Personal Mention
An international team of researchers, including Carnegie Mellon President Subra Suresh, has developed a new technique called cyclic healing that uses repetitive, gentle stretching to eliminate pre-existing defects in metal crystals. Their results have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most materials are made of crystals. When materials fail, it is usually the result of defects in the crystal or in the arrangement of multiple crystals in a polycrystalline structure. While much research has been done on metal fatigue at larger scales, new technologies are just now allowing researchers to see how atomic-scale defects nucleate, multiply and interact in materials subjected to monotonic or fatigue loading inside a high-resolution microscope. Find out more.
Engineering professors Deborah Stine, Alan McGaughey and Bryan Webler (l-r) have been selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's seventh Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium, Oct. 25-28 in Irvine, Calif. Faculty are selected from a highly competitive pool for their innovative educational approaches. The symposium enables faculty to share ideas and learn from research and best practices in education. Stine is a professor of the practice in engineering and public policy. McGaughey is a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering. Webler is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering.
Ignacio Grossmann, the Rudolph R. and Florence Dean University Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and his co-authors were awarded the Journal of Computers & Chemical Engineering 2014 Best Paper Award for the paper "Scope for Industrial Applications of Production Scheduling Models and Solution Methods." The authors will be presented with the award at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers annual meeting in November.
Associate Professor Youngjie Jessica Zhang gave the keynote address at the VIPImage 2015 Conference in Spain this past Monday (Oct. 19). Her talk was titled "High-Fidelity Image-Based Geometric Modeling and Mesh Generation for Engineering Applications." Zhang also recently presented "Image-Based Mesh Generation and Volumetric T-Spline Modeling for Isogeometric Analysis" during the 24th International Meshing Roundtable conference in Austin, Texas. Doctoral students Kangkang Hu and Lei Liu who received travel awards, also presented their research during the conference.
LaShawnda Thomas, senior director of Accounting & Financial Reporting, was accepted into the Leadership Pittsburgh (LP) XXXII 2015-2016 Class. LP is a 10-month program for established senior-level leaders. Participants are selected by a committee that reviews recommendations and letters of support submitted to endorse the applicant. In the program, content area experts from the community serve as faculty to build the capacity of program participants who are leading this community now and will affect change in our region in the coming years. It not only engages and informs the senior leadership of the region’s companies, but also creates meaningful bonds with others of their levels and diverse backgrounds. For more information about Leadership Pittsburgh, visit www.lpinc.org/.
A paper by Tomotake Furuhata (right), Inho Song, Hong Zhang, Yoed Rabin and Kenji Shimada, titled "Interactive prostate shape reconstruction from 3D TRUS images," has been selected as the best paper for the second Gaheon Academic Award for the Journal of Computational Design and Engineering (JCDE). This award is given on behalf of the editor-in-chief and the Society of CAD/CAM Engineers and is sponsored by the Gaheon Sindoh Foundation. It includes a certificate, memento and a cash prize. An award ceremony will be held at the Asian Conference on Design and Digital Engineering in Kitakyushu, Japan, in November. The paper, published in September 2014, presents a two-step, semi-automated method for reconstructing a three-dimensional (3-D) shape of the prostate from a 3-D transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) image. 3-D shape data of the prostate plays a key role in surgical interventions for diagnosing and treating prostate cancer.
Obituary: Robert Farrell Stewart
Robert Farrell Stewart, a chemistry professor at Carnegie Mellon for 40 years known for his crystallography research, died last month in Pompano Beach, Fla. He was 78.
“He pushed the limits,” Chemistry Professor David Yaron told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Scattering is most often used just to determine where the atoms in molecules are. He used it to figure out the structure of the electron cloud around those atoms, which allows you to do things like determine what’s bonded to what.”
Stewart joined the CMU faculty in 1965 and was a full professor of chemistry from 1967 through 2005. “He was always willing to talk, and he knew so much about the parts of science that don’t get written down in papers,” Yaron told the P-G.