Winter 2009

A Weekend to Remember Alumni & Leadership

Each year in the fall Johns Hopkins University hosts Leadership Weekend for all of the divisional alumni councils and boards, the University’s Alumni Council, and the university Trustees. The Whiting School’s National Advisory Council (NAC) and Society of Engineering Alumni (SEA) had several events throughout the weekend in conjunction with the university events. On Friday…

Alumni Awards Alumni & Leadership

The Heritage Award Established 1973, the Heritage Award honors alumni and friends of Johns Hopkins who have contributed outstanding service over an extended period to the progress of the university or the activities of the Alumni Association. Robert F. Bradley, PE’ 73 , MA ’96 Bob Bradley, who received his BS in civil engineering at…

Society of Engineering Alumni Career Night Alumni & Leadership

On the evening of September 24, 2008, 37 engineering alumni returned to campus to share their professional experiences and insights with engineering students. A panel discussion was followed by a reception, and in this casual setting students had the chance to speak with alumni from a wide range of professions and get the insiders’ scoop…

Staying Power Alumni & Leadership

When Charles W. Shivery landed his first job with Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) right out of college, he was waiting to see what he really wanted to do. After more than 36 years with the utility industry, it seems he may have found the answer. Since 2004, Shivery has served as the chairman, president,…

Priming the Pipeline for Female Engineers Alumni & Leadership

When Carl E. Heath Jr.’s daughter Alison was 11, he gave her a chemistry set for Christmas. He had received a similar set as a child and had fond memories of playing with it. “My mother-in-law was horrified,” says Heath ’52. “She thought it was not a very good gift for a girl.” How did…

Self-Assured and Resilient Alumni & Leadership

Motivated self-starter. Successful executive. Intelligent engineer. All of these words describe Natalie Givans, MA ’89. As a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton she directs the work of 1,800 people on the firm’s Assurance and Resilience Capability team and is responsible for more than $300 million in annual sales. Givans has spent her entire 24-year…

Crystal Ball: What Natural Disasters Loom…and How Can We Mitigate Them? Research & Development

A few weeks before election day, coastal engineering expert Robert A. Dalrymple, the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Professor of Civil Engineering, was named to Wired magazine’s “2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To.” Dalrymple, Wired advised, could educate the president on what our country can do to prepare for extreme weather…

News Briefs Research & Development

Kudos David Gracias, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has received a 2008 National Institutes of Health (NIH) New Innovator Award. The award was given in recognition of Gracias’ pioneering work inmicro- to nanoscale tools and devices for medicine. Launched in 2007, the New Innovator Awards are a key component of the NIH Roadmap…

Strength in Numbers Research & Development

Each Tuesday evening last fall, Murat Bilgel felt like a Jeopardy contestant. He offered only questions. Bilgel, a sophomore biomedical engineering major, was one of five group leaders in a peer- learning program piloted in Calculus II that aims to boost academic performance and foster better student interaction. The 40 freshmen who signed up for…

On the Slopes Research & Development

An undergraduate assignment with a renowned Hopkins Medicine orthopedist persuaded Andrew Chen, BS ’93, MA ’94, MD ’97 that orthopedics was the medical field he wished to pursue—and that decision will put him on the slopes at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver next year as the head physician for the U.S. Ski Jumping Team. Chen…

Civil Engineering Meets NanoBio Research & Development

The same methods that engineers use to design better bridges or more efficient airplane wings are now being brought to bear on much smaller structures—the tiny structural elements inside our own cells. Lindsey Smith is a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil Engineering studying structural topology optimization, a method of designing structures from the…

Beyond Voxels Research & Development

Making a computer model of a porous material such as sand used to be simple. All you had to do was model a bunch of average sized sand grains separated by average sized pores, and run your simulation. Unfortunately, the simple method was a little too simple. It turns out that sand is a lot…

No Batteries Required Research & Development

On a Friday afternoon in early December, students in Allison Okamura’s Mechanical Engineering Freshman Laboratory, working in teams of three, wound string around wooden dowels, carved foamcore with X-Acto knives, and cut pieces of balsa and plywood. Their assignment—building a vehicle powered only by two mousetraps and six rubber bands—is the culminating project in the…

Corporate Connections: Meeting of the Minds Research & Development

For Whiting School students and engineers from Synthes, collaboration is a no-brainer. What makes it so effortless, says Synthes business manager Maria Maroulis ’96, MS ’01, is that their cultures are so aligned. The global medical device company designs plates, screws, and other instruments and implants for every bone in the human body, and its…

Tracking Nano-Metal Marauders Research & Development

Our bodies are constantly exposed to tiny invaders. Typically, the body’s natural first line of defense—the mucus barrier—traps and flushes these assailants out. But the mucus barrier may not always intercept everything it encounters, especially if that something is a nanoparticle the size of a handful of atoms. Because of their unusual properties, many nanomaterials…

From the Archives: The Evolution of Robotics Research & Development

Underneath a lab bench in the Computational Science and Engineering building sits a snakelike five-foot-long robotic arm, a collection of triangular metal shapes, pneumatic cylinders, and aluminum tubes linked together in an integrated truss structure. It has no name, but “Adam” would be apt. Adam is a binary manipulator. Basically, he picks things up. But…

Knowledge for the World Campaign a Success Research & Development

A Campaign Worth Celebrating Bill Ward ’67, co-chair of the Knowledge for the World Campaign for the Whiting School of Engineering, and Benjamin T. Rome Dean Nick Jones have announced that the Whiting School has exceeded its campaign goal of $160 million, raising a record $162 million as of December 31, 2008. The school’s effort…

On the Ground in Afghanistan Research & Development

It’s been almost 20 years since Major Raymond DeGennaro II ’89 attended Hopkins on a ROTC scholarship, and he’s just now on his first active duty assignment with the U.S. military. Several years of educational deferment and a fire in a military storage room that housed DeGennaro’s records threatened to bounce him off the military’s…

Designing Minds: A Transforming Safety Solution Research & Development

For electrical utility workers, detaching a transformer’s power connector can be dangerous business. The operation sometimes triggers an explosive arc, traveling as far as eight feet from the transformer, which can cause serious skin burns and eye injuries. Now a team of mechanical engineering students has invented a new tool aimed at allowing utility workers…

Return of the Paper Ballot Research & Development

Avi Rubin’s day at the polls last November as an election judge proceeded as he expected: long lines at some precincts exacerbated by electronic voting systems. The electoral margins were large enough that the results of the presidential election were not called into question. That is fortunate, Rubin says: For states with e-voting systems, a…

The Great Meanderer Features

In his 51 years at Johns Hopkins, where his Friday afternoon field trips have become the stuff of legend, Reds Wolman ’49 has shaped the brightest minds in geomorphology–and forever changed the field. In his 51 years at Johns Hopkins, where his Friday afternoon field trips have become the stuff of legend, Reds Wolman ’49…

Joint Strength Features

Five years ago, the Whiting School of Engineering and the Applied Physics Laboratory decided to formally combine their research and design expertise for a wide range of cutting-edge projects. The results have been nothing short of groundbreaking. In a small workroom at Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Jacob Vogelstein, PhD ’07, picks up a red…

The Terawatt Challenge Features

From finding new catalysts for fuel cells to better understanding wind energy’s wake, Hopkins researchers are stepping up to meet the global need for energy that’s abundant, cheap … and clean. In the final years before his untimely death from cancer at the age of 62, Nobel Prize winning chemist Richard Smalley had a set…

Message from the Dean From The Dean

The beginning of the new year has brought the promise of change and opportunity, with a new administration in Washington and another here on the Hopkins campus. In March, we will welcome the arrival of Ronald J. Daniels as the university’s 14th president. President Daniels comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania, where he…