Student Awards
Elizabeth Tigrett Medal - Engineering major Rachel Carbonell was presented the Elizabeth Tigrett Medal during the May 2013 graduation ceremony. This medal is awarded annually to an outstanding member of the senior class as determined by a vote of the entire Union faculty. Rachel also received the medal for Academic Excellence in Engineering for the Class of 2013.
Service through Engineering Award - The Service through Engineering award was presented jointly to seniors Jonathan Gwaltney and Jonathan Vunk in May 2013. These two students have been actively involved in the North Africa humanitarian engineering trips and have demonstrated a passion for serving others through their chosen vocation of engineering.
Faculty Awards
Summer 2014
Pew Research Grant - Dr. Georg Pingen, Assistant Professor of Engineering, has recently been awarded a Pew Research Grant for his proposal entitled “Analysis of Moderate Knudsen Number Flows using Finite Element Methods and the Hydrodynamic Boltzmann Equation.” The goal of his research is to develop a multi-scale computational fluid dynamics model. His proposed model should be an improvement over current techniques, which typically rely on two different approaches to handle large and small Knudsen numbers, resulting in the lack of a continuous transition for fluid flows that include physical phenomena at both length scales. An anticipated application of this research is increased longevity of lithium-ion batteries.
Spring 2014
Course Redesign Grant - Dr. Jay Bernheisel and Dr. Georg Pingen have been awarded a course redesign grant for the Spring 2014 semester for their proposal to develop an affordable data acquisition system using MATLAB and Arduino boards. Currently, students in many of our engineering labs collect data by hand, a cumbersome approach that limits collection to relatively small, slowly changing data sets. The proposed system will allow several of our engineering labs to offer improved experiments that are more closely aligned to situations students will encounter in the “real world.”