Chris Cherry

We live in a transient society. And with travel come decisions that impact our health, economy, and environment.

This is why Chris Cherry chose transportation engineering as his life’s work.

“Transportation engineering really is something that impacts everyone daily,” said Cherry. “It is also quite complex as it deals almost exclusively with human behavior and decision making.”

Cherry, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, is responsible for launching the nation’s first automated e-bike sharing system on UT’s campus. Called CycleUShare, it is a research and education project he works on with students.

“The electric bicycle sharing project has really required us to think outside the box and come up with some creative solutions,” said Casey Langford, a doctoral student. ”Dr. Cherry has been very hands-on with the project and has put in several long nights working with me and the other students in the lab, which really inspires us to work just as hard.”

Dayakar Penumadu, department head, said UT is “fortunate to have Dr. Cherry on our faculty addressing the nexus between novel transportation technologies, including e-bikes, energy, and public health. He is very passionate about making the UT campus amenable to green transportation.”

Cherry also has published multiple studies that have garnered international attention from media outlets such as US News and World Report, Time, and the Wall Street Journal.

Cherry hopes his research will influence transportation policy toward technologies and systems that encourage effective and efficient use of the world’s scarce resources.

He said he’s trying to inspire his students so they will have an impact on the future.

“We have serious problems related to our transportation and we need professionals that are serious and creative about addressing the problems,” he said. “Many of these problems are new, some are old, all have big impacts, and I try to inspire my students by showing them how much room there is to improve the well-being of so many people.”

Lynne Parker

Question your assumptions.

Lynne Parker, professor and associate head in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, does this in her own research. And she urges her students to do the same.

“Do we presume something can or can’t be done, just because most people presume it is that way?” said Parker. “I try to inspire students to see if revolutionary new ideas can result.”

Hao Zhang, a doctoral student, said Parker constantly challenges his work and helps him find the missing links in his ideas.

“Dr. Parker helps me analyze the pros and cons and suggests real-world applications to use my methods,” said Zhang. “Most importantly, she changes my way of thinking and always instructs me to think critically.”

Parker is a leading researcher in the field of distributed multirobot systems.

Parker’s work involves developing robots that are able to perform society’s most mundane and challenging tasks.

“Robots could help us around the house or the office, so that we can be more productive,” she said.

One ongoing project in Parker’s lab is training a robot to teach life skills to adults with learning disabilities. She and her students are working with the robot so that it can visually recognize the activity of the human, determine whether the activity is correctly producing the required skill, and provide the appropriate feedback to the human.

Parker is also a faculty mentor with her department’s STARS (Students and Technology in Academia, Research, and Service) student mentoring program. The program matches student volunteers with introductory computing students to help them become more comfortable with computing capabilities.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5034, wheins@utk.edu)

Christopher Stephens, (left), and Mohamed Mahfouz, (right), help lead collaborative research through the Institute of Biomedical Engineering.

UT has launched a new institute to research solutions to medical problems such as devices for improved delivery of medications, better imaging technology, and optimized efficiency in the healthcare setting. Finding answers to these and many other healthcare problems is possible through a unique collaboration introduced by the new Institute of Biomedical Engineering. This new institute connects not only engineering and medicine but also three diverse UT campuses in a collaboration that is unique in the country; innovative for faculty, physicians and students; and beneficial to people. To learn more about the institute, visit the College of Engineering website.

The competition is part of a grant awarded to professors within the College of Engineering by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s People, Prosperity, and the Planet (P3) competition. The professors’ project, Promoting Sustainable Transportation Among Teens, aims to introduce a small group of high school students to the issues related to the impacts of transportation choice in a fun way.

The event will take place from 2:00 to 5:45 p.m. on Sunday, February 10. There will be three parts to the competition, each with a different location:

• 2:30 p.m. at the bottom of Tee Martin Drive under the stadium. Students will compete in “Road Trip through UT Football History,” where their bikes will be timed on a hilly course.
• 3:15 p.m. at Stephenson Drive. Students will compete in the “Late for School” obstacle course, where they will have to navigate obstacles such as trees and traffic cones while carrying books and a class project. They also will compete in “Pedal Pusher” and “Speed Racer” events, which will test the bikes under pedal power only and for raw speed.
• 4:00 p.m. Bike judging and poster defense in the Min H. Kao Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Building lobby. The bikes will be judged on the quality of assembly. The posters will be judged on factors such as design choices, team knowledge and sustainability analyses of various commuting options, such as cars, buses, electric cars, and e-bikes.

Three teams from West, Fulton, and Farragut high schools have designed and assembled their own electric bikes. This event marks the culmination of a more than semester-long project. The e-bikes’ abilities will be tested on climbing, speed, and agility, among other things.

Undergraduate engineering students have been advising the teams on the design and construction of electric bicycles. The high school teams will orally defend project reports discussing the design process and sustainability impacts of various transportation scenarios, including an e-bike as a commuting option for school and for general personal transportation.

This project is part of the first of two phases of EPA’s P3 competition. In the first phase, teams are awarded a $15,000 grant to develop their idea. They will bring the design in April to the National Sustainable Design Expo in Washington, D.C., to compete for the P3 Award and a grant of $90,000 to take their design to real-world application. Read more about grant announcement in Tennessee Today.

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C O N T A C T :

Paul Frymier (865-898-1706, pdf@utk.edu)

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)

The university has two new cutting-edge microscopes worth a total of $3.5 million. One microscope has the power to see at the atomic level, while the other has the power to slice and cut at the nano scale.

Image taken using the Zeiss Auriga. Extracted from plant leaves, these protein complexes are involved with the conversion of solar energy by plants. Professor of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology Barry Bruce and his students are exploring how plants harvest solar energy and how the process may be used in hybrid photovoltaic devices.

The microscopes are key to discovering and improving advanced materials used in areas like medicine, nuclear security, nanotechnology, and green power. They eventually will be housed in the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials (JIAM), currently under construction.

The university is hosting an open house to view the instruments on February 6 from 2:30 to 3:00 p.m. in Science and Engineering Research Facility (SERF) Room 307. All students, faculty, and staff from the University of Tennessee-system, University of Tennessee Medical Center, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are welcome. A tour and lecture will follow. Parking is available for a fee at the Eleventh Street Parking Garage at the corner of Eleventh Street and Cumberland Avenue.

The microscopes are among the most powerful in the world and unique in that they can be controlled remotely. Complementary to capabilities at ORNL, the new microscopes will be used for fundamental research as well as a training bed for students. Personnel within academic institutions and industry, across the region and around the world, can access them for a modest fee.

“Understanding how and why materials behave the way they do and how new and improved materials can be made starts at the level of the atom and builds up from there,” said George Pharr, JIAM director. “The new instruments have the ability to probe, see and characterize materials from the atomic scale up so we can make breakthrough discoveries.”

The $2.5 million Zeiss Libra 200 Transmission Electron Microscope, with the magnification power of 1 to 10 million times, can resolve and image individual atoms. Already, the instrument has been used to produce three-dimensional images of molecules to improve drug delivery, develop a handheld neutron detector for control of nuclear materials, and study materials to build better fuels cells for hydrogen cars.

Image taken by Professor Gerd Duscher and his students showing the effect of helium implantation into a new lithographic mask material. The image in the background was taken with Zeiss Auriga and the two images in the foreground were taken with the Zeiss Libra. Materials Science and Engineering Professor Philip Rack is testing new methods to manipulate these materials for Intel, Inc.

The Libra is one of a few instruments in the world that can simultaneously examine specimens cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures, fully image a structure three-dimensionally, and produce extremely high energy resolution in chemical analysis.

“These features make the instruments extremely versatile in advanced materials development and can be used to study polymeric, biological and crystalline materials, as well as composites or hybrids of these materials,” said Pharr.

The $1 million Zeiss Auriga Crossbeam microscope has the magnification power of 100,000, with the ability to machine—or cut through—features as small as a few nanometers. It can prepare samples, etch substrates and slice and image successively to get three-dimensional interior images of small objects. The Auriga has been used to slice through single biological cells to identify the internal cell structure and study the effects of diseases and pathogens. It holds promise in nanotechnology in creating nanoscale electrical and mechanical devices.

Gerd Duscher is lead scientist and John Dunlap is the facility manager for JIAM. The microscopes were funded by UT Knoxville and the UT system.

Established in 2005, the Joint Institute for Advanced Materials, which comprises a multidisciplinary team of scientists from UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, operates at the forefront of modern materials science in facilities across campus. The permanent site of JIAM, located at Cherokee farm, is slated to open in 2015.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)

HITES offers a one week residential experience for rising eleventh and twelfth grade students. The program provides an introduction into engineering, college life preparation, and showcases the applications of math and science.

The award recognizes HITES for inspiring students through college preparatory, retention, and graduation. The program serves as a model for research institutions and minority-serving institutions to increase minority engineering enrollment. HITES will be recognized at the 34th Annual NAMEPA National Conference in West Lafayette, Indiana in February.

“It is an honor to work with HITES and see these students succeed,” said Travis Griffin, director of the Engineering Diversity Program Office, which coordinates the summer program. ” The students value the opportunity to work with outstanding faculty, engage with engineering students, and live UT experience.”

Since the beginning of 2001, HITES has provided the experience to over 200 high student juniors and seniors. Odds are if you are a student in attendance, you left loving engineering. In 2011, 86 percent of seniors decided to major in engineering once they enrolled in engineering.

“Many may describe the beginning as being the first day of the first semester but for me, the HITES program was the beginning of my college experience,” Brandon Hambrick, a freshmen studying material science. “Not only did it reveal to me what my true interests were, but it allowed me to engage with hands-on activities and meet diverse people who had the same goals in mind.

“Through HITES I decided not only what field I wanted to study, but to attend UT,” Kalese Howse, a freshmen in industrial engineering. ”I was exposed to many different engineering majors and switched interests to industrial engineering. It also got me excited for UT by showing programs available, facilities, and campus life despite that walk up ‘the hill.’”

The NAMEPA Outstanding Pre-College/Community Organization Award was established to honor pre-college programs, community organizations, or individuals who have been active increasing the participation of minorities in engineering disciplines at the pre-college or community level.

NAMEPA is a national network of educators and representatives from industry, government, and nonprofit organizations who share a common commitment to improving the recruitment and retention of African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians earning degrees in engineering.

For more information about NAMEPA, visit http://www.namepa.org.

The Working Safely Is No Accident website won $15,000 in the Department of Labor Worker Safety and Health App Challenge.

The site is aimed at teaching workers ages thirteen to twenty-four about factors that increase workplace safety. The site features a game in which users evaluate relative probabilities of interesting events. The concept is then applied to workplace safety, with additional links to work-safety sources.

The goal of the contest was to encourage entities to build tools to educate the public about safety in the workplace.

For more information about the contest, visit the Department of Labor’s website.

Results show the region will be hotter and wetter.

Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Yang Gao, a graduate research assistant, developed precise scales of cities which act as a climate crystal ball seeing high resolution climate changes almost fifty years into the future.

The study found that heat waves will become more severe in most regions of the eastern United States and both the Northeast and Southeast will see a drastic increase in precipitation.

The findings are published in the November 6 edition of Environmental Research Letters.

Harnessing supercomputing power of UT’s Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar (now Titan, the fastest in the world), the researchers combined high-resolution topography, land use information and climate modeling. Then, they used dynamical downscaling to develop their climate model results. Dynamical downscaling allowed the researchers to develop climate scales as small as four square kilometers.

“Instead of studying regions, which is not useful when examining extreme weather, dynamical downscaling allows us to study small areas such as cities with a fine resolution,” said Fu, who is also a professor within the UT-ORNL Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education (CIRE).

The researchers evaluated extreme events along with daily maximum and minimum temperatures and daily precipitation. For the twenty-three states east of the Mississippi River, they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059. This is the first study to predict heat waves for the top twenty cities in the eastern United States. For example, Nashville will see a temperature rise of 3.21 degrees Celsius and Memphis will see a rise of 2.18 degrees Celsius.

In comparing present climate to future, the researchers found that heat waves will become more severe throughout the eastern part of the nation. The Northeast and eastern Midwest will experience a greater increase in heat waves than the Southeast, which will almost equalize the temperatures between the future North and current South.

“Currently, the mean heat wave duration is about four days in the Northeast and eastern Midwest and five days in the Southeast,” said Fu. “By the end of the 2050s, the Northeast and eastern Midwest will be gaining on the Southeast by increasing two days.”

In addition, the Northeast and eastern Midwest are likely to suffer from steeper increases in the severity of heat waves.

“While the Southeast has the highest intensity in heat waves, the Northeast is likely to experience the highest increase,” said Fu. “We are looking at temperature increases of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius, with New York experiencing the highest hike.”

Both the Northeast and Southeast will experience an increase of precipitation of 35 percent or more. Most coastal states will see the greatest increase, of about 150 millimeters a year. Taking into consideration heat waves and extreme precipitation, the Northeast shows the largest increases in precipitation. This suggests a greater risk of flooding.

“It is important that the nation take actions to mitigate the impact of climate change in the next several decades,” said Fu. “These changes not only cost money—about a billion a year in the US—but they also cost lives.”

Fu and Gao collaborated with researchers at Emory University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They received assistance from the National Center for Computational Sciences, the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, and UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)

Joshua Fu (865-974-2629, jsfu@utk.edu)

Together, professors from four different departments within the College of Engineering have won a $15,000 grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The grant is phase one of the EPA’s People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) annual student design competition, which offers students quality hands-on experience that brings their classroom learning to life.

Paul Frymier, associate professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Chris Cherry, assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering; David Irick, research assistant professor in Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering; and Leon Tolbert, head of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, are advising undergraduate engineering students working with teams of high school students to design and construct electric bicycles.

Three local high schools are participating in the project—West, Fulton, and Farragut. A competition between the teams will be held in January.

“The objective of our project is to encourage new teenaged drivers to consider the impacts of their personal transportation choices,” said Frymier. “To make the project interesting, we showed them how to use elementary physics, mathematics, and engineering to select components for converting a bike to an e-bike to navigate a hilly area such as Knoxville.”

Since September, undergraduate engineering students have been advising the teams of high school students on the design and construction of electric bicycles. The high school teams will prepare and orally defend project reports discussing the design process and sustainability impacts of various transportation scenarios, including an e-bike as a commuting option for school and for general personal transportation.

Teams also will participate in a final event test-driving their e-bikes to determine which is the best at climbing hills, energy efficiency, and speed on a prescribed obstacle course.

“One of the teams will be selected as the competition winner based on its written report, the oral defense of their report and the outcome of the various performance trials,” said Frymier. “The winner will receive a trophy and bragging rights.”

Students also will be surveyed before and after the project to determine their attitudes toward and expectations for personal transportation. Results will be analyzed to see if project participation leads to more favorable attitudes toward use of personal transportation options that lower environmental, societal, and economic impacts.

The undergraduate student advisors are Rebekah Patton in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Rick Wheeler in Civil and Environmental Engineering; Candice Patton in Electrical and Computer Engineering; Chris Stanfill in Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering; and Jordan Bryner and Yi Ying Chin in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

The student advisors are assisted by a team of high school faculty advisors including Karyn Storts-Brinks, David Hawkins Fulton, and Kimberly Kennard at Fulton, Matthew Milligan at Farragut, and Joe Foy at West.

EPA’s P3 has two phases. In the first phase of the competition, teams are awarded a $15,000 grant to develop their idea. They bring the design in April to the National Sustainable Design Expo in Washington, DC, to compete for the P3 Award and a grant of $90,000 to take their design to real-world application.

Forty-five college teams were awarded a total of almost $700,000 in grants in Phase One. For more information about the competition, visit the press release at the EPA website.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)

Read the full story at The Kansas City Star.

UT’s Engineering Research Center, CURENT, has collaborated with Knox County Schools for a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) outreach event called Family Engineering Night at Sequoyah Elementary School from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 6.

The event is expected to draw more than 200 K-5 students and their families to take part in 10 hands-on engineering activity exhibits provided by CURENT. Activities include solar cars, bridge design and homemade prosthetic hands. Farragut High School’s Robotics Team also will be exhibiting student-designed robots.

Family Engineering Night was organized by Andrea Allen, K-12 science instructional coach for Knox County Schools; Principal Alisha Hinton and Science Lab Instructor Erin McCollum from Sequoyah School; and Research Assistant Professor Chien-fei Chen and Adam Hardebeck, communications specialist, from CURENT.

Events such as Family Engineering Night help fulfill CURENT’s educational outreach initiatives to spark student interest in STEM fields from an early age and assist in the creation of a new generation of engineers from more diverse backgrounds.

The Center for Ultra-wide-area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks (CURENT), headquartered on the UT campus, is a collaboration between academia, industry, and national laboratories. The center has been jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy with $18.5 million for five years.

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C O N T A C T :

Adam Hardebeck (865-974-9707, ahardebe@utk.edu)

Mark Dean, a 1979 graduate in electrical engineering, has the big idea of building a device that will replace everything that you carry in your wallet. Dean is one of the lead inventors of the personal computer and is chief technology officer for IBM Middle East and Africa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW2ADpj2Jr4

The Health and Information Technology Simulation (HITS) Laboratory will be housed in the former Student Health Center at 1818 Andy Holt Way. A joint endeavor of the colleges of nursing and engineering, the HITS lab will feature simulated learning experiences and opportunities to explore research scenarios.

The building will add more than 7,000 square feet to the nursing college’s current space and open the door to use more cutting-edge technology such as human simulation manikins.

“Gaining first-hand knowledge of the impact that health technology has on improving patient care, quality, and safety is critical for nursing students,” said Dean Victoria Niederhauser. “Research has shown that when students engage in simulated scenarios in a safe learning environment, they are better prepared to enter into the work force upon graduation.”

The $1.5 million project involves renovating the three-story building; the HITS Lab will take two floors and one floor will house a rare plant herbarium for the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The second floor will include four patient exam rooms; a pediatric inpatient room; an operating room; a room that functions as an intensive care unit, medical surgical room, and birthing room; faculty offices; storage space; and lockers. It will also contain a debriefing room with an observation and control laboratory where students and professors can observe how other students are handling simulated scenarios live. The experiences can be taped so that students can review how they responded to situations.

The basement level will contain an apartment with a bedroom, living room, and dining room for simulated learning and collaborative nursing and engineering research projects to tackle health care challenges. For example, HITS co-directors Tami Wyatt, associate professor of nursing, and Xueping Li, associate professor of engineering, plan to conduct a study using new smart-home technologies to assist with independent living for elderly people. These technologies will allow older adults to live safely in their own homes.

Construction is slated to begin this fall and be completed in January.

Student Health Services moved from its former Andy Holt Avenue building last December. The new Student Health Building, on the corner of Pat Head Summitt Street and Andy Holt Avenue, opened to students in January 2012.

The College of Nursing’s current building is also converting its learning laboratory into a simulated hospital ward so students can practice health assessments. Their original lab will double the capacity of beds and create a better learning environment for undergraduate and graduate nursing students.

The learning lab work is slated to begin in December and to be competed in March 2013.

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C O N T A C T :

Whitney Heins (865-974-5460, wheins@utk.edu)