What a year it's been for Engineering at Maryland!
Here are just a few headlines that made 2018 so special
for the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering.
We welcomed 10 exceptional young engineers as our inaugural class of A. James Clark Scholars. The students selected for this highly distinguished program represent some of the most promising scholars of our freshman class of 2018–19. The scholarship is designed to ensure that these bold young innovators will be able to graduate with little to no debt.
With a nearly $4 million NSF grant, we will lead a first-of-its-kind nationwide pre-college course on engineering principles and design. Engineering For US All (E4USA) will test the effectiveness of a standardized educational curriculum across multiple states. The course is intended to lead to an eventual pathway for high school students to earn college credit.
We broke ground on the E.A. Fernandez IDEA Factory. The latest addition to UMD’s innovation ecosystem will bring together experts in diverse areas—such as robotics, quantum technology, rotorcraft, and transportation—and entrepreneurial students, faculty, and partners to inspire creative thinking, new products, and research breakthroughs.
We launched the Maryland Transportation Institute (MTI), which will coordinate more than $20 million in annual research expenditures. MTI focuses on transportation big data, connected and automated transportation, congestion mitigation, freight and logistics, infrastructure planning and policy, transportation safety and security, smart cities and communities, and future mobility systems.
We were awarded two separate FDA grants of up to $5 million each in support of medical device and regulatory initiatives, in partnership with the Children’s National Health System and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The grants ushered in five-year renewals of the National Capital Consortium for Pediatric Device Innovation and the Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation.
Together with several partners, we demonstrated that drones can safely deliver human organs without incurring any damage. The report authors say that with the development of faster and larger drones, long-distance drone organ shipment may result in substantially reduced cold ischemia times, subsequently improved organ quality, and thousands of lives saved.
We lent our expertise to the 2018 wildfire season—a crisis of staggering proportions, but one that Associate Professor Michael Gollner thinks can be helped by engineers. Gollner and his students utilize both experiments and combustion and fluid dynamics theory to help solve problems related to fire spread in the wildland and built environments.
Our graduate and undergraduate teams received top honors in the Vertical Flight Society’s 35th Annual Student Design Competition, which challenges students to design a vertical lift aircraft that meets specified requirements. Last year, we also placed first in both the graduate and undergraduate categories; in 2016 and 2015, we won the top award in the graduate category.
Willis H. Young Jr. Professor Derek Paley and his students built a fish-inspired submarine that helps explore both fish sensing and propulsion in the context of autonomous robotics. Their latest autonomous underwater vehicle has sensor nodes replicating the functions of the lateral line. Their goal is to use those sensors in a feedback control loop that emulates fish behavior by allowing the vehicle to detect and respond to hydrodynamic signals.