February 2012
Dear Alumni and Friends, This is the inaugural edition of the James B. Francis College of Engineering's eNewsletter, so we have much to catch up on. As you may know from reading the Alumni magazine and local news articles, there is a lot going on at UMass Lowell -- "A Campus on the Move" -- thanks in large part to the vision and energy of Chancellor Marty Meehan. Having just concluded our Strategic Planning exercise (UMass Lowell Vision 2020 -- get it?), we have defined our mission to become a nationally and internationally recognized comprehensive university with strength in science and engineering as well as in arts, social sciences, business, health and education. This requires plans to renew the physical plant, recruit academically strong students and retain them, hire top-caliber faculty and help them succeed, have and execute a strategic marketing plan and stabilize the budget. The good news is that we are well on our way in every plan. In this issue, you will read about recent highlights in the Francis College of Engineering, each with a link to a more detailed version of the story. We plan on issuing this newsletter about four times a year. While we hope that you will enjoy hearing from us, if you wish to unsubscribe from the Francis College of Engineering newsletter, please do so at the "SafeUnsubscribe" link at the bottom of the newsletter. In our spring issue, we will announce several newly established scholarships and the names of the recipients. With best regards, Dean John Ting, ScD, PE James B. Francis College of Engineering University of Massachusetts Lowell
Enrollment Is Up
Enrollment Is Up Our Student Teams Are Doing Great New Academic Programs Approved Research Is Up Meet the New Faculty Reaching Out to Alumni, Globally Notable Alumnus Preview of the Next Newsletter
Facebook and Online Giving Follow us on the web and Facebook. Many photo galleries of alumni and current student activities are posted at engineering.uml.edu and on the Facebook page. And don't forget to page!
our Facebook
Let us know how you are doing. And if you would like additional information on any of our programs or activities, please keep in touch by email engineering@uml.edu and by messaging us on Facebook. If you wish to support our students, programs and activities, you can give online. Make sure to designate your gift to the Francis College of Engineering or any other program that you like.
Enrollment Is Up In the past decade, the number of students in the incoming freshman class in the Francis College of Engineering has almost doubled, compared with a less than 20 percent gain nationally. Over the same time period, the quality of the incoming first-year engineering class has also increased, with the average SAT I (Math + Verbal) components going up almost 100 points, and the average high-school GPA is up significantly as well. This past fall, 15 Commonwealth Scholars enrolled in engineering. These are high-merit scholars who qualified for a "full-boat" scholarship (tuition, fees, room and board) to anywhere in the UMass system and they chose to come to UMass Lowell for engineering. Our goal is to continue to increase the selectivity of our incoming students. And our students continue to do well when they graduate. Seniors who elected to sit for the "Fundamentals of Engineering" exam, previously known as the EIT, have been passing at an 85 to 95 percent rate, well above the national average of between 70 and 80 percent. Recent graduates choosing to go to graduate school have been accepted and placed at elite programs, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Cornell. Our graduates have been well received and compensated by industry. According to PayScale.com, UMass Lowell graduates command the second-highest average starting and midcareer salaries of graduates from any public university in New England (second only to the Mass Maritime Academy). Read more.
Our Student Teams Are Doing Great With growth in enrollment in every department, there is greater opportunity for student teams to organize and compete in regional, national and even international competitions. Last year, teams in civil engineering competed in both the ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) Concrete Canoe Competition and the ASCE Steel Bridge Two women sprints in the concrete Competition simultaneously. And they did great, finishing canoe. a solid third and fifth, respectively, out of more than a dozen teams in the Northeast Regionals in each case. This year, the canoe team is shooting for a spot in the Nationals. Read more. We also fielded a team of mechanical engineering students in the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Design-Build-Fly remote airplane competition in Arizona, and are planning to send a team for the Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) hybrid race car competition. Our team of computer engineering students was selected as one of only 24 teams across the country to compete in the Intel-Cornell Cup USA competition for embedded chip design in Orlando, Fla. Read more. Design-Build-Fly UMass Lowell team.
We are particularly proud of our showing in the biannual Solar Decathlon competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and held last fall on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. We were part of Team Massachusetts, along with Mass College of Art and Design, with a goal to build a 1,000-square-foot "net-zero-energy" home. As one of 20 teams selected to compete, we finished ninth overall, above all three international participants -- the best showing ever by a Massachusetts team! You can read more about it here Team Massachusetts in Washington, DC with and in Inhabit.com. their solar "4D" home.
New Academic Programs Approved To help address student demand and industry interest (and to help recruit strong students), we have added several interdisciplinary programs in the past two years. At the graduate level, with encouragement and support from our various college and departmental Industrial Advisory Boards, we have added a Leadership Option to each of our technical master's degrees in engineering. This option provides training in organizational behavior, professional communications, financial accounting and marketing fundamentals as well as a discipline-specific elective course and co-op/internship. This is similar to the Professional Science Master's programs recently developed in the College of Sciences. For undergraduates, we added a Robotics Minor in the fall of 2010 to go along with our very popular Business Administration Minor for Engineers. This past winter, we added an Energy Engineering Minor and a Biomedical Engineering Minor. These latest minors dovetail nicely into existing M.S. and Ph.D. programs in Energy Engineering (Solar and Nuclear) and intercampus Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology. At the same time, our experientially focused service-learning programs and integrated co-op programs are going strong. The integrated co-op program expanded from plastics engineering to include chemical engineering and mechanical engineering. And our service learning activities continue, helping the campus achieve the prestigious Carnegie Foundation for Excellence in Teaching award and the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. Last summer, our students and faculty traveled to Turkey and India to bring their expertise in assistive technology to other parts of the world. They also made trips to Peru in January and June to help provide and install solar irrigation systems in remote Andean villages. UMass Lowell students in India Plastics engineering co-op student.
demonstrating their "mindmouse" computer controller.
Research Is Up As our undergraduate and graduate student enrollments continue to grow, we need to hire more faculty. Combined with our desire to deepen our research enterprise, we have sought to hire new faculty members with the ability to attract external research funding, which allows us to support more graduate students.
This past year, UMass Lowell was classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a "Research University -- High Research" for the first time (just one notch below their top category of "Research University -- Very High Research").
Mean external research expenditures per tenure track faculty. Some of the major awards recently received by our engineering faculty include: The prestigious $400K National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for Asst. Prof. Xingwei Wang in Electrical and Computer Engineering for her research on nanoparticle-based ultrasound probe. A $1.3M U.S. Department of Transportation award for Asst. Prof. Tzu-Yang Yu (Civil Engineering) and his colleagues for their non-destructive evaluation of the structural health of highway bridges. A $1.15M NSF major research instrumentation award for a Zeiss focused ionbeam scanning electron microscope for use by Asst. Prof. Xingwei Wang and her co-investigators. Co-principal investigator in a $1.6M grant for STEM education in conjunction with the Graduate School of Education.
Xingwei Wang
In addition, we are currently working with the Deshpande Foundation through the Merrimack Valley Sandbox Initiative to grow the region's next generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs. The initiative is funded through a $5M grant to UMass Lowell, in partnership with Merrimack College, Middlesex Community College Tzu-Yang Yu and Northern Essex Community College.
Meet the New Faculty
To help meet the University's teaching needs, there has been a move toward hiring more fulltime teaching faculty. A new category of full-time faculty has been created -- Lecturers and Senior Lecturers -- whose main responsibilities are teaching and service. This allows the University to reduce its reliance on part-time faculty while reducing class and lab section sizes. In the past two years, the number of full-time faculty in the University has increased from about 400 to well over 500. In the Francis College of Engineering, we hired 12 full-time faculty during 2011 alone, an increase of more than 15 percent in a year, with several additional faculty candidates already agreeing to come during 2012, and with new searches ongoing in every engineering department.
Reaching Out to Alumni, Globally
Middle, front row: Prof. Tzu-Yang Yu of Civil Engineering, Engineering Dean John Ting, Prof. Fang Lai of Plastics Engineering and Mark Reimer of the University Advancement Office with alumni in Taipei, Nov. 2011.
In addition to our efforts to connect with alumni domestically, we are now engaging with alumni around the world through gatherings and the formation of local alumni chapters. Last November, we hosted an alumni reception in Taipei, Taiwan, attended by 25 alumni. In February, we hosted an alumni get-together in New Delhi in conjunction with the Plastindia Expo. Watch for another event this spring in Hong Kong.
Notable Alumnus Last summer, one of our alumni, Harish Hande (M.S. Energy Engineering '98, D.Eng. Mechanical Engineering '00) won the Ramon Magsaysay Award, known as "Asia's Nobel Prize," for his work in providing solar electricity in rural India. Hande is the founder of SELCO, a supplier of affordable solar lighting systems in India. Congratulations, Harish.
Preview of the Next Newsletter We hope you enjoyed this issue of the Francis College of Engineering e-Newsletter. Watch for our next issue, which will include updates on: International partnerships in China, India, Turkey, Israel, Czech Republic and Vietnam International recruiting efforts with Navitas and CERNET Building constructions and campus planning Our student teams
This email was sent to john_ting@uml.edu by john_ting@uml.edu |