Clark School Accomplishments in Summer 2002

Friends of the Clark School of Engineering,

I am delighted to share with you news of several significant and exciting developments in the Clark School since the last time I sent you an email on May 23, 2002. These developments are further indications of the impressive forward momentum of the college.

Early this summer, Trigen-Cinergy Solutions of College Park, LLC established a $2M education fund to support energy conversion education and research at the Clark School of Engineering. This fund will support two graduate fellowships and up to eight undergraduate scholarships annually.
In mid-June, NASA announced that the Clark School will be the site of one of the seven NASA University Research, Engineering and Technology Institutes (URETIs). The URETIs are being established in areas of long-term strategic interest to NASA and the nation. Each URETI will have an initial life of five years and maximum possible duration of 10 years. The budget for each URETI is approximately $3M per year. The University of Maryland URETI is in the area of 3rd Generation Reusable Launch Vehicles and is led by Professor Mark Lewis from the Department of Aerospace Engineering. Other participating faculty include: Profs. Wereley, Pines, Yu, Cadou and Akin from Aerospace Engineering, A. Gupta and Buckley from Mechanical Engineering, Smidts from Materials and Nuclear Engineering and Marshall from Fire Protection Engineering. The University of Maryland is the lead institution on this URETI; other participating institutions are: University of Michigan, University of Washington, North Carolina A&T University and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
In mid-July, we announced the appointment of Professor Hani Mahmassani as the Charles A. Irish Sr. Chair in Civil Engineering and Director of Maryland Transportation Initiative. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, Dr. Mahmassani was the Adnan Abu-Ayyash Centennial Professor of Transportation Engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering, Professor of Management Science and Information Systems and Director of the Advanced Institute of Transportation Infrastructure Engineering and Management at the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Mahmassani is considered one of the most eminent academic scholars in the field of transportation systems. He is the immediate Past President of the International Association of Travel Behaviour Research and a Past President of the Transportation Science Section of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. Dr. Mahmassani's research and interests include: In-vehicle information systems for navigation and route guidance in congested traffic networks, dynamic analysis of transportation system usage, dynamic network assignment models, and methodologies for real-time carrier fleet decisions under real-time information.
In mid-August, we announced two major developments related to our efforts in Bioengineering: First, the approval of the Bioengineering Graduate Degree Program by the Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland; and second, the appointment of Dr. William E. Bentley as the Director of the Bioengineering Graduate Program and as the Herbert Rabin Distinguished Professor in Engineering. Dr. Bentley is currently Professor of Chemical Engineering, holding a joint appointment with the Engineering Research Center and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. He has an outstanding record of technical contributions in metabolic engineering, modeling of genetic circuits, cellular stress responses and E Coli protein expression, bioreactor design and optimization, and insect cell and Larvae/Baculovirus expression systems. Dr. Bentley's work is internationally recognized and he has received numerous awards and prizes for his work, including the Schering-Plough Young Investigator Award from the Society of Industrial Microbiology in 1996, and the Dow Outstanding New Faculty Award from the American Society for Engineering Education in 1995. Dr. Bentley is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

You will read more about these exciting developments and other good news from the Clark School in our Engineering@Maryland magazine, which you will receive in early September. Thank you for your interest and unfailing support.

Nariman Farvardin, Professor and Dean

Published August 30, 2002