION

Members of the Class of 1964 gathered at the EPIC Design Studio on September 20 to celebrate their 50th reunion.

Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen with members of the Class of 1964. From left: Graham Willoughby, Steve Rocketto (CAS’67, started in ENG), Ted Mansfield, Al Brothers, Ruth Hunter (also GSM’86), Tony Pirri, Peter Cocolis, Berl Winston and Dean Lutchen.

ENG 50TH CELEBRATION ON THE WEST COAST CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY MELISSA OSTROW, DAVE GREEN, FRANK CURRAN, GENEVIEVE SHIFFRAR, NATALIA BOLTUKHOVA

ENG NATIONAL SOCIETY OF BLACK ENGINEERS RECEPTION

ENG alumni reconnected with fellow members of the Minority Engineers Society and the NSBE at the Ingalls Center on September 20.

Michael Chung (ENG’85), Toni-Ann Daniels (ENG’85,’86), Tracy Tillett Sr. (ENG’90), Al James (ENG’85, GSM’96) and Dean Lutchen.

LOOKING FOR MORE?

Seventy-five alumni and friends joined Dean Lutchen on January 28 in Palo Alto to continue the celebration of the naming of the College of Engineering.

Michele Julien Iacovone (CGS’86, ENG’89), Dean Lutchen and Lisa Iacovone (CGS’86, COM’88)

For more information about the ENG 50th Anniversary Celebrations on the east and west coasts, including photos and videos, visit

bu.edu/eng/50th.

E N G I N E E R S P R I N G 2 0 1 5 W W W. B U . E D U / E N G

35

CLASS NOTES

DAVID MOUNTAIN

THOMAS KINCAID

Professor David C. Mountain (BME), 68, died on November 5 in Newburyport, Massachusetts. An internationally recognized professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University for 35 years, Mountain pursued research on auditory function and underwater acoustics and was a co-founder of Biomimetic Systems, Inc., a Cambridge-based startup advancing acoustic sensors for medical, military and other applications. In 2002 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

As a principal investigator at the Auditory Biophysics and Simulation Laboratory and a key member of the Hearing Research Center, Mountain pursued studies that combined engineering and physiological techniques to model and improve understanding of the hearing process.

Mountain took a leading role in the design and evolution of the BME department’s undergraduate and graduate curricula, and served for many years as a member of the University’s Faculty Council, representing the College of Engineering.

Emeritus Professor Thomas G. Kincaid, a longtime faculty member and former chair of the ECE Department, died on January 18 at the age of 77. He joined the Boston University faculty in 1983, served as ECE chair from 1983 to 1994 and retired in 2006.

Kincaid’s research focused on signal and image processing, photonics, dynamic neural networks and nondestructive testing. He taught courses in engineering and in logic design, signals and systems, and advised graduate students pursuing degrees in electrical engineering. Previously, he worked as a researcher for General Electric. A member of the IEEE, he received his PhD from MIT in 1965.

As ECE chair, Kincaid increased the size of the department by more than 50 percent, hiring faculty who included three future ECE chairs— ECE Professors Bahaa Saleh (Emeritus), David Castañón (SE) and W. Clem Karl (BME, SE). He also increased the size of the graduate program and focused it on doctoral education.

Anne Everett Wojtkowski, First BU Female Engineering Student anne everett wojtkowski (cit’56), the first female engineering student at Boston University, where she studied aeronautical engineering, died in October at the age of 79 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She also served as the first female mayor of Pittsfield from 1988 to 1992, helped to establish one of the first early childhood education programs in the US, and advocated for equal pay for female faculty members during a 35-year career as a professor of mathematics and engineering at Berkshire Community College.

36

BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Want to earn an ENG T-shirt? Send your class notes submissions to engalum@ bu.edu or visit bu.edu/eng/alumni.

Contributors of all published notes receive a red BU Engineering T-shirt!

Jimmy Trinh, BS,

1988 Hudson, Massachusetts

Jimmy’s happiest day was when his son Julian received his acceptance letter from the College of Engineering. On a recent campus tour, he enjoyed strolling down Commonwealth Avenue and chasing the Green Line trolley.

Anita Sengupta, BS,

1998 Pasadena, California

A senior systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Anita is the project manager of NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) mission team, which has produced an ultra-low temperature state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate in a prototype for an instrument that will debut on the International Space Station in late 2016.

CAL will enable potentially groundbreaking fundamental physics research in temperatures colder than any found on Earth.

Kyle Allison, PhD,

2013 New York, New York

Kyle received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award based largely on research he conducted as a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering at BU. One of 17 issued nationwide, the award provides up to $250,000 per year for five years to enable exceptional early career scientists to skip traditional postdoctoral training and move rapidly into independent research positions at US institutions. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, Allison developed an innovative method to eradicate “persisters,” dormant bacterial cells believed to be responsible for perpetuating chronic bacterial infections.

While earning his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, Kyle Allison (BME, PHD’13) developed a new approach for eradicating persistent bacterial infections.

PASSINGS Norman H. Van Meter (’67), Framingham, MA Jeanell R. Cunningham (’79), Unity, ME Meir Ruhman (’60), Tehachapi, CA

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BU PHOTO SERVICES (WOJTKOWSKI); CYDNEY SCOTT (ALLISON)

Remembering Longtime Faculty

the engineering annual fund

INSPIRING SOCIETAL ENGINEERS The College of Engineering’s Inspiration Ambassadors are introducing young people to the impact engineering can have on society and showing them pathways to exciting careers in the field. Professionally trained through the College’s Technology Innovation Scholars Program, these BU engineering under-

graduates have delivered presentations and facilitated design challenges for more than 9,500 middle and high school students in 19 states. Through your donation to the Engineering Annual Fund, you can help meet the growing demand for more Inspiration Ambassadors and support other transformative undergraduate programs.

Inspiring Young People to be Societal Engineers “Last year I visited middle and high school students in Boston and in my hometown, guiding them to design their own computer games and wind turbines. It was a great personal joy to inspire these young people to consider engineering, and to share with them how they can change lives by aspiring to become Societal Engineers.”

—Charina Ortega (BME’16) Impacting the Community “I was amazed at the incredible capabilities of the Boston high school students that I worked with on the robotics team, many of whom were homeless, living apart from their parents or facing other difficult challenges. In addition to coaching them, we encouraged them to apply for the BU Menino Scholarships and Community Scholarships—and two of last year’s high school seniors received these scholarships and admission to BU.” —Jennifer Larbi (BME’15) Meeting Emerging Workforce Needs “This program taught me many extremely useful skills for the workplace, including mentoring, which is highly valued at GE. As an Inspiration Ambassador and a leader on several FIRST Robotics teams, I learned how to adapt to each individual’s skill level, interest and aptitude. I was able to share my passion while teaching ­students how to mentor each other and organize in cross-­ functional teams.”

—Oliver Kempf (Aero’12, ME’16), Performance Engineer, GE Aviation You can help shape future alumni into well-rounded Societal Engineers who have a lasting impact on the world by giving to the Engineering Annual Fund today.

Visit bu.edu/eng/alumni to make your gift.

Connect with the ENG Alumni Facebook Group at facebook.com/BUengalumni.

Ari Trachtenberg PHD, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA-CHAMPAIGN PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING & COMPUTER SCIENCE

Today’s smartphones are an extension of our personage. Like an extra limb, they follow us to our most intimate environments, wirelessly exposing our every action to the world through a wide variety of onboard sensors. People love their games and rely on these devices to contact friends and access bank accounts, but do they really know what is going on inside those small frames? Our work focuses on identifying and exposing the threats these ubiquitous communication devices

pose at all layers of abstraction— from hardware to communication systems, sensors, operating systems and applications—and developing defenses primarily against remote exploitation.

Boston University engineering students are the lifeblood of this research. It is their passion and creativity, infused with the engineering culture of persistence, that leads to the discoveries that make the research process worthwhile. An essential catalyst for this creativity is BU’s environment of breaking down antiquated boundaries, be they between bureaucracies, disciplines or people at different stages of their lives. This is especially important for cybersecurity research, in which progress is intrinsically tied to a broad range of technical and nontechnical understanding.

To Tolearn learnmore, more,visit visitwww.bu.edu bu.edu/eng./eng.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL D. SPENCER

NONPROFIT US POSTAGE PAID BOSTON MA PERMIT NO. 1839