For the week of June 3, 2011

@COE will be published on a biweekly basis for the remainder of the summer; the next edition will be sent out Friday, June 17.

Please send submissions for @COE to Julie Stansberry in the Engineering Communications Office at [log in to unmask] by noon on Thursdays.

Department Head Announcements

Interim Vice Chancellor for Research Hines Named Nuclear Engineering Department Head at University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Dr. J. Wesley Hines, the current Interim Vice Chancellor for Research at UT Knoxville and a nuclear engineering professor, has been appointed as head of the UT Knoxville Department of Nuclear Engineering (NE). Hines will assume the department head role on or before January 1, 2012, once the university has concluded a successful national search for a permanent vice chancellor for research.

Hines was named as the UT Interim Vice Chancellor for Research in 2010. He previously served as the Interim Associate Dean for Research and Technology for the UT College of Engineering (COE) from 2008 to 2009.

Hines received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Ohio University, Athens, in 1985; M.S. degree in nuclear engineering and an M.B.A. degree from The Ohio State University in 1992; and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from The Ohio State University in 1994. Hines also attended the Naval Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Fla. in 1986 and worked as a U.S. Naval Officer on Naval nuclear submarines from 1987-1990. He started his career at UT in the NE department in 1995 as a research assistant professor. In 2005, Hines was promoted to professor in the nuclear engineering department.

Hines has received numerous recognitions from both the university and the COE, including the Chancellor’s Research Award in 2007; COE Research Fellow Award in 2006; the Moses E. and Mayme Brooks Distinguished Professor Award in 2005; the COE Teaching Fellow Award in 2005; and the Allen & Hoshall Engineering Faculty Award in 2002.

Hines’ research areas include applied artificial intelligence, surveillance and diagnostics, instrumentation and controls, modeling and simulation, and maintenance and reliability engineering. He currently serves as the director of the college’s Reliability and Maintainability Engineering (RME) Program, which offers an interdepartmental M.S. degree in reliability and maintainability engineering through a joint relationship between the engineering college and the Department of Statistics, Operations and Management Science.

Hines will succeed Dr. H.L. (Lee) Dodds, who will continue as department head until the vice chancellor search is successfully concluded. Dodds, who has been an NE faculty member for 35 years that includes 15 years serving as NE department head, plans to retire December 31, 2011. The NE department is currently ranked number 9 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report and has experienced dramatic increases in enrollment due to renewed interest in the nuclear engineering profession.

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Los Alamos Researcher Sickafus Appointed Head of University of Tennessee, Knoxville Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Dr. Kurt Sickafus, Project Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has been named as the Alvin and Sally Beaman Professor and Head of the University of Tennessee (UT) Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), effective August 1, 2011.

Sickafus has been associated with Los Alamos since 1989. He is a part-time faculty member at the University of New Mexico Extended University-Los Alamos Center. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 publications and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory Distinguished Mentor Performance Award and the Los Alamos National Laboratory 2001 Fellows Prize. He was named as a Fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2008.

Sickafus received his B.A. in physics and mathematics from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1978. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in materials science and engineering from Cornell University in 1981 and 1985, respectively.

Sickafus is the president of the New Mexico chapter of the Materials Research Society and a member of the advisory editorial board of the Journal of Nuclear Materials.

Research areas for Sickafus include the behavior of complex oxides in extreme radiation environments.

Sickafus will succeed Dr. George Pharr, a UT Chancellor’s Professor who has been serving as both MSE department head and director of the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials (JIAM). Pharr will step down as department head on August 1, 2011, to take on full-time duties at JIAM, a joint UT-ORNL institute for advanced materials multidisciplinary research.

Construction on the new JIAM building, which is being built on the university’s Cherokee Farm Campus, is expected to commence later in 2011.

The MSE department is scheduled to move to Ferris Hall in 2012 after the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science moves its laboratories, offices and classrooms from their current location in that building to the new Min H. Kao Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building in the fall of this year.

Student News

COE Student to Participate in Harvard Business School Program

Aeron Glover, senior in industrial engineering, will participate in the 2011 Summer Venture in Management Program at Harvard Business School June 18-24. Google is his sponsoring company, which has joined with Harvard Business School to provide Glover with this opportunity to complement his summer employment with an experience of Harvard management education.

Glover, along with his business partner, launched howstheliving.com, a website that helps college students learn more about student housing around the world.

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Graduate Student, Faculty Member Receive Best Paper Award

Shuping Gong, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and faculty member, Dr. Husheng Li, also in the EECS department, received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE's International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2011 for their paper, “Decoding the 'Nature Encoded' Messages for Distributed Energy Generation Control in Microgrid." ICC is a top international conference in the area of communications, and Gong's paper is one of only 11 to receive this award out of the 1,092 papers accepted. The official news of best paper award is in the following link: http://www.ieee-icc.org/award.php.

Faculty and Staff News

EECS Associate Professor Invited to Present Research

Bruce MacLennan, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has been invited to present his research at the Physics and Computation and Hypercomputation workshops held in conjunction with the Tenth International Conference on Unconventional Computation in Turku, Finland, June 6-10, 2011. His topic will be "Embodied Computation: Applying the Physics of Computation to Artificial Morphogenesis." This work seeks to exploit novel physical processes as a basis for post-Moore's law computing technologies and to apply algorithmic principles to the self-assembly and reorganization of physical systems. This talk will focus on the use of processes inspired by embryological morphogenesis to assemble complex, hierarchical structures with very large numbers of microscopic components. Recently, MacLennan has given invited presentations of this work in Himeji, Japan and Cambridge, England.

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CEE Associate Professor Lectures in Bosnia

Dr. Lee Han, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), is visiting International University of Travnik in Bosnia, where he lectured on May 30. The lectures were given to university faculty, research staff and graduate students from various departments including transport engineering, logistics, economics and informatics (computer science). The "rector" or president and several other vice presidents and "dekans" or deans were there. The event was first announced and then reported the next day in their best-selling national newspaper.

Han's two lectures were on 1) an algorithm he developed to better use weigh-in-motion (WIM) technology to reduce weight violation (to save roads) and reduce truck delay (to save money); and 2) another algorithm he developed to track vehicles in real time using license plate recognition with automated learning and text-mining. Both algorithms have been published in SCI journals with his doctoral students.

Han also gave two media interviews at a special conference on "Ecology and Transportation" at a ski resort. He gave a keynote speech on "Sustainability and Other Myths in Transportation" to start the conference and to challenge the presenters and researchers about the issues on sustainability.

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Seven Habits for Managers Course Information

Employee and Organizational Development is offering for the first time Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits for Managers" course on June 15-16. To receive the most from the course, participants may read beforehand the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or have completed the Seven Habits seminar. Click here for more information about the course. You may call 865-974-6657 to register. The class will meet in Room 238 in the UT Conference Center Building. The cost is $200, and parking is provided.

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Case Writing Course Information

UT Center for Executive Education, in July, will host the Ivey Business School faculty of the University of Western Ontario to teach a "Case Writing" course. The course is 4.5 days long, and there is a discount to UT faculty and staff. Click here to view all the course information details!

Engineering Professional Practice Student Feature

Featured student: Troy Eckleberry

Our featured student this week is Troy Eckleberry, a nuclear engineering student who completed his spring 2011 co-op assignment at First Energy in Akron, Ohio.

Eckleberry described his work experience as follows: “I worked in Reactor Engineering. I helped gather information about control rod blade lifetimes and depletion levels to give to First Energy’s fuel vendor. I worked with another co-op on a database in Microsoft Access that will make pre-job briefs more efficient. I was able to go out into the plant and issue nuclear instruments to other site departments as well as take inventory of all special nuclear material.

“The knowledge I gained about what a nuclear engineer actually does was astronomical," Eckleberry said. "But besides the ton of things I've learned about the subatomic level and the processes of a power plant, the most important thing I’ve learned was the value of proper communication, accountability and the use of human performance tools to reduce human error.”

Students may read more about their peers’ co-op/internship experiences by logging into their Engineering Professional Practice profile via www.coop.utk.edu, clicking “Resource Library” (on the left margin) and selecting “Students at Work – In Their Own Words.”

For information on engineering co-op and internships, contact Engineering Professional Practice at [log in to unmask] or 865-974-5323.

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If you have submissions for @COE, the college's electronic newsletter, please send them to Julie Stansberry at [log in to unmask] by noon on Thursdays.