Summit: Fall 2015 by University of Vermont

SUMMIT www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN How a CEMS program is leading the way in smart-grid innovation.

CONTENTS 3

THE DEAN’S VIEW

BY THE NUMBERS

ENGINEERING THE CLASSROOM How the new Vermont Engineering Initiative is preparing K-12 teachers to add engineering design to their curricula.

DISCOVER CEMS The Governor’s Institutes of Vermont hits the sweet spot of summer learning, while UVM breaks ground on its new STEM building complex.

NEW FACULTY SPOTLIGHT The next wave of new faculty and staff at CEMS spans expertise in fields ranging from big data to geotechnical engineering.

A BRIDGE TO CROSS A model steel bridge from the college’s ASCE student chapter scores high marks in the National Steel Bridge Competition.

MAKING THE SMART GRID SMARTER Funded by the National Science Foundation, an interdisciplinary team at CEMS is tackling problems such as energy conservation and climate change.

SPARKING NEW IDEAS Four CEMS research groups win seed grants for moving their ideas to the marketplace.

A FLUID SITUATION CEMS professor George Pinder applies modern medicine to an age-old ecological problem.

HACKING 101 An all-night hackathon in Votey Hall leads to new apps for improving student life at UVM.

SHOOTING FOR THE STARS How Professor Doug Fletcher is studying the ways materials perform in the hostile environments of space.

THE LIVES OF STRUCTURES New techniques are helping Professor Eric Hernandez predict the life spans of bridges and buildings.

WHERE NUMBERS MEET MEDICINE

EDITOR: Aimee Picchi PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE DIRECTION: Jenn Karson GRAPHIC DESIGN: Ion Design CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Joshua E. Brown, Meredith Woodward King, Andrew Liptak, Sujata Gupta, Aimee Picchi, Erin E. Post, Carolyn Shapiro, Amanda Kenyon Waite PHOTOGRAPHY/IMAGES: Joshua E. Brown, Jeff Clarke, Eric Hudiberg, LONDONmiddlebury, Sally McCay, Jason Meyers, Keri Toksu, IGERT, Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist, UVM ASCE, UVM Mathematics and Statistics Department, RLPhoto SUMMIT IS PUBLISHED TWICE A YEAR BY THE DEAN’S OFFICE AT THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

SEND LETTERS AND ALUMNI NEWS TO: summit@uvm.edu WEBSITE: www.uvm.edu/cems

The FDA looks to UVM biostatistician Chip Cole in assessing biosimilars, or generic copies of biological drugs.

MAKING THE GRADE: STUDENT PROFILES How Katherine King’s love of math and stats led to her new job with the Mayo Clinic, while Presidential scholar Nick Martin aims for the aerospace industry.

A TWITTER EARLY WARNING SYSTEM A team of CEMS scientists taps the social-media network to mine evidence of drug interactions.

A LEGACY OF GENEROSITY Growing up poor in the Northeast Kingdom sparked a desire in Richard Fisher ’47 to give back to CEMS.

ON THE COVER: The Stafford Solar Hill Farm, a Green Mountain Power facility in Rutland, Vermont. Photo: Eric Hudiberg

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

The Dean’s View Photo: Sally McCay

Dear Alumni and Friends of CEMS, As I start my third year as dean, it is a fabulous time to update you on what’s happening at CEMS. Last spring I shared the exciting news that the UVM Board of Trustees had given the “go ahead” to the proposed STEM building complex. On May 15 we had the project’s official groundbreaking, and shortly thereafter the demolition of Angell Lecture Center began. As of this writing Angell Lecture Center is no longer, and work on the foundation of the first of the two new STEM buildings, called Discovery, is underway. UVM has a live cam where you can see the progress on the construction of the building (https:// uvmtube.uvm.edu/stem/embed_stem.php?id=1). As in previous issues, we’re excited to highlight some of our extraordinary faculty and students. I am also pleased to introduce you to our most recent hires, who include two new tenure track faculty members and six new lecturers, including a senior lecturer hired as a Professor of the Practice for Civil and Environmental Engineering. This fall, we are conducting nine new faculty searches with the goal of adding four tenure track professors and five lecturers. At the same time we said goodbye to four long-time members of the CEMS community. We lost Dan Archdeacon (Math), who passed away this spring, while three other faculty members retired after having served with great distinction for a combined service of more than120 years. Those three faculty members are: Jim Burgmeier (Math), Dave Dummit (Math), and Gagan Mirchandani (Electrical Engineering). Our enrollments continue to grow, with CEMS welcoming its largest incoming class ever, with more than 380 new students arriving this fall. Our applications last year represented a 12% jump from the prior year. Because CEMS has a plan for modestly

growing the student population by less than 4% annually, we were able to boost the selectivity of our incoming class. We’re achieving our goal of moderate growth while simultaneously enhancing the rigor of our programs and continuing to advance the quality of the CEMS learning community. This edition of SUMMIT will also provide you with glimpses of some of the research undertaken by our faculty and students, ranging from improving the smart grid to turning to modern medicine to solve an ecological problem. I continue to take the opportunity to visit with a number of alumni, parents and friends, and I am very grateful for your generous support, enabling our college to set a record for fund raising. A generous donation of more than $6.8 million from alumnus Richard L. Fisher ’47 endowed the Richard L. Fisher Professorship, which was awarded to Electrical Engineering Professor Paul Hines. The generosity of our alumni is a great motivator, since it recognizes the important opportunities ahead of us and allows us to continue the vital mission of educating the next generation of engineers and scientists. Our goal with SUMMIT is to provide a means to keep you informed and connected to CEMS. You are the CEMS extended family, and it is always great to hear from you, so please share updates with us. We have made substantial upgrades to our webpage and social media, so be sure to check those for frequent updates. Sincerely,

Luis Garcia, Ph.D. Dean and Barrett Foundation Professor College of Engineering and Mathematical Science

CEMS by the

NUMBERS 1:10 The scale at which model bridges for the Steel Bridge Competition are constructed. The national competition brings together engineering students from across the country, with college teams vying to create model bridges that will impress judges with their structural efficiency, strength, and aesthetics. CEMSâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; American Society of Civil Engineers club qualified for the national competition in May, and placed 32nd out of more than 200 teams.

6,000 degrees Celsius The temperature inside the center of a cylindrical chamber at UVMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Plasma Test and Diagnostics Lab, built by mechanical engineering professor Doug Fletcher. The high heat can be used to create a form of matter called plasma, simulating the behavior of various materials in hostile environments, such as when spacecraft travel through different atmospheres.

16 hours The length of the hackathon held this year in Votey Hall, where 70 students split into eight teams worked to develop apps to improve student life at UVM. Apps ranged from one for students to post reviews of UVM classes to another that tracks the availability of athletic equipment at the fitness center.

4 % and 0.4 % The share of the U.S. electricity supply that comes from wind and solar energy, respectively. Scientists at CEMS, through its Smart Grid IGERT program, are undertaking a 5-year, $3 million program to train two dozen doctoral students with the goal of making the smart grid even smarter. Research, with funding from the National Science Foundation, includes designing better control algorithms for managing wind farms.

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

Engineering the

NEXT GEN CLASSROOM High-school science teachers are upgrading their skills at CEMS’ new Vermont Engineering Initiative By Aimee Picchi

This past summer, high school science teachers at the Vermont Engineering Initiative brainstormed solutions to several engineering problems, including how to design and build the longest possible cantilevered bridge using Popsicle sticks. More importantly, how might the design task – and the principles behind it – be added to their science curriculums? “We were thinking about what steps were involved and how to incorporate a whole project during the school year,” says Allison Stafford, a high school physics teacher in Redwood City, California who attended the inaugural VEI, which was held this summer at the University of Vermont’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. Learning the concepts of engineering design “is an awesome part of scientific literacy and students being successful in their lives,” she adds. While the Popsicle-stick bridge problem was just one of several engineering tasks the teachers took on during the week, they all tie back to a major undertaking taking place in 13 states (including Vermont) and the District of Columbia: meeting the Next Generation Science Standards, a new set of statedeveloped learning standards that emphasize scientific inquiry as well as engineering design, with the latter being a new addition to the guidelines. Why do some states think it’s time to refresh the science curriculum for America’s K-12 graders? The previous state science standards were developed almost 20 years ago, and the standards aim to reflect the changes that have taken place in science since then. One of the core principles is that students should demonstrate a solid understanding of how engineers approach and solve a design problem. “Most of the teachers have not had the engineering background to learn how to incorporate engineering design into the

Photo: LONDONMiddlebury

classroom,” notes Andrea Pearce, a research associate at CEMS and who worked on this summer’s VEI. “Engineering design starts with a problem. You need to use your knowledge of math and science to come up with a prototype and then improve it based on objective criteria.” She adds, “We’re hoping we can deliver this to more teachers.” The program was inspired by the Vermont Mathematics Initiative, created in 1999 by Ken Gross, the University of Vermont Azarius Williams professor of mathematics, and the late Vermont education commissioner Marc Hull. The VMI had the goal of helping 19 elementary schools that were underperforming in mathematics, and within two years, all those schools were off the list of underperformers. Over the years, the program has helped more than 400 K-12 teachers develop their skills and confidence in teaching math. This summer, the Vermont Engineering Initiative came together through a collaboration between CEMS and the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, whose mission is to improve how science, technology, engineering and mathematics are taught in the U.S. For Stafford, a Knowles fellow, that mission echoes her own beliefs about the importance of science education in American schools. “As an undergrad, we saw tons of solutions to worldwide problems like climate change and feeding the world,” she notes. “The biggest barrier isn’t about technology and science, but is about political will and making sure everyone has a basic understanding of scientific literacy.” The teachers tested their new skills by working with high school students enrolled in the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont’s Engineering program, which Stafford says was a highlight of the weeklong program. Engineering design, she notes, “is trying and learning from things that didn’t work and getting better. That kind of a mindset, a growth mindset, says that maybe you aren’t good at something yet, but you can do better.”

Learning by

DESIGN This summer, high school students from across Vermont gathered at the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences to delve into an intense week of either math or engineering instruction through the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont. CEMS faculty members help run and teach the two tracks, which attract STEM-focused students like Cameron Gilmour, a high school senior from Clarendon, Vermont. During his engineering program, Gilmour came up with an idea for his Governor’s Institute project while playing soccer with fellow students into the evening. Having a tough time seeing the ball prompted him to create a glowing soccer ball, which would change colors depending on which team had last kicked it. The prototype “was pretty fragile, so we passed it forth once and decided that was about it,” he notes. Having the time to work on an in-depth project was an enriching experience, Gilmour says, who adds he’s considering engineering as a college major.

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

Christopher Keane, a robotics student in the 2015 UVM-GIV Engineering Institute. Photo: LONDONMiddlebury

Breaking

GROUND

Take a quick walk through the heart of University of Vermont’s campus, and it’s clear that change is in the air. In May, the university officially broke ground on the its new $104 million STEM building project, which will reshape the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences over the next four years by creating a new 266,00-square-foot complex geared toward science, technology, engineering and mathematics instruction and research. UVM President Tom Sullivan, speaking at the groundbreaking, said it marked “a transformative day for the university, for Burlington, for the state of Vermont and well beyond our borders.” That transformation includes some major changes on the campus, including the demolition of Angell Lecture Center, which was pulled down this summer.

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

To watch the continuing progress of the project, check out the UVM construction webcam

“A transformative day for the university, for Burlington, for the state of Vermont and well beyond our borders.”

— President Tom Sullivan

Photo: Sally McCay

New Faculty

SPOTLIGHT Faculty Photos: Sally McCay

COMPLEXITY RULES

PURE MATH

Complexity is second nature to lecturer Cathy Bliss.

For assistant professor Christelle Vincent, the thrill of exploring and solving problems has fueled her career and research.

Bliss, who earned her Ph.D. in mathematical sciences and a certificate in complex systems from the University of Vermont, received the inaugural Complex Systems graduate fellowship at UVM. Since then, her research has delved into topics as wide-ranging as developing statistical techniques to deal with missing data in complex networks to examining emotions in social networks. The opening of UVM’s Vermont Complex Systems Center several years ago provided her with “a wonderful opportunity to learn the skills and techniques to conduct research in many fields – ranging from computational social sciences to problems in ecology and natural resource management – all through the lens of quantitative and computational thinking,” she notes. Her path to complex systems and mathematics came after Bliss had studied coastal ecology and marine science, as well as several years spent teaching in countries including Venezuela and Costa Rica. In her new role as a lecturer at CEMS, Bliss says she wants to excite students about working with data, manipulating models, and searching for patterns, no matter what field they pursue. She’s also working on research into how social networks evolve in Massive Open Online Courses and how the nature of discourse changes throughout the duration of the course. “One of the best aspects of teaching is that we are always learning – learning more about our fields of expertise as new developments are published, and learning more about the art of teaching,” she adds.

“I am very interested in algebraic curves, which are roughly objects that are given by polynomial equations that look like F(x,y) = 0,” she notes. “To me, it’s striking that there are still a lot of things that we don’t understand about these objects that are introduced in middle school.” Vincent, who will join CEMS in 2016, earned her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where her supervisor was Professor Ken Ono, who is known for his research into combinatorics and number theory. Vincent recently finished a post-doctoral lectureship at Stanford University, and is spending the fall semester at Brown University’s Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics. In the classroom, she wants her students to tap into the excitement that can come from solving math problems “in a playful and open-minded way, without getting frustrated with yourself,” although she notes that struggles aren’t uncommon when students push themselves to learn. In her own career, she credits Ono with supporting her at crucial moments. “When things got very difficult in grad school and I didn’t know if I could keep going -- I think every Ph.D. student goes through that -- he just told me that I was a good mathematician and that he believed in me,” she says. At CEMS, she plans to continue with her research, as well as prepare students for jobs in STEM careers and in boosting math literacy for non-math majors. She notes, “Just like

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

running a marathon feels good not despite of the pain of pushing your body so far but because of how far you are pushing yourself, learning and thinking can feel the same way even when struggling with something difficult.”

A DEEP FOUNDATION After a career in engineering, senior lecturer John Lens returned to UVM – his alma mater – five years ago to pursue a doctorate in engineering. His goal, Lens says, was to enter academia to teach and engage in research after spending 27 years in a professional engineering practice. His research at UVM has focused on risk and reliability quantification, which he notes stems from his interest in geotechnical engineering. Geotechnical engineering “provides a rational way of addressing the unknowns associated with what is underground,” he notes. “I’ve continued to be fascinated with the field because there is always uncertainty associated with dealing with the underground, and it’s an exciting challenge to reduce that uncertainty.” While he finishes his thesis work this year, Lens will also be teaching Introduction to Engineering, a first year class, as well as a Senior Design class for engineers and an elective relating to deep foundation engineering and construction. “I want students to early on become well aware of the breadth of possible career options with having a civil or environmental engineering education,” he notes. “It’s clear that increasingly more is going to be expected of our profession in order for our society to survive on this planet. That means changing how we do our work so we can deliver on those expectations.”

THE POETRY OF MATHEMATICS Lecturer François G. Dorais wants his students to find inspiration in the “beauty and poetry of mathematics.” For Dorais, who joins UVM from Dartmouth College, that goal stems from his own epiphany about mathematics. A onetime aspiring poet, Dorais happened to pick up a copy of Serge

Lang’s “Algebra,” a book that’s credited with changing the way the subject is taught, on a library visit. “I sat down with the book and read the first page where he defines a monoid and proves the uniqueness of the identity element. I was fascinated. It was so beautiful. I fell in love,” he notes. Dorais went on to earn his Ph.D. at Dartmouth. At UVM, Dorais will be teaching calculus and linear algebra in the fall, as well as working on research into reverse mathematics, a branch of mathematical logic. “I am currently very excited about recently discovered applications of my research in logic to computer science,” he says. “I really enjoy when my work has impact on other disciplines and I constantly look forward to new opportunities to apply my work in other areas.” Dorais adds that mentoring students is one way where he can have an impact in their lives. “It’s a great feeling when you hear that someone you helped along the way is now doing great things,” he notes. “I look forward to meeting UVM students at all levels, to guide and help them along their paths.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Lecturer Alicia Peregrin Wolfe notes that a basic question about humanity sparked her research into artificial intelligence. “The underlying thing I’m most interested in is using machines as a model to understand people,” she says. “I’m interested in how people communicate and how they form abstract concepts and why we form the abstract concepts we do.” How people communicate those ideas, and how other people interpret those ideas, is also at the heart of her research. “The words that I use don’t always mean the same thing as those in your mind,” she notes. By using artificial intelligence, researchers can run “very precise experiments” that help uncover answers, she adds. Wolfe, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and joins CEMS from Smith College, will be teaching the theory of computation and introduction to Java. Her goals are to “make the theory of computation a little more fun for people who aren’t into the theory” and to help students learn to code Java. “People often teach it abstractly,” she says. “I want my students to go into an interview and have their interviewers say, ‘This person knows Java.’”

TEACHING BY DESIGN Lecturer Victor Rossi says computeraided drafting and design (CADD) is only growing in importance in the design and manufacturing industries. Because of the increased need for engineers to become fluent in CADD, Rossi joined the faculty of CEMS in a full-time role this year, although since 1985 had taught the subject at the college on a part-time basis. Before working at CEMS, Rossi taught in the public schools in the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Burlington School District. At CEMS, “I taught everyone from computer science masters students to thirty-year drafting veterans who had never touched a computer,” Rossi notes. “What inspires me most is when a person who has taken one of my courses contacts me later to say that the imparted skills either got them an internship or a full-time job.” Empowering students with CADD skills continues to be one of Rossi’s goals as he expands his role at CEMS. “UVM Engineering has a history of producing students who are highly productive and pay great attention to the quality of their products and services,” he adds. “My job is to continue this trend.”

DYNAMIC TEACHING Lecturer Zach Ballard says his approach to the classroom is inspired by Albert Einstein, who once said, “I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” “If I do everything I can to get my students excited about the subject matter and give them even the most basic tools, they can come to understand complex ideas in a more organic fashion than if I spelled out every detail for them in lecture,” Ballard notes. “Not only does it make the act of gaining the knowledge much more satisfying for the students, but it prepares them for when they have to solve problems on their own as they start their careers.” Ballard, who received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2013 and held a post-doctoral research post in University of Notre Dame’s civil engineering department, will be teaching UVM undergraduates about dynamics, such as system dynamics and thermodynamics.

Teaching is a career that Ballard says he set his sights on during the second week he was in college. “Teaching at the college level is the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do,” he says. “I feel extremely lucky that, at 29, I’ve already landed my dream job.”

AN INFECTIOUS QUESTION For assistant professor Sam Scarpino, studying infectious disease outbreaks has provided a path into the investigation of complex phenomena. “Infectious disease outbreaks recapitulate ecology, emerging from the multi-level interaction of hosts, pathogens, and their environment,” Scarpino notes. “As a consequence, we can gain perspective on numerous big, transdisciplinary questions by better understanding epidemics.” Scarpino, who will join CEMS in early 2016, is currently serving as an Omidyar postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent research center devoted to studying complex systems. By investigating issues that intersect the fields of biology, behavior and disease, Scarpino’s research is delving into understanding disease as an emergent process, and improving public health surveillance. At CEMS, Scarpino plans to develop a course in mathematical epidemiology, and will teach statistical computing and data analysis. While he views the digital age’s ability to generate and store vast quantities of data as one of the greatest achievements in recent decades, he says he wants to impress upon CEMS students that “data alone can’t solve our problems.”

“UVM Engineering has a history of producing students who are highly productive and pay great attention to the quality of their products and services.”

— Victor Rossi

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

Building

BRIDGES How CEMS students relied on engineering skills and a cold Vermont barn to reach the National Steel Bridge Competition By Aimee Picchi

During the bitter cold weather of the past winter, a team of CEMS students could be found in an unheated Vermont barn, welding and fabricating parts of a bridge designed to span Kuprica’s Nogo River, joining its farmland with its capital city.

Photo: ASCE

them access to the prototype shop in Votey Hall. Thankfully, Iain Portalupi, one of the co-captains, offered the use of his family’s barn in Barre, where he had shop tools and equipment.

If you’ve never heard of the Nogo River or the country of Kuprica, there’s a good reason for that. Both were dreamed up by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) and the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) as part of a hypothetical problem that young college engineers must solve in the groups’ annual National Steel Bridge Competition. The 23-year-old event challenges students to design a bridge to address that problem, and then fabricate a 1:10 scale model that is judged on how well it meets the guidelines as well as on qualities such as strength and lightness.

“It was so cold,” notes Kevin Nguyen ’15, who served as a cocaptain of the steel bridge team last year, about working in the barn. “We had to bring in portable kerosene heaters and take a break every hour because we couldn’t feel our fingers or toes.”

It’s the type of design and building challenge that draws ambitious engineering students from schools including the University of Vermont’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley. Last year, the CEMS student chapter of the ASCE ranked among the top three schools in the Northeast regional competition, ensuring the club a place in the national field.

“Not all teams build their own bridges,” notes Nguyen. Teams with larger budgets often have the ability to hire contractors to professionally fabricate their bridges. “We want to learn about the fabrication process, and not just send it out,” he adds. “We are competitive, but we are also trying to better ourselves.”

“You have a packet of rules, and you are trying to figure out the best possible solutions,” says Jamie Martell ’16, who was on last year’s team and is serving as the president of the ASCE student chapter in the current academic year. “Last year, when we came in second place in regionals and were able to go to nationals, it was crazy, seeing it all come together when you had nothing eight months ago.” The team started by planning the bridge, relying on a trapezoidal design. Then, with a budget of about $4,000, the team bought the steel and other supplies it would need to make the design a reality. As winter arrived, they were ready to start construction. But there was one issue: not all the members had completed their required safety training which would allow

The cold hours spent constructing the bridge paid off in more ways than one. Aside from qualifying for nationals, the team gained fabrication experience to complement their engineering knowhow. “As an engineer, you will never build something you designed yourself,” says Martell. “For me, it was good to get that experience.”

The team drove 24 hours to reach the national competition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, breaking the drive up into shifts. Along the way, they stopped in St. Louis to visit the city’s arch, which they had studied in the classroom. (It was “huge and mind-boggling,” Martell notes.) The team’s bridge, which had its superstructure painted green in a nod to UVM, placed 32nd out of about 50 competitors. Observing the designs from rival clubs has provided some ideas for this year’s bridge, although designing won’t begin until after the AISC and ASCE post the new competition rules this fall. Reaching the nationals in 2016 is on the team’s agenda, Martell notes. He’d also like to get more students involved in the project. “It’s more than just building the bridge,” Nguyen says. “The main point was about team work. No one person can just build this bridge.” He adds, “It’s a blast!”

Something New

UNDER THE SUN How CEMS’ IGERT program is leading the way in smart-grid innovation By Sujata Gupta

About a year and a half ago, Dan Fredman approached Burlington Electric to see if they would collaborate with him to develop games that encourage consumers to conserve energy. At the time, Burlington Electric was on the verge of completing installation of 20,000 new meters that would show energy use in 15-minute increments rather than every month. The prospect of having so much extra information was both exciting and bewildering. The hope for these so-called smart meters is that they will convince people to reduce energy use, particularly during peak

hours when the risk of overloading the system and triggering a blackout is high. (Protecting against blackouts costs consumers in the US around $79 billion per year). But getting consumers to focus on that information and make corresponding changes has proven daunting. Fredman “hit us at the right time,” recalls Chris Burns, the company’s director of energy services. Fredman’s research project is just one of several emerging out of the University of Vermont’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, or IGERT, program. Housed in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, the program is funded by a five-year, $3 million grant through the National Science Foundation. The purpose of the highly selective grant (in 2012, UVM’s proposal was one of just 18 selected from 154 applicants) is to encourage interdisciplinary work in science, math, and technology. CEMS is using the money to research ways to develop a smarter grid.

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

Dan Fredman, Curtis Saunders and Emily Cody. Photos: Sally McCay

The current power grid was designed back in Thomas Edison’s day, explains Jeffrey Marshall, a mechanical engineer at UVM and director of IGERT. And it’s starting to show its age. “A lot of it,” Marshall says, “involves turning dials and pushing buttons.” Modernizing the grid emerged as a national priority following the 2003 blackout in the Northeastern US and parts of Canada that left 50 million people in the dark. In 2009, the federal government allocated $4.5 billion in stimulus money to building the smart grid. Vermont used its share to install smart meters, and now more than 90 percent of households in the state have one. Smartening the grid means looking at both supply and demand. The smart meters largely track demand – or consumers – to even out peaks in power usage. In terms of supply, most of our energy comes from greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels, but renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, are gaining traction. Renewable energy sources accounted for 22 percent of global electricity generation in 2013, a 5 percent increase from the previous year, according to the International Energy Agency. But renewable power is intermittent, a huge challenge for power companies tasked with supplying power all day, all the time. So a priority is developing really good batteries, or storage systems, to hold excess energy on clear, windy days. More than a question of engineering, smartening the grid will require input from mathematicians, behavioral scientists, and policymakers. Prior to coming to UVM, Mads Almassalkhi, an electrical engineer and one of two professors hired through IGERT, worked at a startup in Chicago. There, he developed an algorithm to help clients, such as universities and businesses,

minimize energy costs. In that environment, Almassalkhi says, “you very quickly realize that the best math solution doesn’t win. You need other people to push things along.” So UVM is using IGERT money to fund 22 doctoral students, including Fredman, from an array of disciplines. The university is also contributing resources, which has allowed CEMS to add two faculty positions and graduate student support. Each student must complete a five-course certificate in complex systems, as well as a series of four IGERT-designed courses in smart grid fundamentals, behavioral economics, policy systems, and research ethics. Students also complete internships at national labs around the country. Compared to traditional doctoral students who typically assist with an adviser’s project, IGERT fellows have more freedom to design their own research proposals. The fellows’ backgrounds and the projects they choose run the gamut. While some of those projects link directly to designing the smart grid, others explore broader questions around consumer response to energy system transitions, integration of sustainable energy sources, and broader issues concerning climate change and our dependency on fossil fuels. For instance, Emily Cody entered the program when it was first rolled out in 2012. Trained in applied math, she was keen to work with UVM mathematician Chris Danforth, whose research includes work on climate as well as analyses of language and social science trends on Twitter. Cody wanted to tweak the program to look at the public discourse around climate change. For one of her projects, she has been combing through old newspaper articles following Hurricane Katrina in

2005 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 to measure differences in how people talked about the two events. When she asked the computer program to analyze and then break up the articles into a couple dozen trending topics, the term “climate change” emerged as a topic with Sandy but not Katrina. “Sandy was a watershed event that made people come around to the idea of climate change,” Cody says. Tying her work back to IGERT, Cody says that understanding people’s acceptance of climate change is a crucial first step to identifying those who might be willing to change behaviors related to energy use. “There are certain segments of the general public saying that climate change is here, climate change is an issue,” Cody says. “So give those guys in-home displays showing energy use patterns because they might change the way they live.” In 2013, Chris Clement came to IGERT with an entirely different skillset. An economist who spent several years working for a large consulting firm in San Francisco, California, Clement had grown interested in building a bridge between economics and policy. As an IGERT fellow, he set out to evaluate if Vermont would meet its pledge to switch to 90 percent renewable energy by 2050. To build a program capable of looking into the future (recognizing all the caveats that come with developing a crystal ball), Clement investigated historic patterns of energy use in Vermont starting in 1970. He then added variables, such as energy costs, technological advances, and economic growth to develop a method to forecast future energy use patterns. There are many variables we can’t predict, Clement says; for instance, the cost of solar is now one-tenth of its price in 2008. But he can adjust any of those variables to create different scenarios. Even with the best-case scenario, Clement’s program indicates that the state is behind schedule. “The policy drivers that the state has available are not going to allow for a natural shift to clean energy,” Clement says. By training the next generation of power experts, CEMS is itself evolving into a more interdisciplinary school. Both new faculty members – Almassalkhi and Sam Scarpino, who will start in Jan. 2016 – come from non-traditional backgrounds. Almassalkhi joined the Chicago startup directly

after completely his doctorate rather than pursuing the more conventional post-doctoral fellowship. Instead of focusing on a single discipline, Scarpino has been applying mathematical tools to biological problems. In his current position at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, Scarpino has been studying how various factors, such as vaccination rates and human behavior, influence the spread of infectious diseases. He wants to study problems in which several moving parts come together to yield a different end result than if they were working alone. At UVM, he wants to use the same general principle to investigate the interface between communications and power networks. For instance, during a massive blackout, is there a way to keep Wi-Fi up and running for first responders? “I’m trying to quantify how robust our communications networks are to power failures,” Scarpino says. IGERT fellows’ work may soon have real-life applications. Fredman’s research is a case in point. This September, Fredman will roll out a project on tenants (mostly UVM students) in about 400 rental properties in Burlington. Except for those in the control group, households will receive a digital picture frame that relays information from the smart meters into their Jeff Marshall and IGERT students. homes. They can see how Photo: RLPhoto much power they’re using at any given moment and how much they could save by, say, turning off the air conditioning. Some households can compete for prizes – in this case a month of free electricity – by having the greatest reduction in energy use. Fredman says his research could help utility companies maximize efficiency by offering similar incentives. In this case, though, without the prize money, the actual savings from reduced energy use per customer is pretty small, Fredman acknowledges. “Most people aren’t motivated to save $.03 per hour.” Perhaps what’s really needed is a way for utility companies to charge extra for energy consumed during peak hours. But moving forward with a new rate structure requires clearing legal hurdles and convincing consumers about the merits of the plan (some consumers are wary of a power company monitoring their energy use). Luckily, with their multidisciplinary training, IGERT fellows are poised to take the lead in answering those sorts of questions to build the power grid of tomorrow.

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

Three CEMS proposals are among those chosen for the first university-wide seed grant program By Erin E. Post

(From left) Jon Ramsey, Ph.D., Research Associate in Biochemistry; Rachael Oldinski, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Dryver Huston, Ph.D., Professor of Mechanical Engineering; and Daniel Weiss, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Medicine. Photo: COM Design & Photography

With proposals ranging from low-cost ground-penetrating radar to a lung sealant derived from seaweed, six UVM research teams in June pitched their ideas to a panel of experts at the first university-wide SPARK-VT session. The teams were vying for seed grants that would help move their innovative work one step closer to the marketplace. By July, SPARK-VT had decided upon four winning proposals, and three of the teams represented research from the university’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. SPARK-TV was created in 2013 by the Department of Medicine with the goal of supporting researchers as they navigate the tricky terrain between developing an idea for a new device or therapy and making it a reality. Its premise hinges on feedback from outside of the university: A panel of 12 leaders from biotech, pharmaceutical, business, engineering, finance, and legal fields listened to the presentations. Panel members asked questions, challenged presenters on the details of their plans and ultimately offered suggestions for next steps. While all participants received tips and suggestions, only the four winning proposals were awarded seed funding from UVM’s Office of the Vice President for Research. Based on a program at Stanford University and brought to the College of Medicine by Department of Medicine Chair Polly Parsons, M.D., SPARK-VT now also includes workshops and guest lectures that address the commercialization process, founding start-ups, business planning and other topics that help faculty move research from bench to bedside.

The winning proposals from CEMS faculty are: An innovative easy-to-use, non-toxic, lung sealant patch/band-aid that could be used for lung surgeries or other emergency sealant needs developed by Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Rachael Oldinski, Ph.D., and Professor of Medicine Daniel Weiss, M.D., Ph.D. SPARK-VT funds will aid the team in testing the longterm durability and reliability of the innovative alginate material in animal models, before later moving on to humans. A proposal by Professor of Mechanical Engineering Dryver Huston, Ph.D., and Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Tian Xia, Ph.D., that focuses on a new, low-cost ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology for highway infrastructure maintenance testing that promises deep cost savings compared to systems currently available. SPARK-VT funds will help them to move the current prototype forward and identity a “scalable, low-cost manufacturing pathway” for a lightweight, vehicle-mounted system. A project led by Assistant Professor of Engineering Patrick Lee, Ph.D., and involving Assistant Professor of Engineering Ting Tan, Ph.D., and Professor of Mechanical Engineering Dryver Huston, Ph.D., that focuses on the development of environment responsive microfibers to reinforce concrete structures. The market for concrete admixtures like this is estimated to be over $700 million, with a 2.5 percent growth rate.

The Phantom

KNOWS George Pinder holds a model that he uses in teaching numerical methods for engineers. He notes that while he could use a drawing instead, the three-dimensional object is more flexible and appealing to students who are learning how to represent physical systems in a computer-oriented form of mathematics. Photo: Sally McCay

Why CEMS researchers are turning to modern medicine to solve a major ecological problem By Sujata Gupta

The phantom’s exterior consists entirely of plastic, right down to the bolts. Shaped like a giant soup can, the device slides easily into the MRI. But unlike a human, the phantom’s “organs” are made of silt and sand and its “blood” is water. Compared to a person inside the claustrophobic confines of the machine, with its incessant and loud clanging, the phantom is preternaturally calm. “The phantom doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t move around. It doesn’t have to go to the bathroom,” says Richard Watts, director of the MRI Center at the University of Vermont. Soon, the phantom will be pumped full of gadolinium, the same contrast agent often pumped into people undergoing an MRI. Only here, the researchers will image sediments rather than something more typical for an MRI, like a brain tumor.

shops that cleaned machine parts needed for war. Those cleaning agents slowly leeched into the ground. Over the past several decades, water has been pulled out of the ground to suck out the chemicals. Initially the expensive process worked and chemical loads decreased. But then things leveled off. Chemical concentrations there are still 50 times higher than what is considered safe for drinking water, Pinder says. It turns out that the chemicals in the coarse sand layers are quickly flushed out, while those in less permeable layers, such as silt, stay stuck. Over time, those trapped chemicals trickle back into the coarse sand. “Anything that’s not sand is going to harbor these contaminants and leech them very slowly,” Pinder says. While that issue – known as the “tailing effect” – is known, what’s not clear is where those contaminants are trapped or how they move through fine-grain materials underground. And without that information, it’s impossible to know where to focus cleanup efforts or predict how long it will take to clean up the valley. This situation is not unique to San Fernando, which is just one of an estimated 350,000 contaminated sites across the nation, with the cost of cleanup over the next 30 years projected at $250 billion.

The elaborate setup is the brainchild of George Pinder, a groundwater hydrologist in UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering who has dedicated his career to studying the movements of fluids underground. Specifically, he is interested in figuring out what happens to contaminants as they sink into the soil at the surface into the layers below.

“We’re spending billions of dollars a year to deal with these sites,” says David Ahlfeld, a groundwater hydrologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (and Pinder’s graduate student from many decades ago). “If we could understand better how the contaminants behave at the very small scale we could do a better job of cleaning up.”

As the phantom gets secured to the MRI gurney, Pinder describes a large swath of land in San Fernando Valley just outside of Los Angeles. Back in the 1940s, the valley housed

As he mulled over that situation, Pinder recalled a CAT scan he’d had on his back. “I was really impressed by the pictures,” Pinder says. Pinder began to wonder if he could use medical

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

imaging to look at what was happening to contaminants underground. He soon realized the CAT scan technology would be too low resolution for what he needed. So he called up MRI guru Richard Watts, who was intrigued. Pinder wanted to create a proxy for what happens to contaminants underground and then observe that process in real time. Those images would then let him develop algorithms better able to predict where contaminants get stuck and how long it will take for them to exit. So with the help of machinist Floyd Vilmont and graduate student James Montague, Pinder came up with the idea for the phantom. Scanning sediment is a decidedly novel use of medical imaging technology. “We primarily scan humans,” says Watts, “although we do some work on rats, pigs, and dogs.” After all, MRIs were designed to image living things. But as long as the materials inside the MRI contrast with one another, the machine should – at least in theory – be able to create an image. An MRI is essentially an enormous magnet. Humans are made up of mostly water, or hydrogen and oxygen, and inside the hydrogen atoms are protons that just happen to behave like little magnets. That means that when a person is placed inside an MRI, the protons inside those hydrogen atoms line up to face the magnet. To generate an image, radio waves are transmitted into the body to knock those protons out of whack. When the radio waves are turned off, the protons send out radio signals as they re-align. Protons within different tissues produce unique signals. When a receiver picks up those signals, the information reveals the protons’ precise location. Back at the UVM hospital, the yawning mouth of the MRI and the phantom nestled within it are visible through an enormous observation window. Inside the phantom are high-grade silt and coarse-grain sands made of silica that have been separated – by freezing the silt core and pouring sand all around it – to mimic sediment layers in nature. Both layers are completely saturated in water so that they, like tissues in the body, will emit a unique magnetic signal.

pipe pumping in the gadolinium came loose, dumping the contrast agent all over the MRI. And problematically, even though Pinder has been purchasing high quality sand, it appears to contain some impurities that are muddying the signal. “To be honest,” Watts says, “we were surprised at how difficult it was to get a signal out of it.” Early results from the project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, seem promising. Montague has run the numbers and can now accurately predict the gadolinium’s path through the phantom. Out in the field, Montague says, sampling is done at wells spaced across a large area. The resolution is decidedly low; nor is it clear where a well’s contaminant is coming from as the fluids below ground are in constant motion. Now, he can see what’s going on down to 5 millimeters or even smaller. Pinpointing the source of the problem, as well as forecasting cleanup times, will undoubtedly appeal to businesses, for whom the time allotted to pumping out chemicals translates directly to lost revenue. His clients, says Micheal King, a hydrogeologist and petroleum engineer with the Hydrodynamics Group in Seattle, Washington, just want to say “Hey, I’m done. Here’s my bill. Have a nice day.” Pinder’s efforts, he suspects, could bring them one step closer to that goal. It’s early days, though. As the research progresses, Pinder and his team will need to take those equations and test them in the field. His hope is that the equations will provide clues for how to more efficiently remove contaminants from fine-grained materials. Ultimately, Pinder says, “the goal is to reduce the cost to society and to companies of cleaning up contaminants that have been around since the ’40s.”

George F. Pinder Named Honorary Diplomate of the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers George F. Pinder, professor at the University of Vermont in the College of Engineering and Mathematics, was recently named an Honorary Diplomate, Water Resources Engineer of the American Academy of Water Resources Engineers (AAWRE), a subsidiary of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

As I look on, the team prepares to add the gadolinium, an analogue for the contaminant. That way, they can watch as the “contaminant” diffuses and measure how much clears out when the phantom is flushed with clean water (to mimic a real-life cleanup effort). Crucially, the team can observe how long it takes for contaminant trapped in the silt core to seep back into the coarse sand.

In support of AAWRE’s mission to broaden and deepen the body of knowledge for practicing engineers, AAWRE’s Diplomate certification was developed to improve the practice, elevate the standards and advance the profession of water resources engineers. The Diplomate, Water Resources Engineer represents strong professional ethics and a commitment to lifelong learning and continuing professional development.

“Our experiment really is to watch what happens to the gadolinium that’s in the silt,” Pinder says.

The Honorary Diplomate status is AAWRE’s highest honor given to an individual. Since the founding of AAWRE in October 2004, only 36 individuals have received the Honorary Diplomate, Water Resources Engineers status from the academy.

So far, there have been a few hiccups. On the day I visited, the

More information: www.aawre.org

HACKATHON

Brings Software Engineers and Students Together By Amanda Kenyon Waite

With “Eye of the Tiger” blaring, their fists pumping and cheers erupting, a team of students jogs into the final round of the competition.

No, this isn’t a basketball game, and we’re not at Patrick Gym. It’s a Saturday night at Votey Hall, and 70 students have gathered for a hackathon.

A dozen software engineers from State Street, an international financial services institution headquartered in Boston, have traveled to Burlington to host the event. In partnership with UVM staff, they judged the event, and coached the students all day -- looking for talent to recruit in the process. A number of UVM students in recent years have gone on to intern and fill full-time positions at the company.

While the skills on display at the coding competition haven’t necessarily been athletic in nature, endurance has certainly played a role. For 12 hours, following four hours the night before, the eight teams have been working against each other and against the clock, developing apps with an aim to improve student life at UVM. The students are weary, but the energy is high now that it’s time to show their work to their classmates and competitors — and to their judges.

What did the students create? An “impressive” range of apps, according to the judges. The “Eye of the Tiger” team’s entrance was a nod to the athletic theme of their app, designed to track availability of equipment at the fitness center. Another group created a site where students can post their reviews of UVM classes, providing helpful information during class registration time. A third group conceived of an app that could help organize carpools to the mountains during ski season.

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

Seventy students dedicated a Friday night and all-day Saturday to the hackathon, where eight teams competed to build the best app to enhance campus life at UVM. Photos: Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist

The first-place team, who split a $1,000 award, created an app that’s of particular value to the college student: a calendar of campus events serving free food. Their site, which was built with responsive design so that it’s mobile friendly, lets users “favorite” the events they plan to attend, which triggers another mobile-friendly feature: the addition of that event to the user’s calendar. The team was also able to integrate a Google map of campus, dotted with friendly pizza and coffee icons that correspond to upcoming events. More important than the what, though, at this hackathon was the how. The purpose of the competition was to train students in the “Agile” method, a system of project management gaining popularity in the software development world. At a training session Friday night, before the competition officially began, State Street Vice President Hung Tran gave students a crash course. Unlike more traditional models, which involve intensive documentation before a project begins and then minimal contact with the client until product delivery much later, the Agile method is structured with short phases of work punctuated with frequent assessment and potential revision. Among other benefits, this system minimizes the risk of creating a product that doesn’t meet the needs of the client or the always-changing marketplace. The Agile method gave the students a framework to organize their work, stay on task and connected to each other and their coaches throughout the hackathon -- just the structure they needed to develop functioning apps from scratch in less than 24 hours. “Trying to coordinate and work with everybody and make sure that what we’re doing isn’t going to break what someone else is doing is quite a challenge,” says UVM senior Computer Science major Paul Kiripolsky, whose team won the second place prize of $400. “But it’s a lot of fun, and it’s a good work experience, as well.”

“Doing things like this can really help to give our students great experiences beyond what we’re teaching in the classroom,” says Maggie Eppstein, chair of Computer Science, who, along with lecturer Robert Erickson and the UVM Career Center, worked with State Street to make the event possible. “Most hackathons don’t provide any direction about how the teams should collaborate. Having professional software engineers coach the Agile method makes this event really unique,” she says. While this is the first hackathon the department has organized, it’s not the first public event or partnership with regional businesses. Annually, Computer Science hosts a CS Fair, a chance for students to share their work with campus and network with potential employers. Providing these enrichment opportunities is a priority for Eppstein to meet the needs of a rapidly growing area of study; the number of CS majors has more than doubled in the past five years at UVM. But as much as the event was tailor made for CS students, it also attracted a number of students from across the disciplines — including business, electrical engineering, economics and even psychology majors. Junior Jackson Donovan, a business major, says he participated for the experience collaborating and working with programmers, a key skill for his potential career interest in tech marketing. And the event led to collaboration among students of different levels. The winning team, for example, was composed of two first-years, a sophomore, junior, senior and two grad students. “That was our goal,” says Lisa Strack, vice president of university relations at State Street, “to reach a broad set of students, which is the talent we want to recruit, to share Agile with them, get them excited about State Street, about working in financial services — and to have fun.”

Photo: Jeff Clarke

SAVE THE DATE FOR THE NEXT COMPUTER SCIENCE FAIR: Dec. 9, 2015, in the Davis Center’s Grand Maple Ballroom Presentation times: 1:10pm to 2:00pm | 2:20pm to 3:10pm | 3:30pm to 4:20pm

UVM Lab at Spaceflight’s

LEADING EDGE Sending materials to space and back without leaving Earth

UVM’s Plasma Test and Diagnostics Lab, built by mechanical engineering professor Doug Fletcher (left) and grad student Walt Owens, has helped Fletcher and his colleagues win 10 competitive grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, NASA and the Office of Naval Research. Photo: Sally McCay

By Sujata Gupta

Inside Doug Fletcher’s Plasma Test and Diagnostics Laboratory at the University of Vermont, we watch through a clear window as a bolt-shaped piece of graphite enters a new atmosphere. As the cylindrical chamber housing the graphite heats up to a whopping 6,000 degrees Celsius at its center, a graduate student adds nitrogen gas, a core component of Earth’s atmosphere. At such high temperatures, gases change dramatically into a form of matter called plasma – electrons break away from molecules, leaving charged particles called ions in their wake – and alter surrounding materials in unexpected ways. When the grad student turns off the heat, the white-hot graphite sample slowly cools to a deep orange.

The demonstration is meant to simulate what could happen to that piece of graphite if it coated the heat shield of a rocket careening back to Earth from, say, Mars. The rocket would be so fast-moving it would generate a shock wave along its leading edge, turning all the gases in its path into a searingly hot, corrosive plasma. Predicting how various materials will perform in such a hostile environment is crucial to developing the next generation of efficient and effective insulating heat shield systems that will enable a spacecraft to travel safely to and from distant locations in the universe.

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

BOUNDARY ISSUES UVM’s plasma lab is an instrumental player in that effort because, alone among test facilities, it focuses exclusively on a region where much of the important action takes place in spaceflight – the so called “boundary layer,” a three to four millimeter thick region between the plasma at the rocket’s leading edge and the surface of the insulating material being tested. “Everything happens at this interface,” says Fletcher, a mechanical engineering professor in UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. Fletcher’s lab creates plasma and simulates the boundary layer as other labs do, but is unique in then capturing a welter of data – with a laundry list of laser diagnostic and measurement tools – about the complex chemical and physical reactions that are taking place there.

To build it, Fletcher recruited Walt Owens, a graduate student in the School of Engineering whom he had seen around campus riding a so-called tall bike – a double stacked bike welded together -- that he had built for himself. Fletcher assumed, says Owens with a chuckle, “If I can build a bike, I can build a plasma lab.” Owens was an odd pick. When he met Fletcher, all he knew was that he hated fluid mechanics and thermodynamics – key components of the field of aerothermodynamics. But he’d always liked construction and held a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, so he was intrigued by the chance to help build a lab from scratch. Soon, he was engrossed in reading up on similar facilities used by NASA, the Air Force and European and Russian researchers.

The demonstration is meant to simulate what could happen to that piece of graphite if it coated the heat shield of a rocket careening back to Earth from, say, Mars.

This information is coveted by NASA and private aerospace companies because it enables them to plug real data into their design models. Current models for designing new insulating materials, Fletcher says, are weakened by “simplifying assumptions that we know are invalid.” The ultimate goal? To design heat shields that are not only more reliable, but also lighter weight. Uncertainty – arising from the data gaps in the models – has historically led engineers to build extra material and weight into the heat shields to minimize their chance of failure. Eliminating this overdesign will, in turn, allow NASA to achieve one of its major objectives for the next phase of the space program. Lighter heat shields mean there is capacity for larger payloads – of scientific instruments and humans.

BUILD A BIKE, BUILD A PLASMA LAB Fletcher has worked on the complexities of creating better insulating materials for spaceflight throughout his career, which has included 12 years at the NASA Ames Laboratory and another seven at the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium. But it was only when he came to UVM in 2007 that he had the opportunity to create his own test facility, with funding provided by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

It took Fletcher and Owens about a year to build the lab – of a type called an inductively coupled plasma facility – and then another year to fine-tune all the equipment and protocols to get it up and running. They started running tests a few years ago. Now, says Owens, a convert to the cause who has nearly completed a doctorate in aerothermodynamics, “It’s a world-class facility.” Federal funders agree; in its short life, the lab has already helped Fletcher and his colleagues win 10 competitive grants from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, NASA and the Office of Naval Research. Before I exit the lab, Fletcher tells me what the nitrogen plasma is doing to the graphite bolt. Nitrogen atoms in plasma, he says, raising his voice to project over the din of the machine, can grab a carbon atom right off the surface of a material like graphite and shuttle it away. Moreover, free nitrogen atoms preferentially bind to one another and dump that recombination energy back into the material. By measuring those two reaction rates using laser diagnostics, it becomes possible to sort out what’s going on at the graphite’s surface. And that, Fletcher booms, “removes the uncertainty of one key set of reactions.” Adding more certainty to the process of getting spacecraft safely to and from distant places is Fletcher’s métier – making his lab an important way station in mankind’s next step to a new frontier. In addition to Owens, the following faculty and graduates students also work the the lab: Jason Meyers, Andrew Lutz, Max Dougherty, Juergen Uhl, Silas Smith, Corinna Thompson, Corey Tillson and Luke Allen.

Eric Hernandez wins

NSF CAREER GRANT

to detect failing bridges and buildings By Joshua E. Brown

At the height of rush hour, on the evening of Aug. 1, 2007, an eight-lane steel truss bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis suddenly collapsed. Dozens of vehicles plunged into the water, and 13 people died. Eric Hernandez, an expert on structural engineering at the University of Vermont, wants to make sure this doesn’t happen on another bridge. Combining novel algorithms with existing sensor technologies, he’s developing new, lower-cost techniques to interpret the

vibrations in bridges and buildings. His goal is to create affordable tools for engineers and regulators to more accurately forecast the remaining life of a structure — whether it’s a decades-old bridge or an earthquake-shaken building. To support his research, the National Science Foundation granted Hernandez, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, a five-year, $500,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) began June 1.

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

Like doctors using an EKG, a professor of engineering and his students deploy vibration sensors on bridges to test their structural health. To figure out better ways to ensure the fitness and safety of structures—with the fewest sensors necessary—the National Science Foundation has awarded UVM’s Eric Hernandez its prestigious CAREER grant for promising young scientists. Bridge 58N on interstate highway 89, Richmond, VT. Photo: Eric Hernandez

UVM professor Eric Hernandez is one of 146 early-career scientists selected for the NSF’s 2015 CAREER Award. Photo: Sally McCay

“We want to know: can we accurately estimate when a structure will fail? Then we’d be able to step back and say, ‘it has between 12 and 14 years left of service. We should plan now so that in 10 years it has been replaced,’” Hernandez says. “Right now that information is often not known. And you can have cases like the Minneapolis bridge which collapsed dramatically without warning.” Engineers had inspected that bridge annually and were concerned about its condition — it was slated to be replaced in 2020. But they didn’t expect — nor were they able to forecast — its catastrophic failure. “Instead of just relying on visual inspections, we could be using sensors,” Hernandez says, to assess the structural health of “buildings, bridges, tunnels, and wind turbines — early, before there is trouble — like people get tests when we go to the doctor.” Hernandez and his students have been working in a UVM lab, and — in partnership with the Vermont Agency of Transportation — studying a (healthy!) bridge in Vermont to test these ideas. “We’re looking at how structures vibrate as different kinds of loads are acting on them,” Hernandez says, “and from those vibrations we can estimate their level of safety or reliability.” Vibration-sensing technologies on the market today are very good, Hernandez says. “There are sensors with enough accuracy to do the work we need to do,” he says. But they’re not cheap. “The problem is that the number of sensors that we

can put on structures is limited because of cost,” he says. That’s why he’s focused on what’s called a “minimally instrumented” approach to measuring a structure’s remaining life. “We’re proposing to determine what is the minimum number of instruments that you need,” he says, using more sophisticated computational techniques for interpreting the sensor data that is collected. “It’s an algorithmic contribution,” Hernandez says.

FATIGUE LIFE Hernandez is exploring his new approach at both ends of the wear-and-tear spectrum. On one end are seismic loads — think earthquakes — on buildings. “The number of load cycles that it takes to break buildings is often low, on the order of 10 or 20,” Hernandez says. On the other extreme are the loads that car and truck traffic make on bridges. “Imagine a paperclip you bent — it’s not evident when it will break due to fatigue. It’s the same thing with bridges, but instead of three or four bends, it’s millions of cycles. But at some point the fatigue life of the bridge will be exhausted,” Hernandez says, “and we want to be able to track that fatigue as the structure is operating.” Eventually, Hernandez’s new approach could be packaged into software “that could be coupled with different kinds of sensors that people would put onto structures,” whether built into a new wind turbine or attached to a hundred-year-old bridge. “Then the software will do all the analysis,” he says. “Fatigue is responsible for about 75 percent of all structural failures. That’s why this is an important problem.”

Biostatistician Helps FDA Approve First

BIOSIMILAR DRUG

Biosimilar drugs could replace more expensive medicines. UVM biostatistician Bernard “Chip” Cole serves on the expert advisory panel that gave the FDA the green light to approve the first biosimilar in March. Photo: Sally McCay

By Carolyn Shapiro

Bernard “Chip” Cole got the call in late December. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration summoned the University of Vermont biostatistician for another mission. Since 2013, Cole, a professor of statistics in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, has sat on an important FDA panel that assesses applications for new cancer medications and makes recommendations to the federal agency. This time, though, the mission was different. Cole and his fellow members of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee would forge a new route through the realm of regulatory review of drugs in the United States. They would assist in the FDA’s first evaluation of a “biosimilar” product. Biosimilars are close copies

of biological drugs, which are derived from living cells instead of the cocktail of chemicals that make up most medicines. When chemically based drugs lose their patents, generic versions with identical components can easily reach the marketplace, typically lowering prices. Until now, the FDA had no mechanism to approve close copies of biologics, deemed too complex to ensure that similar but inexact alternatives were equally safe and reliable. The most popular biologics, used to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases, are also some of the most expensive drugs. Under a mandate of the Affordable Care Act, with a goal to encourage competing products that could help lower costs,

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

the FDA now has a way to evaluate biosimilars. The federal law permits approval of a product shown as “highly similar” to a specific drug on the market and with “no clinically meaningful differences” in safety or effectiveness as that existing drug. In March -- relying on the recommendation of Cole and the advisory panel, which applied those federal guidelines for the first time -- the FDA approved Zarxio. The new drug mimics the well-established Neupogen to fight infections in cancer patients undergoing chemotheraphy and other treatment. The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research approves more than 100 new medications each year. Most never go through advisory committees. Cole’s group only sees the tough cases, those that lack a “favorable risk profile” or raise alarm bells, making it unclear whether the potential benefits outweigh the risks, he says. “They only bring stuff to us if the question is difficult.” Cole has participated in four reviews on the 13-member panel. His fellow members include oncologists and other medical professionals, a cancer patient or survivor and a consumer advocate. Cole is the only biostatistician. “The level of the work isn’t that bad, but the level of responsibility is huge,” he says. “It would be terrible for a drug company to get a drug approved that doesn’t work out” or that causes harm, he says. Equally terrible is the prospect of denying, because of perceived risks, a drug that is actually safe and could help millions of sick people or maybe save lives. “I think of it from the overarching public health perspective,” Cole says of his role. “Every time you make a drug available, you’re altering public policy.”

WHERE NUMBERS MEET MEDICINE For 23 years, Cole has tied his biostatistics background to cancer. During a post-doctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, he found he liked collaborating with oncologists and studying patient outcomes. It put him at the cross-section of numerical science and human medicine, where he could not only advance the analysis of data but also answer questions for cancer patients.

he writes two statements -- one in support of approval, and one against it -- explaining his reasoning for each. The position that sounds most convincing tells him where to lean. Then, Cole gets on a plane and heads to FDA headquarters in Silver Springs, Md., for the meeting. It’s more like a courtroom trial, and the committee is the jury. Each side, the drug company and the FDA staff, presents its argument. Cole and the other committee members sit at a U-shaped table and can ask questions, and he revises his previous statements. The meeting, which usually lasts a day, also includes time for public comments. “Oftentimes, they’re patients who come and tell us stories about what they’ve been through,” Cole says. “Hearing those statements really puts some perspective on what we’re doing.” Unlike a courtroom jury, the panelists don’t come to a consensus on a verdict at the end of the day. They simply answer “yes” or “no,” to the FDA’s question: “Should we approve this drug?” They also can comment at that time, and Cole says he sometimes reads his written statement. With Zarxio, he says, the answer was relatively clear. The vote in favor was unanimous. The committee played a significant role in the biosimilars review process, ensuring its transparency to the public and bringing expertise to vet critical information, says Tim Irvin, a spokesman for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. For now, the committee will look at every upcoming application for a new biosimilar, he says. “We appreciate getting their feedback,” Irvin says. “It gives everybody a chance to look at the data and make sure everything is as it should be.” Cole doesn’t expect every biosimilar review to go as smoothly. A key difference is the narrower scope of the clinical trials to show that the characteristics of the new drug and the outcomes for patients are close to those of the existing drug. It’s foreseeable that the measurements might not line up, he says. “If there’s one chink in the armor, it opens up a question,” he says. “And then you might need a big clinical trial to answer the question.”

“I look for a well-designed study,” Cole says of his approach on the FDA panel. “The famous line is: ‘All studies have warts.’ None of them are perfect.”

The committee only makes recommendations, but the FDA usually follows them. Cole says he believes all the committee members feel the weight of their decision.

Cole has his own system after reviewing the briefings provided by the FDA and the drug company. After he studies the information,

“You get a collection of people together, you have a collective wisdom,” he says. “So it’s not all on one person’s shoulders.”

Student

SPOTLIGHT

Taking

FLIGHT How an engineering camp set Nick Martin’s course at CEMS By Meredith Woodward King Photo: Sally McCay

For years, Nick Martin ’16 has wanted to work in the aerospace industry. “I’ve always liked building things,” he says. “Even as a kid, I was interested in spacecraft and airplanes. When we went on trips, my favorite part of the trip was flying.” When he was in high school in Manhattan, Kansas, he had narrowed down his interests to either mechanical or electrical engineering. An engineering camp at Kansas State University helped him settle on the former. Now a senior on a four-year UVM Presidential Scholarship, he has made it through some of the most challenging classes in mechanical engineering, including Thermodynamics and Fluid Dynamics with William Louisos and Heat Transfer with Yves Dubief. “Dr. Louisos is known to be a challenging teacher, but his teaching style is a great match for the way I learn. His tests are always hard, which inspires me to buckle down and learn what I really need to learn,” Martin says.

“We might not have seen the problem before, but we knew how to step back and look at the big picture and draw on everything we had learned to solve the problem,” he says. Martin has already observed how this problem-solving approach might play out in the workplace. He spent the summer working in Professor Douglas Fletcher’s plasma diagnostics laboratory, redesigning a probe used to test the thermal resistance of materials such as those used in spacecraft. “I made all the parts with SolidWorks, a CAD program,” he says. “I’ve re-engineered the probe, going through the initial idea to the design phase and on to the construction phase.” Martin also gained experience through a summer internship with SOH Wind Engineering in Williston, a company that operates the world’s largest anemometer calibration wind tunnel, which is used for testing and calibrating wind sensors and the wind loading on structures. “It’s nice to be able to get an internship where you’re applying what you’ve learned in the classroom,” he says. “You learn how forces interact with objects. ‘If I do this to this, what will happen?’ You start to build an intuition of what will happen.”

“And what I really liked about Professor Dubief is that he stressed the ‘problem-solving approach.’ It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s a problem you’re going to see all the time in the workplace, so when you’re on the job, you can just ‘cut and paste’ from your engineering notes and be done with it,’ ” he explains.

He plans to apply some of his undergraduate courses to CEMS’ Accelerated Master’s Degree Program, conduct research at The von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium, and eventually land a job in the aerospace industry.

Instead, Martin and his classmates developed the skills and knowledge to identify a problem, break it down and analyze it piece by piece, and apply scientific and mathematical theory and data to arrive at a solution.

If he has any advice for future engineering students, it’s this: “Learn to program, because that’s going to be huge,” Martin says. “Everything is moving toward working more with computers, and you need coding skills.”

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

A prescription for

SUCCESS

Intersecting interests in math and healthcare helped carve a vibrant career for Katherine King By Meredith Woodward King Photo: Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

Lyndonville native Katherine King’s ties to the University of Vermont go way back — to 1859, when her paternal great-greatgrandfather, Urban Woodbury, graduated with a degree in medicine. He went on to become a Civil War hero, Burlington mayor and the state’s 45th governor. “UVM was always one of my top college choices,” says King ’14, who was a recipient of one of UVM’s Green & Gold Scholarships, a merit award that’s given to the academically strongest rising high school senior in every Vermont secondary school. Although she entered UVM as an undeclared major, a calculus class with Professor Thomas Rogers helped set her on a career path. “I realized that studying math was where my heart and passion was,” she says. In her first statistics class, with Professor Jeffrey Buzas, she discovered how numerical data could be applied to solve problems in healthcare, a field she had previously contemplated for a career. “I always wanted to work in the healthcare field to make a difference in people’s health and lives, but I just couldn’t quite see myself as a nurse or doctor,” she says. By introducing his work on Vermont Oxford Network’s data concerning outcomes of improvement efforts in neonatal care units, “Professor Buzas showed me the perfect way to fit my mathematical mind into the healthcare field.” Working with Buzas on her honors thesis, she gained additional research experience. “We looked into a relatively new area of statistics, functional data analysis (FDA), and we worked with weather data collected throughout the entire United States

over the last 64 years,” she says. Outside the classroom, King tutored students in the Learning Coop and developed her skills in teaching and leadership. “I expanded from just tutoring in specific subject areas to learning-skills tutoring, weekly math help sessions and eventually training all new tutors,” she says. In the spring of her junior year, she pursued her goal of studying abroad. At Bond University in Australia, “I was able to take classes not available at UVM, including Criminal Profiling, taught by Wayne Petherick, an author of many profiling books. I also was able to travel all around Australia and got to see parts of New Zealand, Fiji and Indonesia.” When considering life after college, King realized she needed a graduate degree to pursue work in complex statistical analysis. Buzas encouraged her to apply for CEMS’ Accelerated Master’s Program. In Professor Richard Single’s course on Applied Statistical Genetics, she worked on projects involving “real genetic studies, and we were able to reproduce results from many recent studies and even find patterns of our own.” Her UVM experience paid off once she hit the job market. After hearing from an alumna and two professors about a job at the Mayo Clinic, she landed a position as a statistician, working with cardiovascular surgery and other clinical statistics groups. Her advice for CEMS students? “Network, especially early on,” she says. “It can be a scary word for most people, especially for those of us who fit the introverted mathematician stereotype such as myself, but it can also change your college experience.”

NEW ROLE FOR TWITTER:

“I’m not a medical scientist. I work with big data,” says professor Ahmed Abdeen Hamed. Photo: Josh Brown

Early Warning System for Bad Drug Interactions Vermont scientists mine #hashtags to hunt for unknown side effects By Joshua E. Brown

A team of scientists has invented a new technique for discovering potentially dangerous drug interactions and unknown side-effects — before they show up in medical databases, like PubMed, or even before doctors and researchers have heard of them at all. The far-seeing tool? A computer program that can efficiently search millions of tweets on Twitter for the names of many drugs and medicines — and build a map of how they’re connected, using the #hashtags that link them. “Our new algorithm is a great way to make discoveries that can be followed-up and tested by experts like clinical researchers and pharmacists,” said Ahmed Abdeen Hamed, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont who led the creation of the new tool. A report on how the algorithm works, and its preliminary discoveries, was published online, June 8, in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. “We may not know what the interaction is, but with this approach we can quickly find clear evidence of drugs that are linked together via hashtags,” Hamed said. The new approach could also be used to generate public alerts, Hamed said, before a clinical investigation is started or health care providers have received updates. “It can tell us: we may be seeing a drug/drug interaction here,” Hamed said. “Beware.” And the research team also aims to help overcome a longstanding problem in medical research: published studies are too often not linked to new scientific findings, because digital libraries “suffer infrequent tagging,” the scientists write, and updating keywords and metadata associated with studies is a laborious manual task, often delayed or incomplete. “Mining Twitter hashtags can give us a link between emerging scientific evidence and PubMed,” the massive database run by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, Hamed said. Using their new algorithm, the Vermont team has created a website that

will allow an investigator to explore the connections between search terms (say “albuterol”), existing scientific studies indexed in PubMed — and Twitter hashtags associated with the terms and studies. Previous studies have shown that Twitter can be mined for bad drug interactions, but the Vermont team advances this idea by focusing on the distinctive information contained in hashtags — like “#overprescribed,” “#kidneystoneprobs,” and “#skinswelling” — to find new associations. The team’s approach involves building what they call a “K-H network” — essentially a dense map of links between keywords and hashtags — and then pruning out a lot of the “noise and trash,” Hamed says, “this is Twitter!” — to find the terms that are central to the network. Then the algorithm, called HashPairMiner, searches this cleaned-up network for the shortest paths between a pair of search terms and their intervening hashtags. The overall goal of the project, supported by the National Science Foundation, is to “discover any relationship between two drugs that is not known,” said Hamed. But to “groundtruth the hypothesis” — that data-mining in Twitter can find unknown drug interactions — the team wanted to demonstrate their approach “can produce interactions that are already known,” says Tamer Fandy, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the Albany College of Pharmacy’s campus in Vermont, and a co-author with Hamed on the new study. “It does,” said Hamed. In one example from the new study, a path between aspirin and the allergy medication benadryl, that are known to interact, was detected by the algorithm; in one instance, the two drugs were linked — perhaps not too surprisingly — by the hashtag “#happythanksgiving.”

www.uvm.edu/cems | FALL ISSUE 2015

A Legacy of

GENEROSITY:

L. Richard Fisher ’47 By Andrew Liptak

Fisher, 1939

Growing up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, L. Richard Fisher aspired to attend the University of Vermont, a goal that may have seemed out of reach given his family’s poverty. Yet thanks to the financial support of UVM’s Wilbur Society, Fisher achieved that dream, and he later recalled that he was one of only three students from his graduating high school class to pursue a college degree. That experience was formative for Fisher, who later made a significant financial commitment to providing need-based scholarships to UVM students. His scholarship program is aimed at helping Vermont students, especially those from the still-rural Northeast Kingdom, attend the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. His generosity has also funded a professorship in electrical engineering. Fisher, who was born in 1923, graduated from Hardwick Academy in 1941 and enrolled in the University of Vermont the same year. His collegiate experience was cut short by war, however. Following the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he was assigned to the Signal Corps. While in Europe, his unit remained behind the battle lines, constructing vital communications infrastructure as the Allied Forces pushed deeper into Europe. After Germany’s surrender, Fisher found himself on a ship bound for the Pacific when word came that Japan had surrendered. After spending some time in occupied Japan, Fisher returned to UVM, and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1947. He remained at the school and earned a second degree in commerce and economics. Following his graduation from UVM, Fisher found work with Sylvania, an electronics company. By the 1970s, he moved west to work for Hamamatsu Corporation, a Japanese company that specialized in photomultiplier tubes.

His nephew, Bruce Fisher, noted that while his uncle was slightly reserved, “he was very personable and got along with people quite well,” something that aided him in his role as a salesman for the company. His work for Hamamatsu began just as Silicon Valley began to expand with new businesses and technologies in the 1970s and 1980s. Fisher travelled often to Japan for company meetings, and enjoyed hosting and showing his Japanese colleagues around the Bay area when they came to the United States. He retired in 2008 at the age of 85. Fisher amassed a considerable fortune during his lifetime, thanks to earning compensation in stock options and his own savvy stock market investments. Despite that, his nephew said, he retained his Yankee mentality from growing up in Vermont: “He didn’t replace things; he was just happy with the basics.” In 1995, he established his scholarship fund to support Vermont engineering students, donating more than $5.3 million to the fund since its inception through gifts made during his lifetime and through an estate bequest. In 2012, he gave an additional $1.5 million dollars to support a professorship in the School of Engineering, which is now held by Dr. Paul Hines. After funding the scholarship, Fisher told Vermont Quarterly, “There has been a real shortage of engineering students coming out of our colleges and universities. If we don’t do a better job of attracting talented students into these fields, we’ll fall behind the rest of the world.” Fisher passed away on August 30th, 2014 at the age of 91, leaving behind a rich legacy of hard work and generosity. Fisher was modest, worked hard and remained a devoted Catholic throughout his life. He spent very little on himself, preferring to donate money to his parish and to the University of Vermont, which had given him his start in the business world. His generosity was inspired by the tenants of his faith, and saw that he was in a position in which he could help others in need, just as others had helped him when he was younger.

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage

PAID

109 VOTEY HALL, UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT 33 COLCHESTER AVENUE, BURLINGTON VT 05405 (802) 656-3392 | www.uvm.edu/cems

Burlington, VT Permit No. 143