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Accolades: Atomic Wings, Beautiful Blades, Many Awards

Hines Does Atomic Wings

Hines at the Atomic Wings Lunch
Hines at Atomic Wings

Nuclear Engineering Department Head Wes Hines spoke about jobs in the nuclear energy field at the Atomic Wings Lunch & Learn Series on March 7 in Washington DC.

Hines was one of four panelists invited to speak at the event, which is hosted monthly by the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy to focus on bi-partisan Hill engagement.

Read about Hines’s talk.


McCord Earns ASEE Award

Rachel McCord Ellestad
Rachel McCord

Rachel McCord recently won the Thomas C. Evans Award, which recognizes an engineering education publication from a faculty member in the ASEE Southeast Conference.

McCord, a lecturer and research assistant professor in Engineering Fundamentals, presented her paper “Naturalistic Observations of Metacognition in Engineering (NOME): Using Observational Methods to Study Metacognitive Engagement in Engineering” on March 11, at the 2019 ASEE-SE Conference.

The paper is co-authored with Holly Matusovich, associate professor of engineering education at Virginia Tech.


MSE Students Finished Strong at TMS Conference

Undergraduate and graduate MSE students delivered strong performances at the 2019 TMS Annual Meeting, March 10–14 in San Antonio, Texas.

The Bladesmithing team’s “Volsung” blade received a special citation for beauty. The team made a great video of their project, viewable above.

The team of Sarah Wonner, Rakesh Kamath, Eli Darby, and Connor Stephens participated in the Materials Bowl. They advanced past the elimination and semi-final rounds to reach the finals, where they faced the defending champions from Colorado School of Mines. The Engineering Vols represented the department and college admirably, but ultimately CSM retained their crown.

Graduate student Rui Feng won second place in the conference’s paper competition.


Collaboration Earns Award for Fu and Tan

Jiani Tan
Jiani Tan

The Graduate School recently awarded a Student/Faculty Research award to CEE’s Tickle Professor Joshua Fu and his doctoral student Jiani Tan, providing them $5,000 to further their research goals.

Their project is “Are Emission Abatement Policies Alleviating the Exceedance of Atmospheric Deposition over the Terrestrial Ecosystems?—A Case Study for Conterminous US.”

Read about this award.


Briley Gets Scholarship at MARCON

From left: Kimberly Smith from Henkel Corporation (representing AEE), Donovan Briley, and Klaus Blache, director of the Reliability and Maintainability Center.

Donovan Briley (ME student, RME minor) was awarded a $3,000 scholarship (from the Association of Energy Engineers) to work on a reliability & maintainability project that is related to energy savings. The Reliability and Maintainability Center will coordinate the project.

The award was given at the recent Maintenance and Reliability Conference (MARCON) at the Knoxville Convention Center.

Donovan will present his project results at a later AEE local chapter meeting.

Read about RMC.


EECS Students Sneak in the ‘Backdoor’ for Second Place in Vol Court

Alexander Weber and Makenzie Swicegood

Electrical engineering majors Alex Weber and Makenzie Swicegood earned a second place prize in this spring’s VolCourt pitch competition for Backdoor, a smartphone application to help pet owners track lost pets.

“Backdoor is an idea that I have been working on for a while,” said Swicegood, “and I’m so glad we got to share it with everyone.”

Read about Vol Courts.