1-14-2009 --Three University of New Mexico professors are spearheading an effort to develop blast resistant composite materials. The group is delving into ways to change the structure of materials – like concrete – into something that would be a good building material, more resistant to corrosion and specifically tolerant to blast.
1-29-09 -- Their goal is to become digital artists, writers, gamers, entrepreneurs, engineers, critical thinkers, scientists, film and video makers, animators, storytellers, designers, computer scientists or educators using or developing the tools of digital media. Students in the University of New Mexico’s proposed Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media Program are getting closer to achieving those goals.
2-2-09 --Cleve Moler, co-creator of the MatLab software used worldwide by scientists and engineers, was featured in an article in the New Mexico Business Weekly on January 30, 2009. Moler served as Chair of the Computer Science department in the 1980s and later became Chief Scientist at The Mathworks™, developers of MatLab. The article also features a quote from current chair Stephanie Forrest.
2-05-09 -- Assistant Professor of Computer Science Melanie Moses was one of 12 people recently invited to write essays on being human for the journal “Nature.” Moses wrote about humans and energy. Moses has degrees in Biology and Computer Science and works with her students to explore natural networks and the ways they might show how humans use energy more efficiently
2-11-09 -- School of Engineering Dean Joseph Cecchi gave a presentation at a meeting of the Economic Forum, a group of New Mexico business leaders, on Tuesday, Feb. 11. With him were members of the UNM LoboMotorSports team who are enrolled in a three-semester, for-credit course culminating in the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE), the largest international engineering competition in the world.
2-16-09 -- UNM research in nanoscience and bioengineering is producing scientific advances and economic opportunities in energy and healthcare, including a new generation of diagnostic materials, biofuels, and drug discovery.
2-17-09 -- ECE Professor Vince Calhoun and his team announced on February 17 that it's now possible to differentiate between patients suffering schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using a single fMRI scan, and to do it with a high degree of accuracy.
3-20-09 -- In April, STC.UNM will present awards to Assistant Professor for Electrical and Computer Engineering Pradeep Sen and five of his computer gaming students.
3-23-09 -- The University of New Mexico Centennial Engineering Center won the 2009 Best Building award in the $20 million and over category at the Best Buildings Award Banquet sponsored by the New Mexico Building Branch of the Associated General Contractors and Southwest Contractor. Approximately 450 people attended the event, held on Saturday, March 21, 2009 at the Isleta Casino and Resort.
3-24-2009 --Joseph L. Cecchi, Dean of the UNM School of Engineering, has been elected by his national peers to a two-year term as Vice Chair of the Engineering Deans Council Executive Board. He had previously been elected to 2 two-year terms as a Director on the Executive Board.
4-14-09 -- A student design team from the Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Department has won a Waste Environment Research Consortium (WERC ) Environmental Design Competition. The students have been working on the projects since November as part of their capstone senior year design course. They competed against 31 teams from 21 universities throughout the United States and Canada.
4-15-09 -- Pam Hurd-Knief is among the 2009 Women of Influence, as named by the New Mexico Business Weekly. The 31 women represented the spectrum of business and industry – trades, law, banking, real estate, banking, arts and education. Hurd-Knief, senior director of development for the School of Engineering, stood out as UNM’s sole recipient.
4-16-09 -- The Dean of Students has announced the winners of the Clauve Outstanding Senior Awards. The students were honored at a recognition reception on Thursday, April 16. The winners are Desbah Ahtsoaq Bill Benally, Michaela Brown, Chris Chaves, Joseph M. Dworak, Ashley C. Fate, Molly Maguire-Marshall and Alex D. Riebli. Chaves is a mechanical engineering major who has served in leadership roles for the fraternity Lambda Theta Phi including historian, secretary, vice president and president.
4-19-09 -- Peter Vorobieff, Andrea Mammoli and Larry Sklar were three of the UNM faculty researchers honored during the STC.UNM creative awards this week. The three were honored for their “Wavy Interface Mixer” patent. The invention provides the apparatus and methods for mixing samples in-line in a microfludic system.
4-20-2009 -- After serving nine years as Dean of UNM’s School of Engineering, Joseph L. Cecchi has announced that his current term ending July 23, 2009, will be his last.
4-29-09 --Charles Eastman will give a free lecture on the Impacts of Building Information Modeling on Design and Construction on Thursday, May 7, 2009, at 5:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Centennial Engineering Center on the UNM Main Campus. This lecture, sponsored by Brycon Construction, should be of interest to engineering and architecture and planning students as well as the community at large.
5-11-09 --The UNM School of Engineering announced that the owners of BRYCON Construction have created an endowed fund to the school in honor of company founder Bryant W. Lemon Senior. The purpose of this fund is to permanently support the Bryant W. Lemon Senior Distinguished Lecture in Construction Engineering and Management within the Civil Engineering Department. The lecture brings speakers who have made outstanding contributions in construction engineering to UNM.
5-13-09 -- The April 30 issue of Nature magazine reports on the confluence of energy research in New Mexico, with special emphasis on research conducted by two School of Engineering faculty: Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Professor Abhaya Datye and Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Stephen Herse
5-20-09 -- Provost Suzanne Ortega has appointed Arup Maji, chair of the Department of Civil Engineering as interim dean of the School of Engineering at UNM. Maji’s appointment will begin in July 2009, when Dean Joe Cecchi returns to the faculty. Maji has served as chair of Civil Engineering since 2005. He has been a professor at UNM since 1988.
6-29-09 -- Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Deepak Kapur will be presented the Herbrand Award at the 22nd International Conference on Automated Deduction in August. The award is given to honor individuals for exceptional contributions to the field of automated deduction.
6-29-09 -- The dissertation work of 2009 electrical engineering doctoral graduate David Boutte is featured on the cover of the June print edition of the journal "IEEE Signal Processing Letters." The corresponding journal article appears in IEEE Signal Procecssing Letters, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 402-405, May 2009.
6-30-09 -- New Mexico's Second Congressional District Congressman Harry Teague visited the UNM campus to announce legislation intended to set aside funds for training and fellowships in accredited biofuels engineering programs.
6-30-09 -- It’s the complexity of asphalt pavement that fascinates Rafiqul Tarefder, assistant professor of Civil Engineering. It is the variations in load as the flow of traffic cycles from bicycles to cars to pickups to heavy tractor trailers, and the physical changes as the pavement heats, cools, oxidizes, ages and cracks. His interest in pavement is now paying off with a National Science Foundation CAREER grant.
7-14-09 -- U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman has announced that the UNM Nanoscience and Microsystems (NSMS) Graduate Program has been awarded the highly competitive grant to provide fellowships for Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN).
7-20-09 -- UNM computer science doctoral student Hairong Lei recently served as software session chair for the 2009 International Conference on New Trends in Information and Service Science. He also presented "Software's Eight Essentials." The proceedings will be published by IEEE’s Computer Science series.
7-30-09 -- In New Mexico asphalt pavement is subjected to tremendous changes in temperature, sometimes as much as forty degrees in the course of a 24 hour cycle. Those temperature changes, combined with the constantly varying traffic loads the pavement must support, are very hard on materials. That is why the NM Department of Transportation is constantly searching for ways to prolong the life of pavement.
8-20-09 --In an article on Wired News' GadgetLab blog, Associate Professor David Ackley talked about programming the 'Illuminato X Machina', a motherboard prototype, that uses separate modules each of which has its own processor, memory, storage and communications.
9-3-09 -- The University of New Mexico School of Engineering was ranked 7th in HispanicBusiness Magazine’s 2009 top 10 schools for Hispanics in engineering.
9-3-09 -- The National Science Foundation has awarded the Configurable Space Microsystems Innovations and Applications Center (COSMIAC) a $474,000 grant for the Research for Engineering Undergraduates (REU) program.
Civil Engineering Grad Student Takes First Place for Best Oral Presentation
9-11-09 -- Patricia Jones has had a lot of practice communicating; as an environmental consultant, as a mother and as a graduate student seeking a master’s degree in Civil Engineering. She came to UNM because the Civil Engineering Department has a strong reputation for working well with non-traditional students, allowing her to work toward her master’s degree without forcing her to complete another bachelor’s degree as a prequisite.
9-23-09 -- ECE Professor Tom Caudell has learned that a book to which he contributed, "Manual of Simulation in Healthcare," won first prize in the Basis of Medicine category at the British Medical Association book awards on September 8.
9-29-09 -- The Configurable Space Microsystems Innovations and Applications Center (COSMIAC) is now doing collaborative research efforts with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. COSMIAC and NASA have submitted a joint proposal to help develop the next generation of small form factor programmable logic board for space called SpaceCube.
9-30-09 -- The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded PiBBs a Phase II interdisciplinary research training grant totaling $2 million over five years.
10-05-09 -- ECE@UNM proudly welcomes Dr. Fernando Pérez-González to its faculty this fall in the position of the Prince of Asturias Endowed Chair in Information Science and Related Technologies.
10-08-09 -- Qforma, an advanced analytics and predictive modeling company, announced today that it has awarded its first-ever Qforma Lectureship, in the amount of $5,000, to Shuang Luan, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science and assistant joint professor of radiology at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque.
10-14-09 -- John Pieper, Dean of the College of Pharmacy will chair the search for the new dean of the School of Engineering at UNM. The university is seeking a visionary leader for the school, which has more than 100 faculty members in five academic departments including Chemical and Nuclear Engineering, Civil Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering.
10-19-09 -- The School of Engineering has named Sanjay Krishna, associate professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering, a UNM Regents' Lecturer in recognition of his extraordinary accomplishments and leadership in teaching, research, and service. The School of Engineering also named Abhaya Datye, Distinguished Professor in the Chemical & Nuclear Engineering Department, to a Regents' Professorship.
10-22-09 -- The many uncertainties in the UNM budget have caused the Formula Society of American Engineers program to be put on hold. The three-semester program normally begins during the spring semester for Mechanical Engineering juniors who plan to design and build a competitive formula racing car as their senior design project.
11-05-09 -- Kevin Malloy, professor of Physics & Astronomy and Electrical and Computer Engineering will speak on “Faculty Entrepreneurship: Creating Start-ups from University Research,” on Thursday, Nov. 12 at noon in the Centennial Engineering Center Auditorium, rm. 1041.
11-09-09 -- Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Research Professor David G. Whitten has received a special award from the Japan Photochemistry Association for basic and applied research in photo chemistry. Whitten says this professional organization has a large membership in part because Japan has more photo chemists than the United States.
11-13-09 -- The UNM School of Engineering is deeply saddened by the death of freshman engineering student Raymond Plotkin. A graduate of Westbury High School in Houston, Texas, Raymond was interested in the field of Nuclear Engineering. He was a conscientious student who had already exhibited an understanding of the dedication required to achieve excellence in the engineering profession.
11-16-09 -- The Rio Grande is in trouble, threatened by the growth and demands of cities, farming communities and nature itself. At the next “Science Café,” held at the KNME-TV studios, located at 1130 University Boulevard NE, University of New Mexico assistant professor Julie Coonrod will discuss the historical changes of the Rio Grande and restoration efforts taking place statewide for the river.
11-18-09 -- We’ve all found them, those little kinks in a software program we have to work around because the program doesn’t work exactly as it should. Now there may be a solution in sight for some of those irritating problems. A UNM Computer Science research group is testing a program that automatically and efficiently removes bugs from off-the-shelf legacy software.
11-30-09 -- The School of Engineering has named Abhaya Datye, Distinguished Professor in the Chemical & Nuclear Engineering Department, to a Regents Professorship. Datye received a National Science Foundation Excellence Award from the Industrial Innovation and Partnerships Division in 2008 and both the Senior Research and the Teaching Excellence Awards from the School of Engineering.
12-1-09 -- Students can register for the 2011 FSAE race car program during the coming spring 2010 semester. The program had been placed temporarily on hold, but a re-evaluation of financial resources will allow it to continue.
12-4-09 -- The Public Service Company of New Mexico has donated $25,000 to the Solar Car team at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the UNM School of Engineering. The money will be used to buy electrical components for the car.
12-08-09 -- A single bacterium can act alone, performing the same kinds of actions that a group normally does. The behavior of that bacterium can be manipulated at the cellular level. That’s the intriguing finding by a group of researchers from UNM, the Dartmouth Medical School, the New Mexico Veterans Health Care System, and Sandia National Laboratories.
12-16-09 -- When the freshman from Houston, Texas came to UNM, he thought he had found a home. Raymond Plotkin started class in August 2009 as a freshman interested in Chemical and Nuclear Engineering.
12-16-09 -- UNM dedicated its focused ion beam system Tuesday afternoon in a ceremony keynoted by New Mexico Representative Danice Picraux. Housed in the basement of Northrop Hall in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, the machine is available for use by other departments across campus, and with collaborating institutions.
Microsoft Releases Game Developed in ECE's Advanced Graphics Lab
12-17-09 -- A video game developed by master's student Justin Kellogg in ECE Professor Pradeep Sen's Advanced Game Development course was released by Microsoft on December 16 and is available for free trial download from its Xbox Live website.