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PURDUE

WINTER 2009

Winter 2009 1

COVER STORY

1217

Our Cresting Water CrisisResponding to the Global Water Challenge

24 Efficiency for the Future

FIRST PERSON

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Ford Gift Helps EPICS Make Green Home a RealityBlalock’s Legacy

CAMPAIGN IMPACT

ALUMNI IMPACT

32 What Is It?

APERTURE

30 Two Views on the New Energy Economy

MOSAIC

23 A Question of Water Quality

STUDENT IMPACT

18192022

I2I Learning Lab Redefines Classroom EnvironmentEngineering on the Frontlines Worldwide EngagementTrustees Support Engineering’s Strategic Plan

FEATURES

2 Featuring: Around the Fountain, Milestones, Prime Numbers, and News from Across the College of Engineering

VANTAGE POINTSINSIDE ENGINEERING IMPACT

VANTAGE POINTS

The environment is on everyone’s minds these days, from concerns about declining water quality to a pressing need for alter-native energy sources. As engineers, we are perfectly positioned to create solutions to the challenges facing our planet.

We are inspired by the National Academy of Engineering and its commitment to meeting the “Grand Challenges” of the 21st century, the recent presidential debates and their attention to the environment, and the personal efforts within our community such as the student-led Boiler Green Initiative. Taking care of Earth is, as never before, everyone’s business.

This issue of Engineering Impact focuses on the ways in which Purdue’s College of Engineering is making environmental impact around the world by leading the way in rebuilding our planet and advancing sustainability. The cover story examines research addressing the global water crisis through computer simulation, local fieldwork, and international collabora-tion. This is indeed a complex problem involving a myriad of influences, from climate change to politics, policy, and practice.

Looking again to the strength of our community, we also highlight a student project with Habitat for Humanity to design a green-build home, and we celebrate the accomplishments of a longtime member of the Purdue family, Marion Blalock, founding director of the Minority Engineering Program and a recent retiree. Her contributions to the College will be remembered through an endowment for summer work-shops created in her name.

As Purdue Engineering embarks on its new six-year strategic plan called “Extraordinary People, Global Impact,” we are energized by the vast op-portunity our extraordinary people have to effect positive global change. We hope some of this energy and enthusiasm is apparent in the pages of this magazine.

Leah H. JamiesonJohn A. Edwardson Dean of EngineeringRansburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

FROM THE DEAN

AdministrationDean Leah Jamieson

Associate Dean, Academic Affairs Klod Kokini

Associate Dean, Graduate Education and

Interdisciplinary Programs Audeen Fentiman

Associate Dean, Research Ragu Balakrishnan

Associate Dean, Resource Planning and Management Vince Bralts

Associate Dean, Undergraduate Education Mike Harris

Assistant Dean, Interdisciplinary Research Melba Crawford

Assistant Dean, Undergraduate Education Teri Reed-Rhoads

Adminstrative Director Sharon Whitlock

Director, Advancement Major Gifts Amy Noah

Director, Financial Affairs Christopher Martin

Director, Global Engineering Programs Rabi Mohtar

Director, Marketing and Communications Rwitti Roy

Director, Strategic Planning and Assessment Carolyn Percifield

Director, Information Technology David Carmicheal

Special Projects Facilitator Larry Huggins

Schools, Departments, and DivisionsAeronautics and Astronautics Tom Farris

Agricultural and Biological Engineering Bernie Engel

Biomedical Engineering George Wodicka

Chemical Engineering Arvind Varma

Civil Engineering Kathy Banks

Construction Engineering and Management Makarand Hastak

Electrical and Computer Engineering Mark Smith*

Engineering Education Kamyar Haghighi

Engineering Professional Education Dale Harris

Environmental and Ecological Engineering Inez Hua (interim)

Industrial Engineering Joseph Pekny (interim)

Materials Engineering Keith Bowman

Mechanical Engineering Dan Hirleman

Nuclear Engineering Vince Bralts (interim)

Engineering ImpactDirector, Marketing and Communications Rwitti Roy

Editor Linda Thomas Terhune

Contributing Writers Judith Austin

Jim Bush

Joseph Fowler

Clyde Hughes

Kathy Mayer

Greg McClure

William Meiners

Amy Raley

Matt Schnepf

Emil Venere

Proofreader Lynn Hegewald

Editorial Assistant J.W. Rosson

Designer Jiawei Yue

*As Engineering Impact goes to press, Mark J.T. Smith, head and Michael J. & Katherine R. Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), has been named dean of Purdue’s Graduate School. We congratulate him on this appointment. Venkataramanan (Ragu) Balakrishnan, associate dean for research, has been named interim head of ECE. Melba Crawford, currently assistant dean in the research office, will be the interim associate dean for research and will assume pri-mary responsibility for Engineering’s research office during Balakrishnan’s interim head appointment. Balakrishnan will continue as associate dean, at a reduced level.

Moving? Alumni should send change-of-address notices to Development and Alumni Information Services, Purdue University, 403 West Wood St., West Lafayette, IN 47907. Other readers may send address changes to Engineering Impact (see contact information at left).

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COLLEGE OF ENGINEERINGTM

Engineering Impact is printed on recyclable paper from forests that are managed according to strict environmental and socioeconomic standards, including the protection of wildlife, plants, soil, and water quality.

28 Roberta Gleiter: A Vanguard for Women Engineers

Purdue University College of Engineering. The magazine is distributed free to more than 72,000 alumni and friends of the College of Engineering. Produced by the Engineering Communications Office. Purdue is an equal access/equal opportunity university, committed to the development and nurturing of a racially, socially, and religiously diverse community. Tell us what you think. Please send your letters to: Engineering Impact, Purdue University, 1435 Win Hentschel Blvd., Suite B120, West Lafayette, IN 47906; e-mail: [email protected]. In doing so, you grant us permission to publish your letter in part or in whole in an upcoming issue. We reserve the right to edit letters for length and/or clarity.

purdue engineering impact2 Winter 2009 3

VANTAGE POINTSVANTAGE POINTS

AROUND THE FOUNTAIN

You describe yourself as a “a chief cook and bottle washer.” What does that mean?

Sherwood: In this department I wear many hats. I supervise the research machine and student machine shops. I help teach a measurement course for the juniors and seniors. I’m on the building committee for the Roger B. Gatewood addition to the Mechanical Engineering Building, and I’m on the ME safety committee.

How are you integral to the ME researchers?

Sherwood: Usually the professors or graduate students will come in and ask specific questions on how to do something, like, “How can this research device be machined?” It’s part of my responsibility to make sure things run smoothly in this department, and if someone asks me if I can do something for them, I’ll do my best to help them out.

What is the most innovative research project you’ve been involved with?

Sherwood: It’s hard to pick just one, be-cause we do so many. A few that come to mind are a spinal implant testing machine and a rig to study the dynamics of brake pads and the squeal they produce. The research in ME is extremely diverse, and that keeps my job interesting.

What is the most innovative senior design project you’ve been involved with?

Sherwood: The DARPA car that involved more than 200 undergraduate students from ME, ECE, and CE. This was a compe-tition sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicle capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time.

What is the biggest project you ever worked on?

Sherwood: The particle accelerator job. I was working at the central machine shop at the time, and the job was contracted through the Physics Department. We were literally building 8-ton and 16-ton steel modules.

What brought you into this line of work?

Sherwood: My dad was a very mechanical person, and I really en-joy working with my hands. I took several machine shop classes in high school, and by my second year I was a teaching assistant in

the metal shop course. My senior year, I co-oped at Purdue in the central machine shop, and they hired me right after graduation.

Do you ever get “impossible” requests?

Sherwood: It’s only impossible if you don’t know how to do it. It might take a little more research and thought, but I have a great staff and if I can’t figure it out, one of them will.

If you weren’t at Purdue, where would you be?

Sherwood: I’d probably be working in a factory somewhere or in electronics or the automotive industry.

What do you do in your free time?

Sherwood: I landscape, I’m an avid target-shooter, and I do a little gunsmithing. I like to help my neighbors, and I love to putter and tinker. Basically I keep myself busy.

If you could build anything you wanted in the machine shop, what would it be?

Sherwood: Well, I wouldn’t build anything for myself. I like building things for other people. All my projects are second priority. I’d rather be helping someone else.

n Joseph Fowler

11.03.08 • 12:55 p.m. • Mechanical Engineering Shop, ME Building, Room 12

Researchers from Purdue and IBM have discovered that tiny structures called silicon nanowires might be ideal for manufacturing future computers and consumer electronics because the nano-wires form the same way every time.

The researchers used an instrument called a transmission electron micro-scope to watch how nanowires made of silicon “nucleate,” or begin to form, be-fore growing into wires, says Eric Stach, an assistant professor of materials engi-neering. It was the first time researchers had made such precise measurements of the nucleation process in nanowires, according to Stach.

“The implication is that if you are try-ing to create electronic devices based on these technologies, you could actually predict when things are going to start their crystal-growth process. You can see that it’s going to happen the same way every time and that there is some potential for doing things in a repeatable fashion in electronics manufacturing.”

Nanowires might enable engineers to solve a problem threatening to derail the electronics industry. New technolo-gies will be needed for industry to keep pace with Moore’s law, an unofficial rule stating that the number of transistors

on a computer chip doubles about every 18 months, resulting in rapid progress in computers and tele-communications. Doubling the number of devices that can fit on a computer chip translates into a similar increase in performance. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to continue shrinking electronic devices made of conventional silicon-based semiconductors.

“In something like 5 to, at most, 10 years, silicon transistor dimensions will have been scaled to their limit,” Stach says. Transistors made of nanowires rep-resent one potential way to continue the tradition of Moore’s law. n Emil Venere

Purdue to help draw women to STEM disciplinesPurdue is launching a national model program to increase the number and diversity of women faculty members in the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—as well as agriculture.

A National Science Foundation grant of more than $3.92 million will support the research and programming for “institutional transformation” and create the Purdue Center for Faculty Success. The center will provide targeted research, programs, and university-level coordination to not only attract more women but also to help them succeed. What is learned will be shared with other institutions across the nation. Alice Pawley, assistant professor of engineering education, is a researcher in the project.

“This effort will provide the role models to encourage more young women to enter these fields and succeed. It is essential that more of our domestic students prepare for and enter STEM disciplines and agriculture. These fields are key to global competitive-ness,” says Purdue President France A. Córdova. n Clyde Hughes

Mike Sherwood, supervisor of machining and building services for the School of Mechanical Engineering, and his staff support more than 900 undergraduate students, about 300 graduate students, and about 30 faculty members. They also support many student organizations, including Solar Car, First Robotics, SAE mini-Baja, and Formula SAE. Nanowires, such as this one shown in a transmission electron microscope animation,

are formed from gold nanoparticles exposed to a gas containing silicon.

Nanowires May Help Electronics Industry

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Vantage Points continued

seek environmentally friendly ways to commute, to a litter cleanup along the Wabash River. Football fans got into the act, too, recycling 5,600 pounds of ma-terials from their trash before, during, and after the Purdue–Central Michigan game. The weeklong celebration of the environment concluded with a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Thomas Friedman.

Friedman came to campus to discuss his recently published book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America.

“Tom Friedman has won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work with the New York Times and is one of our

Going Green

Materials engineers have created a new type of membrane that separates oil from water and, if perfected, might be used for environmental cleanup, water purification, and industrial applications.

Thomas Friedman

Engineering affirms commitment to environment

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The new technology would last longer than conventional filters for separating oil from water and works by attracting water while beading oil, traits that are usually mutually exclusive.

Researchers attached the material to a glass filter commonly used in laboratory research.

“We take mixtures of oil dispersed in water and run them through these filters, and we are getting 98 percent separation,” says Jeffrey Youngblood, an assistant professor of materials en-gineering. “This is pretty good, because if you don’t modify the glass filters with our material, essentially all the oil goes through. If you modify them with our material, then almost none of the oil goes through.”

The membrane consists of a layer of material called polyethylene glycol, and each molecule is tipped with a Teflon-like “functional group” made with fluorine. Water molecules are attracted to the polyethylene glycol yet pass through the Teflon-like layer, which acts as a barrier to the oil molecules. The researchers have tested the material with solutions containing oil suspended in water, similar to concentrations exist-ing in oil spills and other environmental cleanup circumstances.

A key advantage of the new approach over some conventional methods is that it separates oil from water without using “nanoporous” filters. Filters containing extremely small pores require the water to be pushed through at high pressure, which consumes energy.

Such filters also might be used in cleanup applications, such as removing oil from a ship’s bilge water or cleaning wastewater contaminated with oil. They could also be applied to water-purification technology called reverse osmosis, which now requires a “prefilter” to remove oil. n E.V.

Filtering May Have Environmental, Industrial Applications

An oily substance called hexadecane beads up on this new type of membrane created by materials engineers to separate oil from water.

country’s foremost journalists on energy and how it has affected our foreign policy. He is one of the world’s preeminent commentators on inter-national affairs,” says event organizer E. Daniel Hirleman, the William E. and Florence E. Perry Head of the School of Mechanical Engineering.

Green Week was organized by the College of Engineering, includ-ing its Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering, Global Engineering Program, and the School of Mechanical Engineering, as well as Purdue’s Center for the Environment, Energy Center, Office of the Provost, and the Purdue Climate Change Research Center. n Linda Thomas Terhune

Water quality in the Great Lakes was the topic of a daylong conference at Purdue University–Calumet last fall. The event, organized by the Water Institute at Purdue University–Calumet, in collaboration with the Center for the Environment and the Energy Center featured presentations by faculty from across the colleges of Engineering and Agriculture, and from Argonne National Laboratory.

Ashok Gadgil, senior staff scientist and deputy director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, delivered the keynote address titled, “Global Water Solutions through Technology: Affordable Safe Drinking Water for Poor Communities in the Developing Countries.”

Gadgil, who is also a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, is known for interdisciplinary and diverse research on energy and environmental issues in the developing world.

Conference Explores Water Quality

Ashok Gadgil

Purdue celebrated its first Green Week September 15 to 19 with a series of activities around campus designed to bring attention to sustainability issues.

Events ranged from the Alternative Transportation Challenge, encouraging members of the Purdue community to


VANTAGE POINTSMILESTONES

Materials Engineering Marks 50 Years

The School of Materials Engineering will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2009, recognizing a road well traveled and a future rich with possibility.

The school’s history, in reality, dates to 1923 when the first metallurgical course—ChE 105/106 (Principles of Metallurgy)—was offered in the chemi-cal engineering curriculum by John L. Bray. The first graduate course in the

subject debuted a year later. By 1935, metallurgy had been firmly embraced as a discipline in its own right and was recognized when the School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering was founded and a BS in metallurgical engineering was approved.

In those days, and on through the 1940s, the subject was taught element by element: copper, zinc, lead, tin, silver, gold, aluminum, iron, and steel. “You studied the metallurgy of copper and then went on to the next chapter and the next element. Engineering principles and engineering practice of extractive and physical metallurgy were loosely connected,” says MSE Professor Emeritus Richard Grace (BSMetE ’51). In 1954, Grace became the school’s first faculty hire and was its head from 1965 to 1972.

Birth of the Division of Metallurgical Engineering

Materials engineering really came into its own at Purdue in 1954 with the arrival of Reinhardt Schuhmann Jr., hired from MIT to head the division of Metallurgical Engineering. Widely acknowledged as the founding father of Purdue’s School of Materials Engineering, Schuhmann brought a new outlook—a curriculum focused on the fundamental principles and engineering concepts needed to solve practical problems.

“For Schuhmann, it was not good enough to know how to make steel. You could get that from a handbook. The future engineer had to know how to solve problems that come up,” recalls Mysore Dayananda, who

arrived at Purdue from India in 1958 and received his doctorate in 1965. Dayananda chose Purdue over MIT and Carnegie Mellon because he wanted to study with Schuhmann, internationally recognized as a master of thermody-namics. “He was the top expert in the art and science of teaching engineer-ing principles,” says Dayananda, who joined the Purdue faculty upon com-pleting his degree. “He emphasized problem solving in materials design and application and made us learn by introspection and self analysis. He really taught us to think.”

The School of MetE comes to life

In 1959, the Board of Trustees approved Purdue’s School of Metallurgical Engineering, with Schuhmann appointed as head. Over the years, the school’s name changed several times to reflect the evolving profile and focus of the discipline itself. In 1965, with Richard Grace as head, it became the School of Materials Science and Metallurgical Engineering. Finally, in 1973, with Robert Vest as newly appointed head, the current name was established—School of Materials Engineering.

From its foundations in metals, Materials Engineering has expanded to include the study of ceramics and polymers, with nanomaterials and biomaterials now emerging areas in the discipline.

Keeping pace

Periodic overhauls of the curriculum have kept Purdue’s materials program current with national education reform; major changes occurred in 1959 when ceramics and polymers were integrated into the undergraduate curriculum and in 1989 when the program was once again rebuilt to integrate all classes of materials. At that time, Purdue’s school was a frontrunner as institutions nation-wide began introducing such changes.

“Over the years, our graduates were going out into jobs and being confronted by materials problems, not just metals. One day they would work with metals, the next with ceramics and polymers. For us not to address the needs of our students would have been foolish,” recalls Gerald Leidl, who received his doctorate from Purdue in 1960 and served as school head from 1978 to 1999. Leidl sat on national MSE education reform panels from 1985 to 1988.

What of the next 50 years? “I see the materials area interacting with all sorts of disciplines,” says Leidl. “There are a lot of opportunities there. When you learn to make something out of nothing, you won’t need us anymore.” n L.T.T.

MSE graduate students (from front) Lisa Veitch, Tim Fitzsimmons, and Carl Lombard. Circa 1985.

Metallurgy students in the School of Chemical Engineering make a test run on a small commercial distillation unit. Circa 1950.

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Astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, the most recent person to walk on the moon, will soon leave another footprint alongside fellow space explorer Neil Armstrong, this time in Purdue University Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections.

Cernan’s papers will join a growing list of historically significant collections in Purdue Libraries’ flight archives. Armstrong, a 1955 Purdue graduate and the first person to walk on the moon, donated personal papers in November. Cernan announced his gift in January.

The George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers, the world’s largest compilation of papers, memorabilia, and ar-tifacts related to the late aviator, also reside in the archives. Earhart, the first woman pilot to cross the Atlantic Ocean, set world avia-tion records and worked as a Purdue staff member in the mid-1930s. She disappeared July 2, 1937, over the Pacific Ocean as she attempted to fly around the world.

Purdue Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections also houses the papers of Ralph

Johnson, a 1930 Purdue graduate in mechanical engineering and a flight pioneer who was the first person to document aircraft landing procedures that are still used today.

Cernan (BSEE ’56) carried out three space flights. As a pilot aboard Gemini IX in 1966, he became the second person to walk in space. He was a lunar module pilot for the Apollo X mission in 1969. As commander of Apollo XVII in 1972, he became the most recent person to walk on the moon’s surface.

“Our expanding flight archives now include some of the key individuals and events in flight history,” says James L. Mullins, dean of Purdue Libraries. “These archives also show Purdue’s significance in the advancement of flight. We have had 22 Purdue graduates who have gone on to be astronauts, and we want to build our flight archives to reflect the university’s rich his-tory and contribution to air travel and space flight.” n L.T.T. with Jim Bush

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Astronauts’ Archives Coming to Purdue

Eugene A. Cernan, far right, applauds with Purdue President France A. Córdova and Neil Armstrong during a ceremony on campus. The two astronauts and Purdue alumni have donated papers to the university.


Comer

Cordelia Brown, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and David Meyer, professor of electrical and computer engineering, with the 2008 Innovative Program Award by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA). They were recognized for develop-ing and implementing a particularly innovative program, titled “Directed Problem Solving.”

Robert Connor, assistant professor of civil engineering, with an Innovation Award from the Minister of the Alberta Department of Transportation for his assistance in developing the constraint induced fracture (CIF) repair of a Heinsburg, Alberta, bridge.

E. Daniel Hirleman, William E. and Florence E. Perry head and professor of mechanical en-gineering, with the U.S. Civilian and Research & Development Foundation’s 2008 George Brown Award for International Scientific Cooperation in recognition of his outstanding commitment to international education and cooperative research.

Larry Huggins, special projects facilitator for the College of Engineering and professor emeritus of agricultural and biological engineer-ing, with the Massey-Ferguson Educational Award by the American Society of Biological Engineers (ASABE). Huggins was recognized for his dedication and outstanding contributions to agricultural and biological engineering through teaching, mentoring, administration, extension, and research.

Jason Weiss, professor of civil engineering, with the 2008 Robert L’Hermite Medal by the International Union of Laboratories and Experts in Construction Materials, Systems and Structures (RILEM) in recognition of his outstanding contri-bution to the investigation of the volume stability of hydrating cement-based materials and its implication on cracking.

Awarded Named Recognized

Invited

AppointedJan Allebach as the Hewlett-Packard Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Charles Bouman as the Michael J. and Katherine R. Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Edward Delp as the Charles William Harrison Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Carol Handwerker as the Reinhardt Schumann Jr. Professor of Materials Engineering.

Jayathi Y. Murthy as the Robert V. Adams Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Yung C. Shin, mechanical engineering professor and director of the Center for Laser-based Manufacturing, as the Donald A. and Nancy C. Roach Professor of Advanced Manufacturing.

Michael D. Zoltowski as the Thomas J. and Wendy Engibous Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Michael Ladisch, director of the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering, distinguished professor of agricultural and biological engineering and biomedical engineering with a courtesy ap-pointment in food science, in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ (AIChE) “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era” list.

Sangtae Kim, Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering, in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ (AIChE) “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era” list.

Eckhard Groll, professor of mechanical engineering, as director of the College of Engineering’s Office of Professional Practice.

Clerical / Service Customer Service Award

Kellie Reece (NE)

Nominated by Shripad Revankar

Sally Shriver (CE) Nominated by Robert Connor and Ayhan Irfanoglu

Administrative/Professional Customer Service Award

Lynn Stevenson (ECE) Nominated by Jeffery Gray

Professional Achievement Award

Daniel Leaird (ECE) Nominated by Andrew Weiner

New Employee Award

Patricia Finney (MSE)

Nominated by Donna Bystrom

Leadership Award

David Bowker (ENE)

Nominated by Teri Reed-Rhoads

2008 Best Teacher AwardsThe following faculty received 2008 Best Teacher Awards:

W. A. Gustafson Teaching AwardDominick Andrisani (AAE)

Wilfred “Duke” Hesselberth Award for Teaching ExcellenceMireille Boutin (ECE)

Outstanding Teacher in the School of Engineering EducationMatthew W. Ohland (ENE)

Harold Munson AwardW. Jason Weiss (CE)

Solberg AwardCharles M. Krousgrill (ME)

Reinhardt Schuhmann Jr. Best Teacher AwardElliott B. Slamovich (ME)

Shreve AwardW. Nicholas Delgass (ChE)

ABE Outstanding Engineering TeacherJohn M. Lumkes (ABE)

Motorola Award for Teaching ExcellenceMichael R. Melloch (ECE)

Pritsker AwardJean-Philippe Richard (IE)

Best Teacher AwardJean Paul Allain (NE)

2008 Engineering Staff Awards

Mary Comer, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, as an Outstanding Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.

Weiss

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Hirleman

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Milestones continued

Kim

Ladisch

ZoltowskiBouman

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Named as Fellows American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)• Thomas Farris, head of aeronautics and astronautics• Jay Gore, Vincent P. Reilly Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of Purdue’s Energy Center

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)• Oleg Wasynczuk, professor of electrical and computer engineering• David Ebert, professor of electrical and computer engineering

American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE)• Arvind Varma, R. Games Slayter Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and head of chemical engineering

American Physical Society (APS)• Muhammad Alam, professor of electrical and computer engineering• Osman Basaran, Reilly Professor of Fluid Mechanics, chemical engineering

Purdue Book of Great TeachersThe following engineering faculty members were inducted into Purdue’s Book of Great Teachers in August in recognition of sustained excellence in the classroom. Those honored included:

Steven Collicott (AAE)Supriyo Datta (ECE)Leslie Geddes (ECE)Eckhard Groll (ME)

James Longuski (AAE)William Oakes (ENE)Robert Pierret (ECE)

Shin

Murthy

Groll

Handwerker

Meyer

Brown


The ecological footprint is the metric that allows us to calculate human pressure on the planet. It is a measure of the area needed to support a population’s lifestyle. It takes into consideration the consumption of food, fuel, wood, and fibers as well as pollution levels, such as carbon dioxide emissions. In 2005, the United States and China had the largest total footprints, each using 21 percent of the planet’s biocapacity. China had a much smaller per person footprint than the United States but a population more than four times as large. India’s footprint was the next largest; it used 7 percent of the Earth’s total biocapacity. Humanity in general is no longer living off nature’s interest but is drawing down its capital with a global hectares per capita (gha) footprint of 2.7.*

VANTAGE POINTSPRIME NUMBERS

Living Planet Report 2008 *One U.S. acre is equal to 0.405 hectares. ** 2008 World Population Data © Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT AND POPULATION BY REGION, 2005

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North AmericaEurope EUEurope Non-EU Asia-PacificLatin American and the Caribbean

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Middle East and Central Asia

CanadaEcological Footprint: 7.10 gha Population: 3.33 M**

United StatesEcological Footprint: 9.40 gha Population: 304.5 M**

ChinaEcological Footprint: 2.10 gha Population: 1,324.7 M**

JapanEcological Footprint: 4.90 gha, Population: 127.7 M**

New ZealandEcological Footprint: 7.70 gha Population: 4.30 M**

IndiaEcological Footprint: 0.90 gha Population: 1,149.3 M**

NorwayEcological Footprint: 6.90 gha Population: 4.80 M**

United Arab EmiratesEcological Footprint: 9.50 gha Population: 4.50 M**

KuwaitEcological Footprint: 8.90 gha Population: 2.70 M**


Our Cresting Water Crisis

“How can we optimize agricultural production but at the same time make sure

VANTAGE POINTSCOVER STORY

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water quality is unimpacted?” –Indrajeet Chaubey, ecohydrologist

By Linda Thomas Terhuneack of clean water is responsible for more deaths in the world than war, according to a 2002 report by the

United Nations (UN). By the same account, about one out of every six people living today do not have adequate access to water. Beyond human need, agriculture, industry, and healthy ecosystems are all dependent on clean water.

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Indrajeet Chaubey

Doctoral students Tushar Sinha (left, PhD ’08) and Dazhi Mao (PhD ’08) install soil moisture

and temperature sensors at the Purdue Agronomy Center for Research and Education.

Indrajeet Chaubey

Indrajeet Chaubey (right front) and students examine nitrogen and phosphorous content in an Indiana drainage ditch.


Household water use ac-counts for a mere five percent of total water use. Agriculture, in comparison, comprises 70 percent of all fresh water withdrawn, according to the UN Global Compact CEO Water Mandate. Maintaining healthy water supplies is now among the greatest challenges facing the world and, as such, poses a great opportunity for engineers.

“For a healthy, sustainable future for the planet, developing methods of ensuring adequate water supplies pose engineering challenges of the first magnitude,” states the UN. Purdue engineers are responding to the call for help. Their work addresses the challenge on all levels, from quality to quantity, and on a scale ranging from remote satellite sensing to local hands-on sampling in the field.

While concerns about air quality and fossil fuel have gripped the American consciousness for decades, water is taken for granted by the average resident in most regions of the United States, the American Southwest being the biggest exception. Even in the research world, it has not received its due, according to Inez Hua, interim head of ecological and environmental engineering and professor of civil engineering.

“In the research world, water has not received as much attention as it should have in the last 15 years. There has been a lot of attention to climate change, but water has been folded into other areas, such as the transmission of disease,” observes Hua, whose research interests include water treat-ment, fate and transport of chemical contaminants, groundwater and soil remediation, and sustainability.

Purdue Engineering has had a stand-ing presence in water-related research for many years, and the College is increasing its global standing with new faculty who bring additional perspec-tives to the discipline. Keith Cherkauer and Indrajeet Chaubey recently joined the agricultural and biological engineer-ing faculty. Cherkauer, a hydroclima-tologist, came with a background in aerospace engineering with a remote sensing focus. Chaubey is an ecohy-drologist with an interest in nonpoint source pollution and watershed modeling. Other researchers around the College are tackling challenges at the municipal level: wastewater treat-ment; on an international scale: dryland hydrology in Tunisia; and in Space:

water treatment technologies for space exploration.

Climate and water

Chicago, which claims to be an environmentally friendly city, recently completed a comprehensive study on climate impact that included input from researchers including Cherkauer. His particular interest in climate change and how evolving weather patterns influence water figured into the Chicago Climate Action Plan, which was unveiled in September and provides a comprehen-sive and detailed strategy to help lower greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change.

Cherkauer uses remote sensing information and hydrology models to study environmental change, land-atmosphere interactions, and the hydrologic cycle. His research on the impact of climate change, specifically precipitation and winter processes, has applications for infrastructure in areas like Chicago and for farmers who are increasingly affected by wet springs and dry summers. Engineers have traditionally designed bridges, dams, and levees based on 100-year flood levels. With changing rainfall amounts, however, the standard has changed. In the Southwest, increased drought is likely; in the Midwest, summers are becoming wetter, storms more intense, and flooding more common. Bridge design needs to anticipate this, Cherkauer says.

“We are confident that climate is changing,” Cherkauer says. “We design dams, bridges, and levees based on

peak flow. That assumes nothing is chang-ing. That no longer applies. If these structures are de-signed for the 100-year-flood, they may not be effective. Without estimates of what will happen in the future, it’s hard to know where to go.”

Cherkauer and the Hydrologic Impacts Group study areas ranging from the role of land management to hydrologic change in cold regions. In one study, Cherkauer and doctoral student Tushar Sinha used remote sensing information to study the impact of snow and soil frost on the surface water and energy balance

in the upper Mississippi River basin. Using that data, they created models that show a trend of warming soils in

the southern area and increasing soil frost in the north due to decreased

snow pack, which is an insulator that has historically kept soil

temperatures warmer. This information can be used by the construction

industry, which has to accommodate for heaving soil. It can also predict potential flooding in areas where frozen soils are unable to absorb rainfall. Most flood forecasting does not take soil freeze into con-sideration, Cherkauer says.

“There is tighter col-laboration with atmo-spheric scientists, study-ing vegetation growth, and soil mapping. It all leads to being able to improve long-range and short-term forecast work,” Cherkauer

says. “With

proper management, we can deal with the changes. We need to think about it as we design new infrastructures and methodologies.”

Clean water for all uses

Without water, agriculture is com-promised. But with certain agricultural practices, water is compromised. It’s a cycle that Chaubey would like to see broken. His concern is water quality and nonpoint source pollution to ensure clean water, not just for human con-sumption but also for other ecosystems such as aquatic life and agriculture.

Among the challenges that motivate him are questions such as, “How can we optimize agricultural production but at the same time make sure water qual-ity is unimpacted and good?”

Agricultural practice at a local level can have long-lasting and far-reaching

our cresting water crisis continued

Keith Cherkauer’s study of peak flow on the Wabash River: Percent change in annual and seasonal peak flows (highest daily flow for each year, averaged over 30 years) for the Wabash River between current (1976-2006) and end of century projected (2069-2099) values for three future climate change scenarios (A2 = high-level emissions; A1B = mid-level emissions; B1 = low-level emissions of green house gasses). Peak flows increase in the future in almost all seasons and for almost all future change scenarios.

Keith Cherkauer

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effects. Much of the pollution in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, can be traced to fertilizers applied in the Midwest. Waters in the Gulf contain dangerously high nitrate levels. High nitrate levels contribute to increased algae growth, which then restricts the amount of oxygen available for fish and other life in the Gulf. The EPA Science Advisory Board’s Hypoxia Advisory Panel has recommended a 45 percent reduction of total nitrogen and total phosphorus flux if the size of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf is to be reduced. The panel feels that it is possible to shrink the zone from a current level of 22,000 square kilometers to 5,000 squre kilometers. This brings Chaubey’s work into focus.

Ethanol production, while providing an alternative to fossil fuel, can have an environmental impact. Corn, the basis of ethanol, requires a lot of fertilizer. If uncontrolled, the fertilizer runs off fields and pollutes water sources. The answer

our cresting water crisis continued

is not to stop growing corn, Chaubey suggests. It is to institute management practices to minimize the loss of nutri-ents into water. This can be done by a variety of means, including injecting nutrients into the soil, using nitrate-removing wetlands that naturally process nitrates and then release them as nitrogen gas into the atmosphere, and building buffer strips at the ends of fields. Each of these has added cost for farmers and federal and local agencies, but resources are limited. “If you have only so many dollars to put into the field, where do you put them?” Chaubey asks. His investigation into how to protect water sources may help provide answers to that question.

Chaubey, who brought ecohydrol-ogy to Purdue when he arrived in 2007, conducts research in the field by examining how nutrients move through waterways. He is a princi-pal investigator on a Conservation Effectiveness Assessment Project, one of 13 projects funded nationwide by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s

Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service to evaluate how various management practices help improve water quality in agricultural watersheds and how the adoption of these best management practices (BMP) can be increased. The outcomes of this project should help various state and federal agen-cies, such as the National Resources Conservation Service and the EPA, to develop effective policy decisions on how agricultural watersheds should be managed.

Chaubey has also developed decision support tools to help users determine appropriate BMPs to reduce pollution. For example, he and his graduate students have developed methods to optimize selection and placement of BMPs that will maxi-mize water quality improvement with minimum production and implementa-tion cost. His team is currently using this tool to help various stakeholder groups determine various BMPs to control losses of nutrients, sediments, and pesticides from agricultural fields in Indiana.

Responding to a global challenge

In an address at the United Nations’ 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, Nitin Desai, secretary-general for the summit, spoke about the integral role that engineers could play in addressing the global water challenge:

“From digging wells to building dams, engineers have historically been prime providers of methods for meeting the water supply and quality needs of society. To meet current needs, which increasingly include environmental and ecosystem preservation and enhance-ment demands, the methods will have to become more sophisticated.”

Chaubey, Cherkauer, and their Purdue Engineering colleagues are not only providing tools that may improve the way that water is managed and protected but are also part of a growing global community putting their exper-tise to work on sustainable solutions. They are heartened to know that their work in sustainability will have an impact.

“It’s a complex problem, but it is very exciting because of the general aware-ness of the public and an increasing willingness to do the right thing,” Chaubey says. “Never before were so many aware of how our actions impact the environment and willing to do what it takes to minimize our footprint.”

During spring semester 2008, five agricultural and biological engineer-ing students chose to focus their senior capstone project on water problems on the West Bank of Palestine. They worked with a non-governmental organization (NGO) to deliver clean drinking water to Al Nwai’mah, a town of 2,200 residents.

For four months, the students made phone calls and collaborated with the local NGO before ultimately designing a filtration and disinfecting unit

that made once polluted spring water safe for use. They also designed a water tower and distribution system for the village. The students then

traveled to Jordan for 10 days and presented their design to engineers from the Palestinian Hydrology Group and students and faculty from the Hashemite University in Jordan.

“The project was an outstanding opportunity to do something different. It was outside the box, offered the possibility of actually helping people, and presented a unique challenge,” says Anne Dare, a member of the design team and now a student in the agricultural and biological engineering master’s program.

With a charge to make a difference around the world, Purdue engineering students and faculty will be involved in an increasing number of international experiential learning projects along the lines of the one on the West Bank. The projects are the perfect synthesis of global discovery, experiential learning, and international engagement that defines the new path for the College of Engineering. They are also in line with the College’s emerging focus on the global water challenge.

Rabi Mohtar, professor of agricultural and biological engineering and director of the Global Engineering Program, is one of the catalysts behind the emerging water initiative.

As a hydrologist who focuses on water and soil land-use models to encour-age conservation of natural resources and nurture informed decisions about development, Mohtar backs his dedication to global solutions with personal action. He has done extensive work with water conservation in Tunisia and has led major water and natural resources initiatives in India, Jordan, France, and the Palestinian regions of Gaza and the West Bank. He is also dedicated to getting students involved in international research, among them doctoral student Kelsi Bracmort, who spent time in Tunisia and helped develop tools to evaluate local water conservations systems that are now being used by the country’s Ministry of Agriculture.

Says Dare, “Water is a basic need, and developing better ways to treat and distribute water in developing regions should be a priority. Providing clean water not only aids in disease control and prevention but also helps advance humanity. So often in the engineering world, we get caught up in enhancing our way of life, but the top tier of humanity cannot leave the bottom behind and expect progress.” n L.T.T.

Responding to theGlobal Water Challenge

The Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin (indicated in red) is the third largest in the world, after the Amazon and Congo basins. Parts or all of 31 states and two Canadian provinces drain into it at a rate of 90 days from the headwaters in Minnesota to the gulf. Agricultural run-off up and down the river ends up in the gulf and has diminished its water quality. Researchers including Indrajeet Chaubey are looking at ways to curb the effects of such run-off.

EPA/Mississippi River Basin Watershed Nutrient Task Force

Portions of Ind. 225 were flooded by the Wabash River

in January 2008.

Engineering students in Jordan as part of their senior design project in spring 2008.


Some 1,800 first-year engineering students are addressing the biggest problems facing humanity this year through team-based projects. And they’re doing it in classrooms that are revolutionizing the way engineering is taught.

In the lower level of Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering, the recently opened Ideas to Innovation Learning Laboratory emulates the workplace and puts design at the heart of the educational process. I2I, as the space is informally known, is all about flexibility. It com-prises seven studios where students can work on different functions along the way to making a design become a solution. They are the Design Studio, Demonstration Studio, Prototyping Studio, Electronics Studio, Fabrication and Artisan Laboratories, and Innovation Studio. In these spaces, students can anticipate and plan for a chosen option, build and test a proto-type, evaluate outcomes, and refine as needed.

“We’re focusing our classes around the National Academy of Engineering’s

14 grand challenges. Obviously the projects are going to be small, but we want students to think along the lines of the grand challenges,” says Teri Reed-Rhoads, the assistant dean of undergraduate education and an associate professor of engineering education.

The rooms in Neil Armstrong Hall are equipped with moveable storage carts and enough containers to allow student teams to work on “something up to the size and weight of a lawnmower engine from one week to the next,” Reed-Rhoads says. Tables wired for tablet personal computers, projectors, and floor-to-ceiling dry erase boards keep the tools of the trade close at hand and encourage group creativity. The variety of projects also helps students in declaring their majors as sophomores.

“We try to highlight all the disciplines, so they can make informed decisions the next year,” says Reed-Rhoads. “It’s imperative that our students have an appreciation and under-standing of multiple disciplines, because that’s life and that is how they will be working.”

The educational architects behind the classrooms and learning labs in Neil Armstrong Hall are banking on a revolu-

tionary philosophy that can help develop those less tangible attributes in future engineers. They’re excited to

see how flexible space can lead to greater adaptability in students and to see how leaders can emerge from a creative, team-based atmosphere and even learn for themselves how ideas can lead to innovation.

“We find that a number of students are more visual learners. They see

how you can apply engineering principles to actually make something. It whets their ap-petite for engineering. We don’t think of some of these attributes as something you can develop in a normal lecture hall situation,” says Michael Harris, associate dean of engineering

for undergraduate education and professor of chemical engineering.

The new learning environment appeals as much to students as it does to faculty, especially to students who entered the engineering program a few years ago in the days of traditional learning spaces.

“I see a lot of potential in this new facility for students to use it,” says Bernie Davila, a junior in mechanical engineering who assists in the lab. “You could only use computers in the other labs I was in. Everything else was separate. The other setups didn’t contribute to the hands-on design philosophy.”n William Meiners with Judith Barra Austin

I2I Two U.S. Army ma-jors made Purdue their home base as they com-pleted PhD studies in civil engi-neering.

Victor Nakano and Reid Vander Schaaf —who were both promoted to lieuten-ant colonel in 2008—each graduated in May 2008 through a program that equips Army officers to meet military needs.

The Uniformed Army Scientist and Engineer (UAS&E) PhD program edu-cates core Army officers who develop technology solutions to problems fac-ing military commanders. The program seeks to bridge the gap between Army and academic labs, preparing gradu-ates who can advise commanders on science and technology issues.

“I truly felt that combining my doctoral research and operational/acquisition experience would greatly benefit the Army by assisting scientists and engineers in helping to shape and focus their research efforts,” Nakano says. His research at Purdue evolved into a decision-making process for evaluating the designs of buildings, providing protection against chemical and biological threats.

As he connected with students as a mentor and peer, Nakano infused

Army culture into campus life. “I intended to convey the strong set of skills I had gained as an Army officer—skills of discipline, taking the initiative and being proactive, organization, responsibility, and communication and presentation skills,” he says. Upon graduation, Nakano served as the military assistant to the commanding general of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command. Following this post, he was assigned as a uniformed Army scientist and engineer at the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center.

For Vander Schaaf, the UAS&E program opened doors to a potential career in academia. He previ-

ously taught in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the United States Military Academy, West Point. “I enjoy teaching, and obtaining a doctorate made it much more likely that I’d be able to pursue this career

after retiring from the military,” he says.

Vander Schaaf discovered that his time away from the Army didn’t limit his opportunities. He currently conducts research in effective organizational de-cision-making at the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center. This summer, he will become a product manager for a missile program.

According to Nakano, both funding and competing demands for Army personnel to serve in higher-priority positions have left the UAS&E program on hold. Yet the benefits of Purdue’s involvement have been striking. Dulcy Abraham, professor of civil engineering, considers the program an excellent avenue to “interact with outstanding Army officers in research and learning opportunities at Purdue while engaging scientists and researchers from Army labs in these endeavors.”

Abraham served as an advisor to both men and commends their com-mitment to excellence, disciplined and timely delivery of research products, and passion for mentoring peers. As she emphasizes, “This has a strong impact on enriching the education experience of other students in our graduate programs.” n Matt Schnepf

Learning Lab Redefines Classroom Environment

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Engineering on the FrontlinesUnique PhD program bridges academic and military worlds

Contributed to the success of the UAS&E PhD program: Dan DeLaurentis, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

Joe Pekny, professor of chemical engineering, director of the e-Enterprise Center, and interim head of the School of Industrial Engineering.

Eric Dietz, director of the Purdue Homeland Security Institute, associate director of the e-Enterprise Center, and associate professor of computer and information technology.

Jay Gore, director of Discovery Park’s Energy Center and the Vincent P. Reilly Professor in Mechanical Engineering.

Victor Nakano

Reid Vander Schaaf


Creating sustainable community devel-opment in Swaziland, telecommunica-tions systems in Ghana and Oganda, or a water-harvesting program in Kenya are potential candidates in a portfolio of real-world challenges that Purdue engineering students could tackle in their senior capstone projects.

Those and other world needs would follow a successful 2008 global design team project, where five Purdue

seniors designed a West Bank water system that is now under construction. Working at Purdue, students would pair with a global partner on a project of global significance and at the end of the semester travel for a week or two to deliver their work.

Vital, real-life experiences for students are just part of the goals of the expanding Purdue Global Engineering Program (GEP), reports Rabi Mohtar,

named in April as its first permanent director. A Purdue professor of agricul-tural and biological engineering since 1996, Mohtar has long focused on global water needs.

Now, he’s widening and deepening the reach and range of GEP, organized in 2005 with a mission to “define, de-velop, synthesize, and/or leverage from existing initiatives an integrated portfolio of opportunities and programs that

support Purdue students, faculty, and staff to be leaders in the global network of engineering professionals.”

The program’s expanding activi-ties will include fostering collaborative research, especially in areas of global concern; getting involved in global re-search networks; and creating regional or thematic research clusters. Mohtar also has his eye on a “focused global footprint with meaningful, constructive impact” and technology transfer that could address international develop-ment challenges, among other plans.

He’s tapping the successes of existing study-abroad programs and individual professors’ global ties and creating new international opportuni-ties. “I’m not only interested in students traveling abroad, I’m interested in an integrated experience where students, faculty and staff engage in global opportunities,” Mohtar says. “We are building an integrated program with a large portfolio of global activities.”

For faculty, it might include taking

Worldwide EngagementGlobal Engineering Program aims for international impact

students abroad or collaborating with peer institutions in research on climate change, water, food, health, or other global challenges. “In many areas, we cannot do it alone. We need global partnerships.”

Many Purdue faculty have the po-tential to make an impact on the world, so Mohtar hopes to design a program that would allow them to effect change in the challenges facing hunger, water, and food. About 50 or 60 engineering faculty currently have “significant touch” internationally, Mohtar says. His goal is for all 300-plus engineering faculty to be involved internationally.

While study-abroad programs offer students unique experiences, they’re too expensive or time-consuming for some students. “We have to provide a more flexible portfolio that allows students to have international experi-

ences,” Mohtar says. “And we want to expand opportunities beyond traditional destinations to include less populous areas.”

Currently, about 200 of the college’s 6,300 undergraduates participate in some global activity each year. “I would like the Global Engineering Program to grow, so every engineering student has an opportunity for a global experi-ence and to take advantage of the wide scope of learning portfolios on campus and abroad.”

Indiana businesses, too, stand to gain from the program. “We’re launching Engage Indiana, a program designed to help small businesses achieve global reach.”

What drew Mohtar to the position of GEP director, he says, is “the potential for impact, making a difference.” n Kathy Mayer

Women in a village in the suburbs of Bangalore, India, attend a workshop as part of the Iowa State–University of Illinois–Purdue AgriculturalKnowledge Initiative Project.

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A participant in the Purdue Agricultural Knowledge Initiative project stands next to a mini fish tank.

Purdue doctoral student Kelsi Bracmort (center) in Tunisia, where she did dryland hyrdrology research. Pictured with her are Tunisian research associates.


As a child growing up in the New Jersey Highlands, Heather Gall was surrounded by nature and loved it. She’s now studying so that she can make a career of protecting the environment.

Gall, who completed a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering in December and is staying with the program for a doctorate, focuses on water quality. Her research is part of a $700,000 project funded by the Environmental Protection Agency that is examining the effect of hormones leached off agricultural fields into nearby water sources. Gall’s major advisor, civil engineering professor Chad Jafvert, is a co-principal investigator on the three-year study. Researchers from forestry and agronomy are also collaborators.

Growth hormones given to livestock end up in their manure, which is spread on fields and eventually finds its way into streams and tile drains. Even minute concentrations of estrogen- and testosterone-mimicking hormones can impact aquatic life such, as fish. Manure is typically applied to fields in the spring, which corresponds with spawning season. Trace amounts of hormones can influence sex changes in fish, changing their secondary sex characteristics and, in extreme cases, rendering the majority of the population one gender and severely limiting their ability to reproduce.

Gall was responsible for setting up seven real-time monitoring stations at the research site, which is located west of campus at Purdue’s Animal Science Research and Education Center. The stations contain datalog-gers, automated samplers, 12-volt rechargeable batteries, solar panels as

back-up power sources, and sensors that measure water temperature, level, and velocity in drainage ditches. From the information gathered, the research team can calculate the volumetric flow rate and hormone concentrations.

Hormone concentrations in manure and surface waters are not currently regulated, according to Gall, who says she would like to have limits imposed on the amounts applied onto fields. “I would like to see the results of this research used to develop best man-agement practices so that farmers know the best time to apply manure to reduce its potential to affect fish,” she says. “I would like to see the best practices incorporated into policy mak-ing. All this data is great, but if we don’t do anything with it, we’re not going to solve the problem.”

Along with an academic commitment to environmental issues, Gall is working

to make her community a cleaner place. She’s a member of the univer-sity’s Boiler Green Initiative, a student organization dedicated to promoting environmentally friendly behaviors, and was recently appointed to West Lafayette’s Go Greener Commission.

In addition to monitoring hormones at the Animal Science Research and Education Center, nutrient monitoring will be incorporated into the project as part of Gall’s PhD research. Indiana is part of the Mississippi River drainage basin, and therefore nutrients applied to fields in this study area ultimately reach the Gulf of Mexico, triggering the large-scale hypoxia known as the “Dead Zone.” Studying the release of nutrients from the source waters (tile drains and agricultural ditches) will help address this issue, which Gall notes is causing devastation to aquatic life as well as the fishing industry. n L.T.T.

A Question Of Water Quality

Civil engineering graduate student Heather Gall works at a monitoring station as part of a research project that examines the effect of hormones in agricultural run-off on nearby water sources.

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CE grad research focuses on the effect of hormones on water sourcesTrustees Support Engineering’s Strategic Plan

Funds will support global education, research, and faculty development

The College of Engineering can move ahead with several initiatives designed to further its mission of empowering people and making a global impact, following approval of funding by the Purdue University Board of Trustees in December.

The board approved the use of $10.8 million from the Vincent P. Reilly Memorial Fund for the College of Engineering to finance portions of its new strategic plan (2009-2014), including global education and research initiatives and faculty develop-ment.

The goals are to use:

• $2.3 million to prepare Purdue engineers to be effective in a global context. The money will be used to support a curriculum innovation project, expand the hon-ors program, and expand cooperative work programs and internships to include international experiences and experiences for international students. It will create facilities, technologies, and programs designed to help students begin solving real problems during their first year. Examples include the Ideas to Innovation Learning Laboratory, zeroHUB technology, and the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program.

• $4.375 million to position research for maximum impact and global significance. The funds will be used to leverage cost-sharing for sponsored programs,

provide seed funding for new research initiatives, and provide gap funding to support employ-ment of research staff during peaks and valleys in funding. It will build research communities, provide support for undergraduate students doing research, leverage external and internal funding for research facilities, and provide funding for surge space during the construction of new research facilities.

• $4.125 million for faculty develop-ment. The funds will be used to help provide start-up packages to new faculty and new department heads; provide discretionary funds for National Academy of Engineering members; increase funding for professorships; and support leader-ship and management development of faculty so they can lead research programs, assume administrative appointments, excel as teachers, and mentor students.

The Vincent P. Reilly Memorial Fund for Engineering Education was estab-lished in 1970 to promote excellence in the field. Vincent P. Reilly, who received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue in 1922, be-queathed approximately $4.5 million to the university in 1969 for promoting the achievement of excellence in engineer-ing education. Since 1970, the fund has supported numerous educational endeavors in engineering.n Greg McClure

VANTAGE POINTS

STUDENT IMPACT

Engineering Mall and fountain

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VANTAGE POINTSFIRST PERSON

Purdue University’s Engineering Projects in Community Service program (EPICS) recently became one of five win-ning programs in the Ford College Community Challenge. The program received a $100,000 grant that will go to the Habitat for Humanity (HFH)/EPICS team for building a next-generation green home in Reynolds, Indiana. Reynolds was dubbed “BioTown, USA” in 2005, when the State of Indiana selected it to showcase ways in which agricultural towns can find new uses for their products and create more environ-mentally friendly ways to dispose of by-products.

The Ford “C3” challenge was based on linking universities with community-based projects around the theme “Building Sustainable Communities.” Ford offered the challenge to their key university partners nationwide and, out of over 20 applicants, Purdue’s EPICS program became one of five winners. “It was very competitive,” says EPICS Director William Oakes. The $100,000 will cover the cost of the proj-ect, including building materials, graduate student technical advisors, travel, and miscellaneous expenses. “The oppor-tunity to go to Ford was very well-timed,” says Oakes. “The grant will provide funding for the house and allow us not to have to do fundraising for the cost of building the house.”

The green-build house is the latest project in the EPICS/HFH relationship that began almost 12 years ago. The build-

ing will not only be an experiment in green technologies but also a training mission for Habitat construction managers. The orga-nization is eager to learn more environmentally friendly building techniques. Both partners are excited about the work. “We could do something that had a state-wide or regional impact, and this resonated with Habitat headquarters,” says Oakes. EPICS has enjoyed over a decade of success with Habitat and has assisted with housing designs and helped the local chap-ter with its building efforts in Haiti. EPICS also works with the international division of HFH on disaster-relief home designs.

The project offers an extensive learning experience for the student team, exposing them to ways in which to incorporate green technologies into a house design and helping dispel some myths about going green. “Some of these things are perceived to be harder to use in construction. The training and education of the builders is part of the process. Students who work on the project are going to come away with a great understanding of the complete life-cycle design,” Oakes says.

The Ford grant will allow both EPICS and HFH to have broad impact in their fields. “It’s putting a very visible project in an area where many people are going to see Purdue’s mark on how engineering is directly helping people,” Oakes says. The project will last two years, with construction slated to begin in 2009. n J.F.

VANTAGE POINTS

CAMPAIGN IMPACT

Ford Gift Helps EPICS Make Green Home a Reality

I grew up 100 miles north of Purdue in Gary. Steel was the lifeblood of the city, and even if you didn’t work in steel, your well-being depended on it. The city was thriving and progressive for decades, until competition in steel heightened in the 1960s. Business col-lapsed, depression set in, and the city suffered for as many decades hence as it enjoyed until that point.

By that time, I had completed a stint in the Army, graduated from Purdue as a mechanical engineer, and moved to Houston in search of opportunity. I started my real-estate firm in 1957 and grew it patiently until I had my first big break in the late 1960s with a contract with the Royal Dutch Shell Company. I had successfully persuaded them to let me build a 51-story office tower for their North American headquarters.

Much time has passed since then, and the world has digitized, globalized, and been made flat again. By and large we are a more prosperous world, but places like Gary, which is the home of four Superfund sites, remind us that our actions reverberate far into the future.

With all of our notable accomplish-ments, one of the consequences of rapid human progress is the harm done to our communities. The great news is that there is a groundswell of support for not only modifying old behaviors but also for remedial action. If you have read a newspaper or watched your local news lately, you might have seen or heard the word “sustainability.” In fact, you have prob-ably seen more about “green” in the media than “Change We Can Believe In.” Everyone is greening everything, from their frequent flier miles to their toothbrushes, and that’s a great thing.

But in business, sustainability has become one of those phrases like

“value-added” or “synergy.” People recognize the marketing value of these statements and use them gratuitously. Sustainability, like these words, has real meaning, however, and an im-portant place in business language—especially now. Companies have to reconcile their marketing gimmicks with impending legislation on carbon emissions and truth in advertising. They are realizing that green is not a device but an approach to business. In fact, for the authentic leaders, sustain-ability is a guiding principle and a qual-ity that aspires for the organization.

One of the most important technical values I learned at Purdue was effi-ciency. It may be the most basic virtue in mechanics, but it was an axiom that catapulted my firm from an average real-estate shop to what I believe is the most sustainable real-estate organi-zation in the world. As an engineer turned developer and building owner, I paid special interest to the systems in my buildings and how efficiently they ran. It was a natural advantage I had over businessmen, financiers, and even leasing experts. But I was a businessman, too, and I realized that every dollar of expense was a dollar off of my bottom line.

For example, Shell’s headquarters in Houston was my first major office tower and my first significant achieve-ment in sustainability. By raising the floor-to-floor height above market stan-dards, we were able to install flexible, low-pressure ductwork that resulted in reduced operating expenses. More than 50 years later, One Shell Plaza remains a leader in energy efficiency and holds the ENERGY STAR® label.

In the 1990s, Hines Interests earned recognition for its leadership in energy efficiency and new building technologies. We partnered closely

with ENERGY TAR, a joint program between the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy. And we were invited to take an active role in the formation of the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) LEED® program for sustainable design.

Green has reached maturity in real estate, at least as far as acceptance goes. More than 25,000 people were expected to attend the 2008 USGBC’s Greenbuild conference in Boston. Instead of just jockeying for the highest rental rate, real-estate companies are now competing to create the most sustainable office environment, which in turn raises rental rates. We are evolving business to place appropri-ate value on each part of the triple bottom-line: people, planet, and profit.

This means good things for cities like Gary, Houston, and London (my current hometown). Each of these places has a significant industrial past, but they also have a much brighter and cleaner future thanks to greater aware-ness, accountability, and integrity. Each day, more people are coming to terms with the life-cycle impact of their decisions, and they are striking a bal-ance between today’s needs and the ability to meet tomorrow’s.

In the end, efficiency may not be the exclusive domain of engineering. It seems it may be the key to a sustainable human existence, as well. n Gerald D. Hines

Gerald D. Hines (BSME ’48) was a partner in Texas Engineering before founding Gerald D. Hines Interests, which is one of the largest real-estate firms in the world, with operations in the United States and 15 other countries. His recent gift of $2 million will support expansion of the university’s Ray W. Herrick Laboratories. The facility’s Gerald D. Hines Sustainable Buildings Technology Laboratory will focus on new building technologies and their impact on human behavior and productivity.

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Efficiency for the Future

26 purdue engineering impact Winter 2009 27

Everyone needs mentors. For Marion Williamson Blalock, one who modeled aspiration was her Aunt Sallie Gearring, now in her nineties. For thousands of students over the last 30 years, their mentor was Blalock.

Getting to college was an achieve-ment in itself for Blalock. Growing up in the shadows of an East Chicago steel mill, she faced losses young: an infant brother, both parents when she was 11, her grandmother four years later.

Seeking opportunity, she watched others. “Whatever the richer kids did, I did,” she says. “If they ran for student office, I ran. When they applied for college, I applied”—against her high school counselor’s assertion that Blalock wasn’t college material.

“My Aunt Sallie pushed all her kids to go to college. I modeled a lot after her,” Blalock says. Landing at Purdue in 1965, she earned a degree in sociology in 1969, then a master’s in counseling and personnel services.

In 1975, she joined the Office of Purdue’s Dean of Students, mov-ing the same year to the Minority Engineering Program (MEP), thanks to Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funding. Blalock taught freshman engineering orientation, and she took opportunity to minorities around the state, invit-ing youngsters to Purdue’s Summer Engineering Workshop.

“The students met other students who looked like them and were aspir-ing,” Blalock says. “And they met role models who looked like them and were doing well. It was great exposure to college life.”

Eventually, the workshops expanded to one-week sessions for 6th and 7th graders, another for 8th graders, and a separate program for 9th and 10th grad-ers. Since 1975, more than 2,000 Purdue engineering degrees have been awarded to African American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Native American students, and Minority Engineering has become a model for others.

Blalock, now retired, is a “living leg-end” in the words of Virginia Gleghorn, who succeeded her as director of MEP. “Her tireless commitment to recruitment, retention, and academic success of engineering students has resulted in countless success stories of prominent corporate and community leaders who benefited from their childhood Summer Engineering Workshop experiences,” Gleghorn says.

While Blalock blazed new trails, she declines singular credit. The ground-work was laid before her, and she was helped by many, including volunteers.

“This was a team effort,” she says, “and there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” n K.M.

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Blalock’s Legacy

Marion Williamson Blalock, retired director of Purdue University’s Minority Engineering Program, guided thousands of students, from middle schoolers in Summer Engineering Workshops to those who earned doctorate degrees in engineering.

Each summer, a door of opportu-nity opens for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade minority students, many of whom have never been outside their hometowns or visited a college campus.

The students come to Purdue for a weeklong Summer Engineering Workshop hosted by the Minority Engineering Program. Living on cam-pus, these students, who have been recommended by a school counselor, math, or science teacher, learn about engineering careers and can envision themselves pursuing higher education and interesting jobs.

Workshop participants tour campus and engineering laboratories, spend time with engineering students and professionals, and take part in hands-on engineering activities. The idea is to inspire; to teach life skills, like interview-ing, test taking and time management; and to encourage students to take college-prep courses.

The workshops, first offered to Indiana students in 1976, were devel-oped by Marion Williamson Blalock, longtime director of the Minority Engineering Program. Over the years, more than 3,000 middle school stu-dents have participated, representing cities throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.

“I always talked about engineering as it related to their day-to-day lives,” Blalock says. “‘You can actually do this,’ I’d say. ‘You can have the satisfac-tion that comes from solving problems.’

And I’d bring engineers their color from companies so they could see what can be achieved. And I’d tell the students, ‘It is happening.’”

Identifying potential engineering students and motivating them to continue their education is the focus of the workshops.

To honor Blalock at her retirement from Purdue in fall 2008, the Marion Williamson Blalock Endowment was established to provide continuing funding for the Summer Engineering Workshops.

The goal is to raise $15 million in six

years for the endowment so minority middle school students from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds will learn about engineering’s opportunities and about Purdue University.

“The Marion Williamson Blalock Endowment is but a small tribute to the legacy she has established at Purdue,” says Virginia Gleghorn, Minority Engineering Program director. “This endowment will be used to continue the summer workshops, encourage strong alumni relations, and expose students who otherwise might not consider col-lege to take advantage of the exciting opportunities at Purdue.” n K.M.

Campaign Impact continued

To contribute to the endowment, contact Madonna Wilson, director of development for the College of Engineering, at [email protected] or (765) 494-6490.

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Marion Blalock, left, pictured with Virginia Gleghorn, current director of the Minority Engineering Program

Access and opportunity for minorities Endowment to fund Summer Engineering Workshops

Marion Blalock

Marion Blalock at work


VANTAGE POINTSALUMNI IMPACT

Roberta Gleiter: A Vanguard for Women Engineers

Roberta Gleiter, who was a member of a safety team for the landing of the Space Shuttle at Edwards Air Force Base when this 1982 photo was taken, stands in front of the mate-demate facility, where the shuttles were mounted and dismounted from shuttle carrier aircraft. The facility was just one of many safety concerns the team addressed.

In this 1982 photo, Gleiter wears a propellant handler’s ensemble that was designed, developed, and tested under her leadership and in cooperation with NASA. The ensemble was used to handle nitrogen tetroxide, an oxidizer used by rocket engines that produces toxic gas when heated.

Gleiter provides direction on a 1984 fuel vapor scrubber system project that she led from design, development, testing, and installation at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The system scrubbed toxic monomethylhydrazine vapors emitted by rocket fuel from the U.S. Defense Department’s satellite facility at the center.

Roberta Banaszak Gleiter doesn’t scare easily. At the top of her 1956 graduating class in an all-girls high school, she wanted to be challenged in college, so she asked her mother which discipline would be the most difficult. Unsure, Gleiter’s mother suggested they ask their dentist, who looked into it and reported that chemical engineering was the most difficult.

Satisfied that it sounded tough enough, Gleiter asked what school she should attend. After more research,

the dentist reported: “The very best school in the country for this is Purdue University.” And, in fact, it was virtually the only place that Gleiter could go. Despite her perfect grades, she learned that unlike Purdue, the University of Michigan, Harvard, and MIT didn’t want her. In 1956, most schools accepted only men into their chemical engineer-ing programs.

After distinguishing herself at Purdue as a top chemical-engineering student, Gleiter was ready to begin a promising

career. However, firms visiting campus didn’t share her enthusiasm. Stymied after being completely ignored at on-campus interview opportunities, Gleiter took advice from one of her male class-mates, who suggested she remove her first name from her resume and list only her initials and last name.

It worked. Soon she was boarding a plane at the Purdue Airport, bound for her first interview. Upon arriving, she introduced herself to the gentle-man waiting for her and was greeted

with unveiled hostility. “He shouted, ‘No!’” Gleiter remembers. “He seemed intensely angry, and then he said, ‘You lied,’ and I was horrified. He said, ‘You’re a woman; we aren’t going to be able to talk to you about anything anyhow.’”

Later, after a useless tour of the facility, she was not allowed inside the chemical process area, even though she had dressed appropriately for it. She was firmly told that it was off limits to her. Instead, she was invited to spend time in the women’s restroom, “where the secretaries go,” and was shown the library, where she was told that she could be hired as a technical li-brarian. “I said, ‘But I’m an engineer. I’m a chemical engineer,’” Gleiter recalls. They weren’t listening.

After marrying fellow Purdue alum-nus John Gleiter and happily raising a family from 1960 to 1980, Gleiter returned to professional life, undaunted by the challenge of catching up on 20 years worth of engineering change. Since earning her master’s degree in systems management/technical sys-tems from the University of Southern California, she has been proving her-self to be a highly competent engineer and a tireless advocate for women engineers worldwide.

Gleiter still puts in nearly 40 hours a week at Aerospace Corp., a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides technical and scientific research, development, and advice to national-security space programs. She has been there for 28 years.

During those years she also served the Society of Women Engineers in many capacities, including national president in 1998–99. A few years later she co-founded and became CEO of the Global Institute for Technology and Engineering (GIFTE), an organiza-tion dedicated to elevating the status of women in the technology and engineering workforce. She also served the National Science Foundation, both on a federal ad-visory committee and as a panelist evaluating engineering research grant proposals.

As GIFTE’s CEO, Gleiter has traveled extensively to promote technical careers to women and has recruited other professionals to get involved in outreach programs that encourage young people, pri-marily girls, to envision themselves as successful in technical careers.

Her advocacy for bright, ambitious women engineers is a driving passion. “I believe that women need to under-stand that they can do it,” Gleiter says with great enthusiasm. “I like to reach out and touch them. It’s the one-on-one that changes their lives.” n Amy Raley

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VANTAGE POINTSMOSAIC

New Energy Economy: Promise or Possibility?

Barack Obama pledged during his presidential campaign to create a new energy economy. This

could translate into support for the sustainability industry, encouraging the development of solar

power, electric cars, and the like.

The Washington Business Journal, for one, argues that if the new president makes good on

campaign promises to put caps on emissions, a new burden may be put on utilities and other

industries.

What’s the outlook?

Answer: Implementing a new energy economy will be challenging but doable.

Meeting the challenges of a new energy economy is not that different from what utilities have always faced. This time, it’s on a larger scale. Yes, it will be a burden for electric utilities to handle the extra load of hybrid cars, for example, whose batteries would access electric power as they recharge. But utilities face similar challenges every time a new device comes out that uses electricity, from air conditioners and microwave ovens in the past to more recently personal computers and plasma televisions. Utilities had to adjust then, and they can again, even on a larger scale.

Utilities will have to build generation facilities, distribution substations, and transmission lines to meet the demand. The magnitude of the project may be a bigger than what they normally see, and the larger demand may prompt some restructuring of prices based on time-of-day access, for example. Also, they’ll have to address safety issues for line personnel in a power outage, who will have to make sure someone’s car isn’t feeding power back onto the line when it should be de-energized. But all that can be engineered around with relatively simple devices.

Overall, the utilities are used to dealing with rapid changes in demand, so they will adjust to any increases that may come as new technologies are implemented that

may need electricity.

The challenge of reducing carbon emissions is also similar to challenges that utilities have faced before. Utilities have already been required to reduce emissions of substances that are components of acid rain and smog. Again, the issue is a matter of scale.

New energy will be fueled by a variety of sources, not just one. I believe we’ll need wind, solar, and nuclear power and clean coal. We’ll also need to use energy more efficiently. While that will require change and effort, it’s doable.

Douglas Gotham Director, State Utility Forecasting Group

at the Energy Center at Discovery Park

Purdue University

Answer: The outlook for implementing sustainable energies is quite positive.

It’s good that we are putting a plan into action to convert our country’s power usage from fossil-fuel sources to sustainable energies, such as solar, wind, and nuclear power. Once we begin and people see that the process can work, that it’s not just an idea, a snowball effect will start, and more people will convert to renew-able resources.

The conversion won’t be completely actualized in the next four to eight years, so the president who follows Barack Obama will need to continue that path.

Switching to renewable energy will put more burden on our current infrastructure, which currently is very, very fragile, as we’ve seen with brownouts and blackouts stemming from bottlenecks on the electrical grid. The grid will need to be made more robust. Another problem facing renewable energy is storage capacity. With sustainable energy, we have to make more than we use and store it somewhere for the times the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.

I’ve seen both sides of the issue, working at the BP refinery in Whiting last summer and serving as vice president of Purdue Solar Racing. BP and others are working to bring emissions down. The technology gets better every year; it’s an

evolving process. I’ve also seen the potential for solar power—the Purdue car took top honors for most-efficient vehicle in the solar category at last year’s Shell Eco-Marathon, running the equivalent of 2,861 miles per gallon. Enough sun shines on the U.S. every day to provide four times the entire country’s annual energy consumption; if we could capture a fraction of that and store it, solar power could be viable.

I think we need to go in both direc-tions at the same time—creating more solar and wind power, then when we see how that is affecting the electrical grid, improve on it. We need to know how the system reacts for a longer period of time. New energies are sustainable if the electrical infrastructure is there.

Robert “Cole” Skelton Junior, mechanical engineering; minor, electrical engineering

Vice president, Purdue Solar Racing

Purdue University

TMI features, benefits and contacts are here . . .http://www.krannert.purdue.edu/tmiRegister online or call 877-622-5726 toll free

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(formerly known as the Engineering Management Program)

Individuals and teams of technical professionals and managers with 5 to 8+ years of experience will enjoy TMI’s 23rd year! TMI features faculty from the Krannert School of Management and the College of Engineering, as well as instructors from industry. They deliver annually-changing course offerings with two primary objectives: • Toupdateparticipantsonimportanttechnicaldevelopmentsandnewapplications

of tools, technology and processes. • Toprovidemanagementcoursesinareasparticularlyrelevanttotheseniortechnical

specialist and the professional-turned-manager. The technical specialist who understands business and the manager with a technical framework will survive in today’s competitive economy and contribute effectively to their organization’s success. Join us!

Engineering Professional Education Krannert Executive [email protected] Education Programs (KEEP) [email protected]

3 CEUs are available Purdue is an equal access/opportunity institution.

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VANTAGE POINTSAPERTURE

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