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Volume 3 | January 2020
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Happy New Year and New Semester!
Greetings! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday break. We’ve got a new semester ahead of us, the students are back, and the energy around campus is popping! Some of you may already know this, but our wonderful Marketing and Communications Specialist, Mindy Peep, was “poached” from us and promoted to Associate Director of Digital & Content Strategy for UW. Our loss, their gain. We have a search underway for Mindy’s replacement. For the near term, please send any new inputs for the CEAS newsletter to Jeanne Moede ( jmoede@uwyo.edu). Mindy and Jeanne did a “mind meld” about the newsletter, and I’m confident that Jeanne will do a great job keeping the newsletter going.

With that in mind, if you have any feedback, good or bad, about the newsletter, please let me know. My goal is for it to be * your* newsletter, not mine. The purpose is to help us get our communication (up, down, sideways) back up to where it used to be. No secrets, no rumors—that’s the objective. This is the third edition of the newsletter, and I hope it’s achieving its purpose.

Many of you know that I periodically “walk the halls” on each floor of both buildings just to say hi and see if there’s something you want to talk about. That’s why I do it, so please feel free to talk if you want. No pressure, but the offer stands. Back (*way* back!) when I was a very junior 2 nd Lieutenant, one of my first commanders regularly stopped by the unit, just to touch bases. It made a very positive impression on me, so I try to do something similar.

Let’s pull together, work as the team I know we can be, and make this a great Spring semester! Oh, and please send those newsletter items in!
,
Cameron Wright's Signature
Cam Wright
Featured Story
Have an idea for a product/company/startup?
Interested in entrepreneurship?
The College of Engineering and Applied Science is offering drop in office hours to discuss the above and more. People with ideas for product or companies often do not know where to turn to for advice on how to bring that idea to market. CEAS Entrepreneur Office Hours is just the place to begin to learn and more importantly begin to build your entrepreneur network.

The office hours are hosted by Peter Scott in EERB 228, on Tuesdays 10:00 am to 2:00 pm. Peter has more than 20 years of working with company founders and startups ranging from clean tech, to software, manufacturing products and medical device companies. He has consulted with startups, raised capital for startups, started companies, help build successful companies and failed companies.

Please feel free to come to the hours to discuss any topic related to entrepreneurship including:

·         Product feasibility and development
·     Value proposition development
·         Innovation and design thinking
·         Market research
·         Industries & markets
·         Markets & sales strategies
·         Business models
·         Team Development, teamwork, and founders agreements
·         How will your company make money
·         Startup financials and forecasting
·         Startup fundraising, investors and securities
·         Investor pitches
·     Legal issues (only broadly as Peter is not a lawyer)
·     Including patents, copyrights and trademarks

If you cannot make the office hours above please send Peter a note to setup a separate time:
Peter Scott – pscott5@uwyo.edu

New Team Members
Welcome to Jennifer Wittstock the newest Accountant to the College of Engineering and Applied Science. Jennifer joins our team in EERB 461. She came to us from the Foundation. Welcome aboard Jennifer, glad to have you part of our team
Welcome to Chengyi “Charlie” Zhang, joins the Department of Civil & Architectural Engineering as an Assistant Professor in the Construction Management program. Previously he worked at Eastern Kentucky University. He has a Ph.D. degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). 
Welcome to our Team Charlie, glad you are here.
Congratulations to Denny Coon who has stepped in to serve as Interim Department Head of Petroleum Engineering until a new search can be conducted and a new department head appointed.
Family Matters
Congratulations to Cam Wright and Becky Garcia on celebrating their one (1) year anniversary on January 25th.
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Our Sympathy goes to the family of Doug Brown, who was janitor on the second floor of the Engineering building. Doug passed away on Sunday,December 29th. A military funeral will be held at the Newman Center on Thursday, February 6th at 11:00 am.
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Mark Your Calendar
WES
Wednesday - Friday,
February 5 - 7, 2020
Little America Hotel and Convention Center
Cheyenne. WY
Spring Break
Monday - Friday
March 16-20, 2020
Tau Beta Pi Banquet
Friday, April 17
6:00 PM- 9:00 PM.
Gateway Center
RSVP to Jeanne Moede
Featured News
K-14 Outreach Project receives DiscoverE grant
The grant will help fund travel for K-12 ambassadors to visit the Indian reservation schools and facilitate the Engineers Week activity there. The Wyoming Department of Education has recently implemented new engineering standards in K-12 curriculum. In addition, there is now a push toward a more in depth focus on Indian education. This grant will, in a small way, help support both by having our engineering students help educators support the engineering standards in third grade classrooms on the reservations.

Engineer’s week is held in every county in Wyoming. Currently there 75 schools, 184 classrooms, and 3,352 students signed up along with over 70 professional engineers from approximately 40 engineering firms. Sign up is still happening, so these numbers may increase.

The purpose of Engineers Week is to increase awareness of the field of engineering at the K-12 level. With the help of the Professional Board of Engineers and Land Surveyors, Cindy Jones facilitates the pairings of professional engineers with 3 rd grade classrooms throughout Wyoming. Professional engineers and engineering students from the CEAS visit classrooms during the week of February 17-21 and teach the engineering design process by facilitating a hands-on learning experience with students. It benefits the learners in the classrooms by bringing some authenticity to the classroom, and it benefits UW and the CEAS by sparking interest in the field of engineering and raising awareness about the engineering profession. 
Space Allocation
The Space Allocation Committee has been busy working on reassigning space in the Engineering building since the move to the EERB. The ultimate goal of the committer to get everyone the space they need. All space requests can be submitted by filling out and submitting the form found here. http://www.uwyo.edu/ceas/dean/_files/19-ceas-space-request-form-fillable.pdf
Home Laboratory Pilot Study
  (Electrical Engineering Courses)
During the Spring 2020 semester the College of Engineering and Applied Science will be conducting a Pilot Study for the laboratory portion of Electric Circuit Analysis (ES2210), and Microprocessors (EE4390). For the past 9 months lab exercises have been developed utilizing PC-based lab equipment (oscilloscope and wave generator) that can be easily conducted at home. At the beginning of the semester volunteer students from both courses will be sought to participate in the Pilot Study.
 
Across the spectrum of higher education, the delivery of instruction is changing, and the College of Engineering and Applied Science is addressing these changes. Wyoming is a large state with many remote areas which prohibits many students from physically attending courses in Laramie. Working adults also may benefit from the opportunity to remotely take engineering classes that have a laboratory component. 
 
Historically, electrical engineering courses have had lab requirements that have involved physical presence in a laboratory with several pieces of test equipment available for testing circuits. In recent years, computer-based laboratory equipment has become available that can provide the same robustness needed to facilitate learning for an online electrical engineering course.
 
Following the Pilot Study, the intent is to expand the offerings of courses with labs within the College of Engineering and Applied Science. For further information contact James Kretzschmar, or Dr. Steve Barrett in Electrical Engineering. 
Computer Science Professor Receives Award for Machine Learning Software
University of Wyoming Computer Science Assistant Professor Lars Kotthoff received an award at the Open Data Science (ODSC) 2019 West Conference in San Francisco for the mlr machine learning software, for which he co-develops with a team of international data scientists. The ODSC awards recognize projects that have made significant and sustained contributions to data science and helped to build the data science community. Four projects were awarded altogether and included the Tensorflow, DataKind, and Shap projects in addition to mlr.

The mlr project, unlike the other awardees, is entirely run by volunteers and relies on voluntary contributions. It does not have corporate sponsors or patrons, while providing a comprehensive machine learning solution that covers all aspects a data scientist needs in their daily work. The recently-released version 3 is a complete reimplementation that takes into account the lessons learned from 6 years of developing and maintaining mlr, and provides much more flexibility and performance than its predecessor version.

More information on the award can be found at https://medium.com/@ODSC/announcing-the-odsc-west-2019-data-science-award-winners-e08269c7f293. A description of the new mlr3 package was recently published by the Journal of Statistical Software and is available at https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.01903.

23 Research and Practice–Ready Papers Presented at Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in DC. 
"Dr. Mohamed M. Ahmed, P.E., M.ASCE, Renowned National Research Council Fellow with the USDOT Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Associate Professor in the department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Wyoming and his postdocs & students presented 23 research and practice-ready papers, 2 PhD Candidates were nominated for the Best Doctoral Thesis and Presentation Awards (Md Nasim Khan and Anik Das), at the Transportation Research Board 99th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
Congratulations to current and former postdocs; Dr. Sherif Gaweesh, Dr. Ali Ghasemzadeh, Dr. Guangchuan Yang, & Dr. Elhashemi Ali, and graduate students; Md Nasim Khan, Anik Das, Irfan Ahmed, Omar Raddaoui, Thomas Peel, Biraj Subedi, Md Julfiker Hossain, and Eric Adomah for another successful year at the TRB AM.” Great job on being selected to present at such a prestigious international conference in Transportation Engineering. 


Aryana talks Use of Foam to Enhance Oil Recovery Application
Saman Aryana recently gave two talks in Jackson about the use of nanoparticle-stabilized CO2 foam in CO2 capture, utilization and storage.
He discussed the use of the microfluidic platform in his lab at UW to explore the use of foams in CO2 storage in saline aquifers and enhanced oil recovery applications.
Aryana’s research group and other researchers at the University of Wyoming are using visualization techniques to study physical systems relevant to energy.

January Inspirational Phone Background
Click the button below to download and save this inspirational image to your phone!

"We rise by lifting others"