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Campus News
Orlando Ortiz ’04 (manufacturing engineering technology), ’08 (MBA) has been appointed RIT’s 2020-2021 Frederick H. Minett Professor.
Rochester Institute of Technology’s newest Frederick H. Minett Professor is an engaged alumnus, successful professional in the manufacturing industry, and highly active community volunteer. Orlando Ortiz ’04 (manufacturing engineering technology), ’08 (MBA) is the 29th person appointed to the prestigious position, established in 1991.
The Minett Professorship brings distinguished Rochester-area multicultural professionals to RIT to share their professional knowledge and experience with RIT’s students, faculty, and staff for one academic year. The professorship emphasizes the connections between education and industry, and also highlights the value of diversity. Minett Professors are selected by the Minett Professors Emeritus, then appointed by RIT President David Munson and Keith Jenkins, RIT’s vice president and associate provost for Diversity and Inclusion.
Ortiz has worked in the manufacturing industry since 1998 and has served as a manufacturing manager with The Gleason Works for the past seven years. As an RIT student, he became heavily involved in community service and many clubs and organizations on campus. While at RIT, he joined Latino America Unida, Lambda Alpha Upsilon Fraternity Inc. and currently serves as the alumni advisor to the local chapter. Through the fraternity, he began volunteering for the Puerto Rican Festival, and has now served as a board member for 15 years as its volunteer coordinator, treasurer, and for the past 11 years, as its president. He also serves on the board of Foodlink, as board chair of The Housing Council, vice-chair of the board for Pathstone, and as secretary on the board of the RIT Alumni Association. In 2019, Ortiz was named Hispanic Businessperson of the year by the Rochester Hispanic Business Association.
Ortiz said that he has several initiatives he wants to focus on as Minett Professor, including strengthening RIT’s ties to the nonprofit organizations he is involved with, such as Foodlink and PathStone. He also wants to use his experience in the manufacturing industry to expose more underrepresented minority students to career opportunities in the field, encourage student involvement in clubs and organizations, and increase the Rochester community’s awareness of the Destler/Johnson Rochester City Scholars program. Ortiz was part of the RIT Strategic Plan steering committee in 2014 and said he sees joining the ranks of the Minett Professors gives him a unique opportunity to help see that plan through.
“It’s an honor to be a part of this group,” said Ortiz. “As an RIT alum, it’s even more gratifying for me because it presents another opportunity for me to connect the various ‘hats’ I wear daily. I want to make sure I move the needle and leave my mark not only on the strategic plan creation, but now actually being a part of executing it and making an impact with students. It’s nice to come full circle.”
Ortiz succeeds longtime Urban League of Rochester leader William Clark, who served as Minett Professor from 2019-2020. Others who have served in the position include many of Rochester’s most prominent business, academic, medical, and law enforcement professionals.
The professorship is named after one of RIT’s early benefactors, Frederick Minett, who started a tool and die company on Water Street in downtown Rochester in the early 1920s. He was familiar with RIT, formerly called the Mechanics Institute, and employed some students. Minett died in 1971, leaving more than $5 million endowment to RIT. Originally divided between RIT’s College of Continuing Education and the general endowment, the bequest was intended to support Minett’s and RIT’s vision of career education. q
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| The ROCHESTER ENGINEER OCTOBER 2020 campus news
RIT faculty-researcher Iris Rivero awarded ELATES Fellowship for 2020-21
ISE department head begins national, yearlong leadership program for female faculty-researchers
Iris Rivero, professor and head of RIT’s industrial and systems engineering department, shown here in a file photo from February 2019, was recently named an ELATES Fellow and will participate in a yearlong executive leadership program.
RIT engineering professor Iris Rivero will be part of the newest class of the Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science, also known as ELATES. The national program based at Drexel University is intended to prepare senior women faculty into leadership roles within their respective institutions.
Rivero, department head of the industrial and systems engineering (ISE) department in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, will be among 30 female professors from U.S. universities participating in the prestigious yearlong program. The online and onsite program is designed to increase personal and professional leadership effectiveness and develop knowledge of organizational dynamics, finance, and strategic management of participants’ colleges and universities.
Throughout the year, the participants will be required to do an institutional-focused project with either the provost of their respective institutions or dean of their college department. Rivero will concentrate on improvements to the ISE department and engineering college’s K-12 outreach in an effort to recruit and retain an even more diverse student body. She will also seek more opportunities for faculty professional development including increasing cross-college research collaborations, interdisciplinary course development, and accessibility initiatives.
“I believe that you have to be continually seeking professional development, but what I also think is important and what this opportunity might give me, is an understanding of how to navigate making changes to the profession,” said Rivero, who joined RIT in 2018, and who is an expert in 3D-printing and its application to develop and manufacture biomedical devices. “Can we push the engineering profession into looking at new directions and new ways of thinking? ELATES might provide me with the tools and the platform to help me initiate something of that magnitude, that big-picture thinking.”
“I am thrilled that Dr. Rivero is participating in the ELATES program. This is an opportunity for her that will also benefit the engineering college and RIT,” said Doreen Edwards, dean of RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, and one of Rivero’s sponsors for the program. “I look forward to working with her on the projects she has proposed.”
The 2020-21 group met informally this summer online and will continue networking, workshops, and training in that format until such time as onsite meetings are allowed due to the pandemic.
Previous ELATES Fellows from RIT include Margaret Bailey, professor of mechanical engineering and former director of Advance RIT, who was among the first cohort in 2012. q
campus news OCTOBER 2020 The ROCHESTER ENGINEER |
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Campus News
Team develops model to determine stability of gas hydrates
Comprehensive model can better predict how gas hydrates and methane stabilization could ease global warming
Department of Energy
This Department of Energy map shows locations where gas hydrates have been discovered, where gas hydrates is inferred to be present on the basis of seismic data, and where drilling expeditions have been completed in permafrost or deep marine environments, all leading to recovery of gas hydrates.
Natural gas-hydrates—crystalline compounds of gas molecules—are found in permafrost and marine sediments. While these gas hydrates can be used as alternative energy resources, they also pose a danger in terms of global warming, if catastrophic release of gas into the atmosphere was to take place.
Patricia Taboada-Serrano
Patricia Taboada-Serrano and Yali Zhang, researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology, developed a comprehensive model to better validate location of gas-hydrate deposits in marine sediments. This information can be used to assess stability of the deposits, and the model can also provide predictive information about destabilization of those deposits due to variations in temperature.
The new model could benefit scientists who measure global climate patterns because they have an available model that predicts the stability of gas-hydrates more accurately. Some of the energy stored in these compounds is larger than the world-wide conventional natural gas reserves combined, said Zhang.
“The petroleum crisis could be successfully avoided if we can exploit most of the natural gas from gas-hydrate reservoirs in a safe manner, without contributing to global warming,” said Zhang, a researcher in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering. “Natural gas is considered clean energy, and huge amounts of natural gas are trapped in gas-hydrates. This clean energy is not only attractive to exploit but also a risk to global warming—methane is a potent greenhouse gas. A given volume of methane causes about 28 times more greenhouse gas warming than carbon dioxide.”
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| The ROCHESTER ENGINEER OCTOBER 2020 campus news
Yali Zhang
The researchers’ findings were published in the paper, “Model for gas-hydrate equilibrium in porous media that incorporates pore-wall properties.” It was recognized recently as a 2020 HOT Paper by the Royal Society of Chemistry and reprinted in a special edition highlighting highly-contributing scientific papers during the year. Information about the size and gas-content of gas-hydrate reservoirs has been limited in the past. Natural gas-hydrates are found in geographically diverse settings around the globe, either in marine sediments or permafrost environments, some inaccessible because of harsh conditions and the need for equipment that can safely extract specimens. The researchers’ model can be used to better predict deposit structure, properties, and reliability.
Department of Energy
This illustration details the different layers of deposits where gas hydrates could be located and accessed.
“The goal of the work was to develop a predictive model that would be more precise than previous models, and that can be used to truly estimate how much gas is stored in these natural gas-hydrate deposits and how stable these deposits are. Furthermore, we aimed to having the capability to predict what would happen with these deposits if the temperature of the oceans is raised even a little bit, and the pressure changes due to changes of the water levels,” said Taboada-Serrano, an associate professor of chemical engineering in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering.
The U.S. Department of Energy has been leading exploration and research initiatives into the use of gas-hydrates as a possible alternative energy solution when it was discovered that the total amount of natural gas stored in naturally occurring hydrates is larger than the worldwide conventional natural-gas reserves combined.
“Over the years, people have developed models to try to predict how large these deposits are these ocean sediments. We are seeing ocean temperatures slowly creep up and polar caps melt and reduce in size. This means that we are basically getting to temperatures in which gas-hydrate deposits destabilize. The temperature is becoming high enough to start releasing methane and it may end up in the atmosphere,” said Taboada-Serrano.
Gas-hydrates are structures trapped in sediment, often 1,500 meters below sea level, dormant underneath the polar ice caps, permafrost, and in marine sediments. Challenges include finding and accessing reservoirs in some of the Earth’s inhospitable areas such as the Arctic and developing technologies to verify the stability of the reservoirs and safely enable extractions. Access to these areas is often limited to diving expeditions or coring samples from drilling. These structures are also stable under very specific windows of temperature and pressure. But if the temperature of the ocean rises a little bit, these ice-like structures are going to start to dissolve and start releasing methane into the atmosphere.
“The models developed can be used to predict the equilibrium conditions, specifically, temperature and pressure, kinetic nucleation rate and formation probability of gas hydrates by incorporating sediment properties such as wettability and interfacial energies,” said Zhang, who recently completed her doctoral dissertation in this area under the supervision of Taboada-Serrano. “It is very useful in the sense that many realistic sediment conditions are captured by the model and the model predictions agree with available experimental data very well. Looking forward, I think the model will be widely used by the researchers both in academics and energy industry.” q
campus news OCTOBER 2020 The ROCHESTER ENGINEER |
