The magazine of the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering
JOINT STRENGTH
New collaboration with
the Applied Physics
Laboratory has led to a
wide range of groundbreaking projects.
WINTER 2009
From the Dean
T
he beginning of the new year has brought the promise of change and opportunity, with a new
administration in Washington and another here on the Hopkins campus. In March, we will
welcome the arrival of Ronald J. Daniels as the university’s 14th president. President Daniels
comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as provost and chief
academic officer.
As Ronald Daniels arrives, President William R. Brody will step down after 12 years at
the helm of Johns Hopkins. For the Whiting School of Engineering, President Brody’s
departure has a special significance: While the university bids farewell to a president,
we are also saying goodbye to an engineer and a faculty colleague. During his tenure
at Johns Hopkins, President Brody has been recognized for his research as well as his
advocacy for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and for his
work in shaping policy and fostering better understanding of the role that research and
development plays in our nation’s competitiveness in the global marketplace. In fact, his election
to the National Academy of Engineering in 2007 was based on both his contributions to digital
radiography and his “leadership in engineering at the interface between academia and industry.”
At the Whiting School, federal funding for basic research has enabled breakthroughs
and discoveries that advance human knowledge while providing our faculty and students with
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING
the freedom and resources they need to do what they do best—innovate and solve challenging
Editorial Staff
problems that are of strategic importance to the school, the nation, and the world.
Sue De Pasquale
Consulting Editor
At the Whiting School’s Institute for NanoBioTechnology and Institute for Computational Medicine, for example, federal research funds are being used to unlock the causes and improve
the treatment of some of today’s most devastating diseases, including cancer and heart disease.
In this way, funding for basic research generates new technologies that, in turn, sustain economic growth and contribute to the betterment of humankind.
Congress’ support of efforts that address problems of global significance, such as
sustainable energy sources and the supply and distribution of safe water, must be redoubled.
I believe that a commitment to increased federal funding for basic research and development
that will enable these efforts is critical—not only to the future of higher education and advancements in science, medicine, and technology, but also to our country’s continued leadership in
the global marketplace.
With new leadership in Washington, economic challenges of grand proportions, and
so many interests competing for federal funding, it is more important than ever that we come
together as a community to continue President Brody’s legacy.
Sincerely,
Nicholas P. Jones
Benjamin T. Rome Dean, Whiting School of Engineering
Abby Lattes
Executive Editor
Royce Faddis
Sr. Graphic Designer, Design and Publications
Rob Spiller
Associate Dean for Development and
Alumni Relations
Kimberly Willis
Assistant Director of Development and
Alumni Relations
Contributing Writers: Maria Blackburn, Geoff
Brown, ’91 (A&S) Mike Field, Christine Grillo, MA
’02 (A&S), Elizabeth Heubeck, Kurt Kleiner, MA ’92
(A&S), Greg Rienzi, MA ’02 (A&S), Angela Roberts,
MA ’05 (A&S), Phil Sneiderman, Mary Spiro,
Mary Talalay
Contributing Photographers: Will Kirk ’99 (A&S),
Jay T. VanRensselaer
Johns Hopkins Engineering magazine is published
twice annually by the Whiting School of Engineering
Office of Marketing and Communications.
We encourage your comments and feedback.
Please contact us at:
Abby Lattes (alattes@jhu.edu)
Director of Marketing and Communications
Whiting School of Engineering
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Phone: (410) 516-6852
IN THIS ISSUE WINTER 2009 VOLUME 7 NO. 1
12
featureS
The Terawatt Challenge 12
From finding new catalysts for fuel cells, to better understanding wind
energy’s wake, Hopkins researchers are stepping up to meet the global
need for energy that’s abundant, cheap … and clean. By Mike Field
The Great Meanderer 20
In his 51 years at Hopkins, where his Friday afternoon field trips
have become the stuff of legend, Reds Wolman ’49 has shaped
the brightest minds in geomorphology—and forever changed
the field. By Maria Blackburn
Joint Strength 24
New collaborations with the Applied Physics Laboratory—involving
everything from space science to prosthetics to human speech
recognition—are leveraging the expertise of both institutions, with
groundbreaking results. By Geoff Brown ’91 (A&S)
20
DEPARTMENTS
from the Dean
R+D The Latest Research and Developments from the Whiting School 2
A campaign worth celebrating … return of the paper ballot ... the
evolution of robotics … tracking nano-metal marauders … and more
36
A+L Alumni and Leadership Making an Impact 29
Priming the pipeline for female engineers … a weekend to remember …
Charles Shivery’s staying power … and more
FINAL EXAM
The classic mousetrap and rubber band–powered
car assignment—with some twists. 36
Cover Illustration by Scott Roberts
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
1
The
latest
research
and
developments
F ROM t h e W h i t i n g S c h o o l — a n d b e y o n d
A Campaign Worth
Celebrating
A Great Statement of
Faith in the Future
Bill Ward ’67, co-chair of the Knowledge for the
Mentorship, leadership, and education—these
World Campaign for the Whiting School of
Engineering, and Benjamin T. Rome Dean Nick
Jones have announced that the Whiting School
has exceeded its campaign goal of $160 million,
raising a record $162 million as of December 31,
2008. The school’s effort was part of Johns
Hopkins’ larger Knowledge for the World
Campaign, which raised $3.75 billion. Over the
course of the campaign, which began in July
2000, more than 7,000 Whiting School alumni,
as well as many friends, foundations, and corporations, participated at all levels.
“On behalf of my fellow chairs, Gil Decker
’58 and Kwok Li ’79, I want to thank each and
every one of you who have participated in the
campaign,” said Ward. “You will be hearing
more about the many accomplishments of the
campaign, and what your support has enabled,
but on behalf of the campaign leadership, we
could not be more grateful.”
The campaign is not only about funds
raised, but what these funds have allowed, and
will allow, the Whiting School to accomplish.
“As the Knowledge for the World
Bill Ward ’67
Campaign comes to a close,” said Jones, “I am
more excited and optimistic than ever about
the future and where the Whiting School is
heading. The support and commitment of
alumni and friends through the campaign give
us the necessary resources to continue to set the
pace and be a leading school of engineering in
the years ahead.”
For more news about the Knowledge for
the World Campaign, visit engineering.jhu.edu/
alumni-friends.
Since the beginning of the campaign, gifts to the Whiting School have provided:
three themes were woven into every aspect of
the Benjamin T. Rome Deanship Dedication,
held on the Homewood campus on October 6,
2008.
More than the formal ceremony during
which Nicholas P. Jones was named the inaugural Benjamin T. Rome Dean, the event was a
celebration of the Whiting School and the
people and relationships that contribute to its
success.
University leaders, friends, faculty, students,
alumni, and staff from the Whiting School and
across Johns Hopkins gathered in the Shriver
Hall Auditorium to mark the occasion (the dedication of only the third endowed deanship at
Johns Hopkins University), and to pay tribute
to the late Benjamin Rome ’25 and A. James
Clark, the individual whose generosity made
this possible.
Last spring, Clark, a leading commercial
builder, committed $10 million to endow the
deanship in honor of his mentor and business
colleague Benjamin T. Rome. The gift provides
“One of the things I’ve learned as
president of Johns Hopkins is that
n 36 scholarships
philanthropy is an act of faith.
n 19 graduate fellowships
When someone agrees to give us
n Nine full and junior professorships
money, it is a way of tangibly stating
n Collaborative research programs in fields including
that faith. The gift giver is saying,
computational medicine, nanobiotechnology, robotics,
alternative energy sources, financial mathematics, and
tissue engineering
n Support for the construction of the Computational Science
and Engineering Building, Charles Commons, and for the
renovation of research laboratories across the school
In addition, the generous gift by Jim Clark to name the
Benjamin T. Rome Deanship will allow the Whiting School to
make the investments necessary to continue the campaign’s
momentum far into the future.
2
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
‘I believe in what you do, and
what you offer to the future.’”
— William R. Brody
WILL KIRK
a permanent stream of unrestricted support
that the school’s deans—present and future—
will be able to invest strategically in faculty, students, and programs.
“It’s an investment in the future of an
entire school and produces truly remarkable
returns for generations to come,” said Provost
Kristina Johnson, adding, “Few gifts make a
more profound or lasting difference at a university than the creation of an endowed deanship.”
Much of the ceremony’s focus was on
Clark, the important role he has played at the
Whiting School of Engineering over the years,
and the knowledge and values instilled in him
by Ben Rome. “Ben Rome was not only my
first boss but a wonderful mentor as well,”
Clark noted. He added, “I owe much of my
success, and the success of our business, to Ben.
He was a great friend and teacher, and I am
honored to be able to memorialize his name at
his alma mater.”
“He [Benjamin Rome] was a man
who allowed actions, rather than
simply words, to communicate what
he believed in.”
— Kristina Johnson
WILL KIRK
Pamela Flaherty, chair, JHU Board of Trustees; Nicholas Jones, Benjamin T. Rome Dean, Whiting School of Engineering; Alice Clark; A. James
Clark, JHU trustee emeritus and benefactor of Clark Hall and the Rome Deanship; William Brody, president, JHU; Ross Corotis, former WSE
faculty; Kristina Johnson, provost, JHU.
“The deanship celebrates this
special bond of mentorship and
friendship and will continue to
symbolize the importance of these
relationships, reminding us on a
daily basis that the wisdom we
possess is not ours to keep but
ours to impart.”
Nick Jones and Jim Clark share a moment
after the deanship dedication ceremony.
— Nick Jones
Jones expressed his gratitude to Clark and
Rome, two individuals who he observed, “lived
their conviction that acting to help others is
quite simply the right thing to do.” Jones also
had the opportunity to pay tribute to his mentor, Ross Corotis, explaining that through his
relationship with Corotis, he also understands,
“how important mentors are and the influence
they can have on future generations.”
The formal ceremony also included a
video paying tribute to Rome (which can be
viewed at www.engineering.jhu.edu/alumnifriends) and was followed by a tented celebration on the quad.
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
3
Alumni Making News
Return of
the Paper Ballot
On the Ground
in Afghanistan
Avi Rubin’s day at the polls last November as an
It’s been almost 20 years since Major Raymond
DeGennaro II ’89 attended Hopkins on a
ROTC scholarship, and he’s just now on his
first active duty assignment with the U.S. military. Several years of educational deferment
and a fire in a military storage room that
housed DeGennaro’s records threatened to
bounce him off the military’s radar altogether.
But he’s quickly making up for lost time.
Stationed in Afghanistan less than three
months, the former biomedical engineering
major already has developed a deeper appreciation of the Afghans’ historical struggle, their
4
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
“For hundreds of years, the
only time the Afghan people
have been united is when
they’re being invaded. The
concept of national identity
is foreign to many Afghans.”
— Major Raymond DeGennaro II
Photo courtesy of Major Raymond DeGennaro II
election judge proceeded as he expected: long
lines at some precincts exacerbated by electronic
voting systems. The electoral margins were
large enough that the results of the presidential
election were not called into question. That is
fortunate, Rubin says: For states with e-voting
systems, a recount would have been impossible.
A professor of computer science at the
Whiting School and director of the National
Science Foundation (NSF-funded ACCURATE,
A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable,
and Transparent Elections), Rubin is extremely
skeptical about the touch-screen systems used in
Maryland and other states across the country.
Rubin favors scrapping the systems entirely
and returning to paper ballots. His reasons? As
he’s explained on 60 Minutes, National Public
Radio, CBS, CSPAN, and even the Daily Show’s
Moment of Zen, the current direct recording
electronic (DRE) machines are coded sloppily
and regulated lackadaisically. In short, the
machines are as buggy as any personal computer.
Furthermore, with DREs, voters can’t confirm
that their votes are recorded correctly, let alone
be certain that their votes are tallied correctly. In
the case of a close race, he warns, the machines
imperil everything: They leave no audit trail.
Twice he’s testified before the U.S. Election
Assistance Commission, and research done by
Rubin and others has had an impact: In
November’s election, Florida, California, New
Jersey, and Ohio all used paper ballots, reverting
from e-voting systems. Virginia, Maryland, and
other states will follow suit in coming elections.
In fact, Rubin helped to draft a Maryland
law that would compel the state to replace the
existing electronic voting machines with paper
ballots and optical scanners. He supports a system that would have voters write (or bubble in)
their choices on paper and then feed the ballot
through an op-scan, which would record, tally,
and give a receipt. Op-scans, he says, at least
allow voters to confirm that their votes have
been recorded correctly. The law has passed
both houses and has been signed by Maryland
Governor Martin O’Malley; the switch is
scheduled for the 2012 presidential election.
—Christine Grillo
some just need the tools, and some need their
energy directed in the right direction,” he says.
What the Afghans don’t need, insists
DeGennaro, is advice on how to fight. “They’ve
been fighting since Alexander the Great invaded.
What they need help with is running a modern,
standing, national military and a strong,
noncorrupt government,” he says.
To encourage national unity among Afghan
citizens, DeGennaro and his U.S. military colleagues must present themselves as trustworthy,
he says. That means not wearing the 40 pounds
of protective gear they might otherwise don
when working with Afghans at Camp
Shaheen—even if it increases their immediate
risk of danger.
With more than a third of his mission
Major Raymond DeGennaro II with his Afghan counterpart, Colonel Mohammed Kobundi, Corps
Surgeon General.
gains toward a national identity, and their long
road ahead to independence.
“For hundreds of years, the only time
the Afghan people have been united is when
they’re being invaded. The concept of national
identity is foreign to many Afghans,” says
DeGennaro, who wears two hats in Afghanistan:
mentor to the Corps Surgeon General’s Office
for the 209th Corps of the Afghan National
Army and medical operations officer supporting the embedded training teams in the north
region of Afghanistan.
DeGennaro likens his mentoring role to
being a teaching assistant, a position he
assumed while working toward his PhD in
binaural noise reduction through cochlear
efferent feedback at the University of Southern
California. “Some need remedial instruction,
behind him, DeGennaro is anticipating relationship building of another sort—back in
Illinois with his wife and two young daughters.
He plans to return home late this spring to his
civilian job as a product developer for a database consulting firm. He looks forward to
working from his home office, he says. “I want
to keep life simpler, to do more things with my
family.”
But he doesn’t discount the possibility
of someday returning to Afghanistan. “The
average counterinsurgency takes 14 years,”
he says. “We’ve only been doing this one the
right way for about two.”
(Major DeGennaro welcomes classmates to
contact him at raymond.degennaro@us.army.mil.) ­
—Elizabeth Heubeck
Corporate Connections
For Whiting School students and engineers from
Synthes, collaboration is a no-brainer. What
makes it so effortless, says Synthes business
manager Maria Maroulis ’96, MS ’01, is that
their cultures are so aligned.
The global medical device company
designs plates, screws, and other instruments
and implants for every bone in the human body,
and its engineers work in one of three divisions:
trauma, spine, or craniomaxillofacial (CMF).
Having forged a connection to the Whiting School
through alumni such as Maroulis, a member of
the Whiting School’s National Advisory Council,
and Dennis Chien ’84, group manager of Synthes’
spine division, Synthes currently sponsors a senior
design project in the mechanical engineering
department, and last summer it recruited exclusively from the school’s biomedical engineering
program for a product developer position.
The design project, currently under way,
is overseen by four of the company’s senior
mechanical engineers in the CMF division.
Over the course of the academic year, students
meet every other week with their mentors, usually via webcast, to develop a working prototype
of an improved sternum stabilizer that the company may be able to commercialize. Charged
with finding a better way to stabilize the sternum after open-heart surgery, the students get
real-world experience in medical device design
and Synthes is able to invest in young talent
and benefit from the ideas and designs of the
school’s “superbright students.”
In the trauma division, product developer
and engineering associate Michelle Zwernemann
’08 has found her position to be a “fantastic
opportunity.” Currently working with a product
design team, Zwernemann is part of Synthes’
rotation program, which targets high-potential
graduating engineering students and gives
them four six-month rotational assignments.
The company, headquartered in West Chester,
Pennsylvania, will provide future rotations for
Zwernemann in manufacturing and in the
innovation group, as well as a possible term
in its Switzerland office.
“Whiting School students are patient-driven
and clinically focused, and they want to work
with surgeons and doctors,” says Maroulis,
who is a business unit manager within the CMF
division. And Synthes’ conjoining of technology
to medical applications appeals to students
who want to work in health care and are drawn
to bench-to-bedside projects. The marriage of
bench science to the real world of medicine, she
says, resonates very clearly at Hopkins, which
draws engineering students who want to work
with clinicians. “This is a self-selective process.”
So far, the Whiting-Synthes symbiosis has
worked out well for everyone. The mechanical
engineering seniors are able to work on a project
that advances their career goals, and the
company can invest in talent for the future.
“We make innovative products that are used in
surgeries,” says Maroulis. “It’s a Hopkins engineer’s dream.”
­—CG
courtesy of Synthes
Meeting of the Minds
Michelle Zwernemann ’08 is the newest graduate of the Whiting School to join Synthes, a
global medical device company, where Maria Maroulis ’96, MS ’01, is business manager.
Beyond Voxels
Making a computer model of a porous material
such as sand used to be simple. All you had to
do was model a bunch of average sized sand
grains separated by average sized pores, and run
your simulation.
Unfortunately, the simple method was a little too simple. It turns out that sand is a lot
more complex than that, and if you’re studying
how pollutants leach through water-soaked
sand, for instance, the models just weren’t good
enough. The same goes for researchers trying to
understand the behavior of snow, sea ice, or any
other multiphase material.
Now Markus Hilpert, associate professor in
the Department of Geography and Environmental
Engineering, and Roland Glantz, a postdoctoral
fellow in the department, have developed a new
technique that allows them to create much more
sophisticated and accurate models of materials,
which could lead to better predictions about
pollution transport or climate change.
“Basically, there have been a lot of advances
in three-dimensional imaging,” Hilpert says.
“The resolution of these imaging devices is get-
ting better and better.” New devices such as the
X-ray synchrotron at Argonne National Labs,
for instance, can produce 3-D images down to
a resolution of a micrometer or two.
But the techniques to analyze and model
these images are still relatively crude, Hilpert
says—“like we’re living in the Stone Age.” The
common technique is to convert the image into
“voxels,” which are the 3-D equivalent of pixels.
But voxelizing an image results in a “chunky”
representation that throws away a lot of important information.
The technique developed by Hilpert and
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
5
Glantz instead represents the image as both a
connected network of pores, and a connected
network of pore bodies. An image of sand, for
instance, would consist of a smooth image of the
connected grains of sand, and a smooth image of
the connected pores between the grains.
To generate these images, Hilpert and
Glantz use mathematical techniques that first
transform the images into millions of much
smaller 3-D shapes, and then fuse the shapes
into connected networks.
These images are still simplified compared
to the complexity of the originals. But they
retain enough information to allow them to
model the behavior of the material much more
accurately, Hilpert says.
The technique could be valuable to studies
of pollutant transport, oil recovery, water
evaporation from soils, snow melting, and sea
ice formation, he says. ­
—Kurt Kleiner
Isosurface from an XRCT image of snow.
Above right, Delaunay cells are fused
into “grains.” Right, Making the solid phase
translucent reveals the dual network.
The researchers received funding from the National Science
Foundation Collaboration in the Mathematical Geosciences
program, and have made their software freely available.
Civil Engineering
Meets NanoBio
WILL KIRK
The same methods that engineers use to design
better bridges or more efficient airplane wings
are now being brought to bear on much smaller
structures—the tiny structural elements inside
our own cells.
Lindsey Smith is a PhD candidate in the
Department of Civil Engineering studying
structural topology optimization, a method of
designing structures from the ground up for
maximum efficiency. Her goal: to use such
techniques to gain insight into cellular structures
like cytoskeletons and actin filaments. Her
work could eventually result in advances such
as better implantable medical devices, or artificial organs that mimic the structure and function of real organs.
The marriage of civil engineering and
nanobiotechnology is an unusual one, admits
Smith, who is working as part of a multidisciplinary team at the Institute for NanoBioTechnology, and is funded by a National Science
Foundation Integrative Graduate Education
and Research Traineeship grant. But as nanobiotechnology advances, she says, it makes
sense to bring insights from civil engineering
into the design of medical devices.
Normally, a scientist using structural topology optimization would start with a set of
parameters, and then figure out how to create
a design that optimized a particular property.
For instance, a researcher might aim to design
Lindsey Smith is taking lessons
from nature in her work with
structural topology optimization.
6
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
an airplane wing that is as light as possible
while remaining strong enough to fly.
But in her work, Smith is approaching the
problem from the other way around. She wants
to analyze how evolution has designed the
structural elements in the cell.
“Evolution has optimized the cell,” she says.
“It’s optimized for something, with a property
or multiple properties in mind. Maybe in
evolution, the most important thing is for the
cytoskeleton to be rigid and also permeable.
That should come through in the algorithms,”
she explains.
Smith has an undergraduate degree in engineering mechanics from Columbia University.
Her advisers are civil engineering Assistant
Professor Jamie Guest and Professor Denis
Wirtz of the Department of Chemical and
Biomolecular Engineering. But she will eventually need a co-adviser in biology, materials
science, or chemistry.
At the moment she is taking her core classes in civil and mechanical engineering, as well
as cell biology courses, bringing herself up to
speed on the inner workings of the cell. Soon
she’ll begin working with mathematical models
of the cell structures she’s interested in, as she
formulates a thesis topic.
—KK
WILL KIRK
From the Archives
The Evolution
of Robotics
Underneath a lab bench in the Computational
Science and Engineering building sits a snakelike
five-foot-long robotic arm, a collection of
triangular metal shapes, pneumatic cylinders,
and aluminum tubes linked together in an
integrated truss structure. It has no name, but
“Adam” would be apt.
Adam is a binary manipulator. Basically, he
picks things up. But that is not what makes him
special. Adam holds the honor of being the first
robot built at Johns Hopkins.
The history of robotics at the Whiting
School traces back to the early 1990s and
Adam’s creator, Gregory S. Chirikjian ’88, BA/
BS/MSE, a professor of mechanical engineering.
Before Chirikjian’s arrival, Hopkins dabbled in
robotics—as far back as the 1960s—but lagged
behind its peers in the field. Bill Sharpe, PhD
’66, set out to change all that.
Sharpe, the Alonzo G. Decker Professor of
Mechanical Engineering, joined Johns Hopkins
in January 1983 to jump-start the reformed
Department of Mechanical Engineering. For the
department’s first open house, Sharpe procured
a small Rhino robot arm. “All it did was pick up
a business card and put it another pile: Just do
this over and over,” Sharpe recalls.
It was enough to impress a 17-year-old
Chirikjian. Drawn by the promise of robotics,
Chirikjian enrolled at Johns Hopkins to pursue
degrees in engineering mechanics, mathematics, and mechanical engineering. He went on
to earn a doctorate in applied mechanics from
the California Institute of Technology, where
he studied under Joel Burdick, a pupil of such
heavyweights as Bernard Roth and Ferdinand
Freudenstein, the “father of modern kinematics.”
Greg Chirikjian is shown here with the first
robot built at Johns Hopkins (floor) and two
more recent self-replicating robots.
In 1992, after his graduation, Chirikjian
called Sharpe to inquire about job opportunities.
Talk about perfect timing. “At that time, other
robotics research labs were well established
at places like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon,”
Sharpe says. “We felt we needed to broaden our
activities and move into this area. Hiring Greg
was the official start of robotics here.”
At Hopkins, Chirikjian has pioneered the
theory of “hyper-redundant” (snakelike) robot
motion planning and self-replicating robotic systems. He also designs and builds hyper-redundant robotic manipulator arms, of which Adam
was the first. Snakelike motion is particularly
useful for inspection in highly constrained environments (think: outer space), and for using the
arm to wrap around objects, he says.
“When I started, most robot arms were
heavy and expensive,” Chirikjian explains. “My
work with binary robots is focused on making
inexpensive, lightweight, and reliable robot arms
that can have many applications, such as to
assist people with disabilities.”
In 1993, the Whiting School hired Louis
Whitcomb, an expert in applied mechanical
robotic systems. Today, a professor of mechanical engineering, Whitcomb and his Dynamical
Systems and Control Laboratory are leading
the way in the development of machines that
interact dynamically with their environments,
in particular underwater robots for deep ocean
exploration.
Sharpe says the final piece of the robotics
puzzle fell into place in 1995, with the hire of
Russell Taylor, a robotic systems expert who established the Computer-Assisted Surgery Group at
IBM Research. Taylor has spearheaded the Whiting
School’s efforts in the field of medical robotics,
creating computer-assisted microsurgical assistants that allow for less invasive procedures and
ones previously thought impossible.
The combined contributions of Chirikjian,
Whitcomb, and Taylor have allowed the Whiting
School to become, in just 15 years, a leader in
robotics research, says Sharpe.
“The strategy all along has been to look
for the ‘best athlete,’ the strongest candidate
regardless of the area,” Sharpe said. “It so
happens we’ve been able to lure here some of
the leading robotics researchers in the world.”
Another “star athlete” is Greg Hager, who
joined Johns Hopkins in 1999. Hager, a professor of computer science and director of the
Computational Interaction and Robotics Lab,
specializes in computer vision with applications
in medical devices and human-machine systems.
What does the future hold for robotics at
Hopkins? Sharpe sees the development of many
more applications in medical robotics. He said
that rising faculty stars such as Allison Okamura
and Noah Cowen are designing systems to amplify
and assist human physical capabilities.
—Greg Rienzi
EP—A New Name—and More
The Whiting School’s Engineering and Applied
Science Programs for Professionals (EPP) has
a new name, “Engineering for Professionals”
(EP), two new academic programs launching in
the fall of 2009, and three new program chairs.
The name change comes as the result of
an extensive marketing research study that was
conducted with the program’s many existing
and prospective audiences.
The new Master of Science in Information
Assurance program, chaired by Ralph Semmel,
will provide working professionals with the technical foundation and skills they need to protect
national security information, institutional operating systems, and other high-value assets. The
Advanced Certificate for Post-Master’s Study in
Climate Change, Energy, and Environmental
Sustainability, chaired by Hedi Alavi, will provide the opportunity to study climate change—
its causes, impact, and possible solutions—as
well as numerous related issues.
With the retirement of Kenneth A. Potocki,
former chair of EP’s Systems Engineering and
Technical Management, the program has been
split into two areas of concentration: Systems
Engineering, chaired by Ronald Luman, and
Technical Management, chaired by Joseph
Suter. Additionally, Dilip Asthigiri was
appointed chair of Chemical and Biomedical
Engineering.
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
7
Designing Minds
A Transforming Safety
Solution
For electrical utility workers, detaching a trans-
WILL KIRK
former’s power connector can be dangerous
business. The operation sometimes triggers an
explosive arc, traveling as far as eight feet from
the transformer, which can cause serious skin
burns and eye injuries.
Now a team of mechanical engineering students has invented a new tool aimed at allowing
utility workers to do their job at a safe distance.
Their prototype was built last academic year at
the request of Baltimore Gas & Electric Company
(BGE). It consists of a lightweight aluminum
frame that uses rope and a lever-and-pulley
system to enable the worker to detach the transformer’s power connector (known as the load
break elbow) from 10 to 12 feet away.
“We’re very pleased with the outcome of
this project,” says Bruce R. Hirsch, a BGE representative who worked with the students. “What
they’ve given us is a good start. It’s a very simple
design, and they’ve suggested some further
refinements.”
The student team initially considered complex designs that would employ hydraulic or
pneumatic power. “We finally decided on an allmechanical design that would require no batteries or motors,” explains Kyle Azevedo ’08, who
worked with classmates Julie Blumreiter ’08 and
Doo Hyun Lee ’08. “One of our primary goals for
this tool was simplicity.”
The finished prototype features three guide
rails that surround the transformer’s elbow
connection. A sliding component of the device
houses a clamp that grabs onto the connector.
The utility technician can then use the lever and
pulley system to detach the power line from a
safe distance. Compared to the current “hot
stick” procedure, their device requires the worker
to exert only a third as much force, the students
say. The tool also should be simple to transport
and utilize during repair assignments, commonly
made in suburban neighborhoods. “We wanted
to make this device as small and as light as possible so that one worker could easily operate it
alone,” says Lee.
The utility worker’s device was one of nine
projects completed last year by undergraduates
in the two-semester Engineering Design Project
course, taught by Mike Johnson and other faculty members in the Department of Mechanical
Engineering. The team used about $9,600 to
make the prototype but estimated that it could
be mass-produced for far less. They’ve now
turned the prototype over to BGE, which will conduct further tests and consider refinements in
the device before deciding whether to deploy it in
the field.
—Phil Sneiderman
The 2008 mechanical engineering senior design team of Doo Hyun Lee, Julie Blumreiter, and
Kyle Azevedo demonstrates the prototype for a device used to disconnect power lines that they
created for Baltimore Gas & Electric.
8
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
Tracking Nano-Metal
Marauders
Our bodies are constantly exposed to tiny
invaders. Typically, the body’s natural first line
of defense—the mucus barrier—traps and
flushes these assailants out. But the mucus barrier may not always intercept everything it
encounters, especially if that something is a
nanoparticle the size of a handful of atoms.
Because of their unusual properties, many
nanomaterials have become indispensable in
consumer and industrial applications and medical products and devices. For example, nanoscale zinc oxide particles improve the coating
ability of paint and the effectiveness of suntan
lotion. But, if inhaled, metal oxides may trigger
inflammation. Three Johns Hopkins researchers
affiliated with the Institute for NanoBioTechnology—one from the Whiting School of
Engineering and two from the Bloomberg
School of Public Health—are studying the
possibility that nanometal oxides slip through
the mucus barrier into the lungs. And, if that
happens, they want to know what kind of
havoc these nanoparticles might wreak.
“What we learn from these particles may
help us begin to understand the effect of other
nanoparticles to which we all are exposed,” says
principal investigator Shyam Biswal, associate
professor in the Division of Toxicology at the
Bloomberg School. He is joined by
Engineering’s Justin Hanes, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and Public
Health’s Patrick Breysse, professor and director
of the Division of Environmental Health
Engineering. The team brings together expertise
in exposure assessment, aerosol science, nanotechnology, the mucus barrier, and pulmonary
molecular toxicology.
The researchers are seeking to answer
several questions, notes Hanes. “Where these
materials are being manufactured, are people
exposed to nanometal oxides via inhalation? If
so, would one expect one in 10 particles to get
through the protective mucus barrier that lines
the lung airways, or is it more like one in one
trillion? What levels are acceptably low so as
not to cause damage?”
Hanes will trace the travel of metal oxide
nanoparticles in samples of fresh, undiluted
human mucus. Using fluorescence microscopy
Alumni Making News
On the Slopes
An undergraduate assignment with a renowned
How many nanometal oxides, tiny
particles now commonly found
in products ranging from paint
and cosmetics to medical devices,
make their way into the lungs?
At what point may they pose a
health risk? INBT researchers
have received NSF funding to
find some answers.
and high-speed video, he will track and videotape particle motion, and measure and calculate
diffusion using mean-square displacement
equations. “This will give us an overall picture
of how well specific particles can penetrate the
mucus barrier over time,” he explains.
Biswal will examine how much inhaled
nanometal oxide is required to trigger an
inflammatory response in lung cells. And
Breysse will analyze the moisture collected in
the exhaled breath of people working in the
closed environment of a nanometal oxide
manufacturing facility. This data will establish
parameters from which the team hopes to
extrapolate how much the average person might
be exposed to such nanoparticles in an open
environment—such as walking down the street.
“Exposure to nanomaterials in occupational
settings is measurable, but exposure in nonoccupational settings is hard to characterize,”
says Biswal, who holds a joint appointment in
the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering. “These studies will help us understand the health effects of nanoparticles that we
might encounter every day.”
—Mary Spiro
Hopkins Medicine orthopedist persuaded
Andrew Chen, BS ’93, MA ’94, MD ’97 that
orthopedics was the medical field he wished to
pursue—and that decision will put him on the
slopes at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver
next year as the head physician for the U.S. Ski
Jump Team.
Chen was enrolled as a dual major (in
materials science and engineering at the
Whiting School of Engineering and biology at
the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences) when
he got the opportunity to work on a graduatelevel project with Johns Hopkins physician
David Hungerford, an internationally
acclaimed orthopedist. “I knew I wanted to go
into medicine, but I didn’t know what field,”
Chen says. “This sort of opened my eyes.”
Hungerford and Chen developed a laserbased system to evaluate the surface roughness
of a prosthetic femoral head—a sophisticated
quality-control procedure, useful for hip
replacement surgery, that later was purchased
by a major implant manufacturer.
“It was an interesting segue in my life,” says
Chen, now 37. “Engineering is such a different
beast from medicine. It’s so exact. You deal with
equations and numbers that have to come out
right, whereas medicine is so much of an art.”
After entering Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine, Chen took additional graduate-level
courses in engineering at the Whiting School
and completed his master’s thesis during his
first year in medical school. He then chose to
specialize in orthopedics.
A passion for athletics propelled him into
the field of sports medicine. Chen says he finds
it enormously satisfying to aid athletes in their
recovery from injury. “When they go on to win
medals or championships, it’s an extremely
gratifying thing to see that happen, knowing
that you had a direct hand in it.”
During a fellowship in sports medicine and
shoulder surgery at the well-known SteadmanHawkins Clinic in Vail, Colorado, Chen treated many skiers (including controversial
Olympic ski jumper Bode Miller) and members
of the Broncos football team and Colorado
Rockies baseball team. In 2004, he and his
wife, Colleen, moved to New Hampshire.
“I wanted to live in the mountains. I wanted
to treat ski injuries. That’s become sort of my
thing,” he explains.
Chen has published numerous articles in
medical journals and presented research at
more than 50 forums here and overseas. As one
of the physicians for the U.S. Ski Team, he was
invited by Johnson & Johnson to travel to
China before last year’s Beijing Olympics to
help train physicians there in the latest sports
medicine surgical techniques.
And in October, he earned the head physician appointment with the U.S. Ski Jumping
Team. Although there is glamour in being
up-close-and-personal with America’s ski
jumpers at the next Winter Games, Chen takes
his new role seriously, noting that the forces
involved with the sport can cause serious
injuries. “Oftentimes we have to
approach injuries
in ski jumping as
trauma cases,” he
says. “That requires
comprehensive
management of the
entire athlete.”
—Neil A. Grauer
Andy Chen (right)
with three-time
Olympian Billy
Demong.
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
9
Crystal Ball
What natural disasters
loom… and how can
we mitigate them?
A few weeks before election day, coastal
engineering expert Robert A. Dalrymple, the
Willard and Lillian Hackerman Professor of
Civil Engineering, was named to Wired magazine’s “2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next
President Should Listen To.” Dalrymple, Wired
advised, could educate the president on what
our country can do to prepare for extreme
weather in the coming years.
“There are disasters coming. Sea levels are
rising, shorelines are eroding, and we keep
moving to the coast. Half of our population
now lives within 50 miles of the coast and
this trend is growing worldwide.
“Our perception of risk has been woefully inadequate. New Orleans’ hurricane protection system was designed for a 100-year flood,
yet six of the 10 most destructive storms to hit
the U.S. since 1900 have taken place in the past
four years. As the Gulf of Mexico gets hotter, the
potential for hurricanes increases. There’s a 26
percent likelihood that another 100-year storm
will hit New Orleans in the next 30 years.
“If we’re going to avert disaster, we need
better warning systems, ways to escape, and
people need to understand the risks we’re facing. My research in wave modeling is relevant to
the development of tsunami warning systems.
These systems are being implemented around
the world, but they’ll need to be maintained.
“In the case of hurricanes, we’re pretty
good at forecasting storms, but we’re not as
good at knowing precisely where and how big
they’ll be when they make landfall. If we can’t
do that, we’ll repeat what happened during
Hurricane Ike [in September 2008]. During Ike,
people in Galveston didn’t pay attention to the
evacuation order because they’d evacuated for
Hurricane Rita [in 2007] and that turned out to
be a false alarm. So people didn’t listen and that
accounts for many of the fatalities.
“When a disaster does hit, people need a
way to escape, which means we need to improve
evacuation planning. During Hurricane Rita, a
car ride that usually takes 90 minutes took 40
hours. People ran out of gas, their cars broke
down, and it was a terribly frustrating experience.
Now, most major cities are taking this seriously
and I think evacuation planning is improving.
“There are trillions of dollars invested in
insured and uninsured infrastructure along
our coastline and all of it is at risk. Tightening
building standards there, making structures
more resilient, is a fix that could be done relatively quickly and could have a big impact. After
Hurricane Andrew, Florida building codes were
changed and in subsequent storms, a much
greater number of buildings—those constructed
under the new codes—survived.
“Bigger changes will require state and
federal government support. States could stop
insuring properties that are no longer covered
by private insurers; FEMA could enact stricter
coastal zoning. The Army Corps of Engineers is
responsible for most of the coastal engineering
in the United States. I think they understand the
risks we face, but the way Congress funds them
prohibits them from doing what’s needed. They
By the Numbers: In and Out
IN—The Whiting School’s Class of 2012
• Applications received: 4,328
• Students admitted: 1,597
• Students enrolled: 435
• Percent women: 32
• Percent women in freshman class of 1998: 24
• Number of freshmen who are first generation
in their families to attend college: 37
• Whiting School freshmen playing on JHU
varsity teams: 35
• Number of the world’s Seven Summits climbed
by freshman mechanical engineering major
Kevin “Kipp” Slachman: 3
10
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
OUT—Whiting School Class of 2007 (six months
after graduation)
Percent enrolled in graduate school: 52
Percent pursuing medical degrees: 20
Percent pursuing PhDs: 36
Percent working full time: 43
Percent working in engineering and information
technology: 46
Percent working in investment banking: 11
Percent working in biotech, pharmaceuticals and
health care: 9
Number of graduates employed by the U.S.
Patent & Trademark Office: 7
receive funding in installments, which means
that from year to year, they don’t know what
they’ll receive and can’t initiate systems that
require ongoing support.
“We haven’t done very well at learning from
our mistakes. Until we’re able to look at, and
act on, what we learned during recent disasters,
things aren’t going to change.”
—interview by Abby Lattes
An Innovative Master’s in
Bioengineering Design
The Department of Biomedical Engineering’s
Center for Bioengineering Innovation and
Design is home to a new graduate program—
the Master of Science in Bioengineering
Innovation and Design. Launching this June,
the program is aimed at educating a new generation of leaders who are capable of moving
medical device products from the bench, to the
bedside, to the marketplace.
The master’s program is offered collaboratively by the Whiting School of Engineering
and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. It provides students who have undergraduate degrees
in traditional engineering disciplines and some
industry experience with the course work,
design experience, and knowledge of commercialization they’ll need to pursue careers in the
biomedical device design industry.
In addition to core classes in engineering,
physiology, and entrepreneurship, participants
will take part in year-long design team projects
that address real medical problems. Over the
summer, student teams will rotate through the
clinical and surgical areas of hospitals including
Johns Hopkins Hospital, working with practicing
physicians to identify challenges that may be
resolved via the creation of novel medical devices.
After completing needs assessments and
developing design proposals, students will produce and test device prototypes and develop
commercialization plans. Their training will
include periodic assessments by clinical and
engineering faculty and consultations with the
Food and Drug Administration, patent attorneys, and venture capitalists, giving them the
chance to learn about intellectual property
issues, regulatory affairs, and business skills
from experts.
To learn more about this program please
visit http://cbid.bme.jhu.edu.
Strength in Numbers
like a Jeopardy contestant. He offered only
questions.
Bilgel, a sophomore biomedical engineering
major, was one of five group leaders in a peerlearning program piloted in Calculus II that
aims to boost academic performance and foster
better student interaction.
The 40 freshmen who signed up for the
program experienced the same lectures, exams,
and homework assignments as their counterparts in the standard Calculus II class. But in
addition they met once each week in small
groups for a two-hour session led by a trained
peer leader.
“We had them think about different aspects
of the problem they were working on,” Bilgel
says. “We asked them questions all the time.
‘What if these conditions were different? What
if I changed this number, what would happen?’
There was a lot of brainstorming going on.” To
prepare for the course, Bilgel and the other peer
leaders underwent 15 hours of peer training last
summer under Regina Frey, a chemistry professor and director of the Teaching Center at
Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Ed Scheinerman, the Whiting School’s vice
dean for education, championed the creation
of the program. “My contention is that for
success in science and engineering, one’s math
skills are paramount,” says the professor of
applied mathematics and statistics. “So many
things build from Calculus II. We thought this
was an effective way to start boosting student
achievement across the board.”
The key, he says, is the roles the peer leaders
play.
“They are the glue that holds the sessions
together. They help the students articulate
ideas to each other. This is quite different from
tutoring, where one can join in at any point.
We want them from day one to take good
students and make them better.”
Bilgel, for one, knew how to keep things
lively. He brought chocolate for instant energy
and occasionally let the conversation wander off
topic to sports or the presidential election. He
also played a game of keywords. If someone
said the name of the course professor, for example, everyone had to switch chairs. “It shakes
things up a bit,” he says.
will kirk
Each Tuesday evening last fall, Murat Bilgel felt
Calculus II students in a new peer-learning program met weekly for a study/discussion session
aimed at boosting academic performance. Peer leader Murat Bilgel offered candy as an energy
boost during the sessions he led.
Richard Brown, director of undergraduate
studies for the Krieger School of Arts and
Sciences’ Department of Mathematics and an
early advocate of the program, says he jumped
on board because he saw the merit of academic
interaction outside the classroom.
“The students benefit from each other’s
strengths,” says Brown. “What comes easy for
one person might be a challenge for another.”
The Center for Educational Resources
helped secure funding for the first year of the
project and will evaluate its effectiveness.
Scheinerman hopes the concept can be
expanded to include other problem-solving
courses at Hopkins. “This program provides
two hours of very efficient studying,” he says.
“They do more in those two hours than they
can do by themselves all week, almost. That is
what I call an efficiency of time.”
Time well spent, apparently. On the first
Calculus II exam, students in the peer-learning
group received grades 10 points higher on average than their non-peer-learning counterparts. —GR
Kudos
David Gracias, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has received a
2008 National Institutes of
Health (NIH) New Innovator
Award. The award was given in
recognition of Gracias’ pioneering work in
micro- to nanoscale tools and devices for medicine. Launched in 2007, the New Innovator
Awards are a key component of the NIH
Roadmap for Medical Research and are intended to stimulate and sustain innovation. This
year, only 31 individuals nationwide were
selected for the honor.
Promotions
Justin Hanes, Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering, has been promoted to professor.
Markus Hilpert, Geography and
Environmental Engineering has been promoted
to associate professor.
Sanjeev Khudanpur, Electrical and Computer
Engineering, has been promoted to associate
professor.
Kostas Konstantopoulos, Chemical and
Biomolecular Engineering, has been promoted
to professor and, on January 1, 2009, became
the department chair.
Sean Sun, Mechanical Engineering, has been
promoted to associate professor.
Randal Burns, Computer Science, has been
promoted to associate professor.
Xiaoqin “Jeff ” Wang, Mechanical
Engineering, has been promoted to associate
professor.
Ralph Etienne-Cummings, Electrical and
Computer Engineering, has been promoted to
professor.
Kevin Yarema, Biomedical Engineering, has
been promoted to associate professor.
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING winter 2009
11
The Terawatt
By Mike Field
I
n the final years before his untimely death from cancer at the age
of 62, Nobel Prize–winning chemist Richard Smalley had a set
speech that he gave over and over, to any audience he could find.
Using PowerPoint, chalkboard, whiteboard, or whatever was at hand,
he would list the 10 top problems facing the world today: energy,
water, food, environment, poverty, terrorism and war, disease,
education, democracy, and population. This list of challenges, he
would remark, seems insurmountable.
But to Smalley, there was one key that could unlock the entire
puzzle. In the 21st century what the world needs most, he said, is
abundant, low-cost, clean energy—a resource that can raise living
standards, desalinate seawater (for crop irrigation and human health),
increase food production, restore the environment, and promote
global peace, health, and cooperation.
istockphoto (ALL)
Challenge
By the time of Smalley’s
death in 2005, the world
was consuming the energy
equivalent of 220 million
barrels of oil per day, or in
electricity terms, about 14.5 million megawatts—or 14.5 terawatts—of electricity. Looking
into the future, Smalley estimated that it would
probably take a staggering 60 terawatts to provide a comfortable first-world lifestyle to all the
planet’s 10 billion or so inhabitants expected to
be around in the year 2050. That is a tall order
by any measure, and Smalley was hardly alone in
recognizing the scope of the problem.
“I’d been scratching my head for a couple of
years about what we can do on energy,” recalls
Whiting School Dean Nick Jones. Part of his job,
after all, is to look forward to the next great engineering challenge and try to position the school
with the necessary resources in place to address it.
But Hopkins academic departments tend to be
small by design, narrowly focused, and nimble.
Energy is such a large problem that Jones found
himself wondering if the Hopkins approach
could contribute in any meaningful way.
Not only must the world effectively quadruple its energy production, but it also must
confront an enormous engineering stumbling
block: These new energy sources cannot add to
atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is generally
accepted to be a cause of global warming. In the
years before his death, Smalley often challenged
his audiences to “imagine the world where that
problem was solved, just totally solved.” He recognized that learning to produce abundant,
cheap, clean energy is the great science and
engineering opportunity of the 21st century.
Smalley dubbed this global problem “The
Terawatt Challenge.”
For Jones, the enormity of this challenge
arrayed against the comparatively small scale of
Whiting School resources provoked a Davidand-Goliath kind of conundrum: If you can
only throw a few small stones at the problem,
they had better be very, very carefully chosen
stones. “Because of our size we can’t be all things
to all people,” he says, “but it was unclear what
approach we should take and where we would
find compatible expertise.” Then, last May,
Jones was asked to chair a panel of Hopkins
experts making a presentation in Denver on
global sustainability as part of the Knowledge
for the World tour. The group included Liberty
Media chairman and Whiting School alumnus
John C. Malone (MS ’64, PhD ’69), who serves
on the board of directors of the Colorado chapter of The Nature Conservancy, and faculty
members from the schools of Public Health,
Arts and Sciences, and Advanced International
Studies at Hopkins. That meeting, says Jones,
was a revelation. “That’s when I realized we do
have the people at work on this and what we
need to do is find ways of bringing them
together.” And, as gas prices peaked in the
months following, there was suddenly a new
sense of urgency surrounding the issue.
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
13
“You can’t predict. There might be an advance in photovoltaics
[for solar cells], but there might be entirely new technologies
that are transformative. We just don’t know.”
Here in the United States, where 5 percent
of the world’s population consumes a quarter of
its energy, there is an accelerating sense that the
current oil-coal-natural gas energy economy will
need to rapidly evolve into a system that creates
less pollution (especially climate-warming carbon dioxide) and relies far less on foreign sources, particularly petroleum from the Middle East.
President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign platform called for a $150 billion investment over
10 years to “build a clean energy future” and
pledged that 25 percent of American electricity
will come from renewable resources by 2025.
Meanwhile, former Vice President Al Gore—
who received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for
his work on climate change—has called for a
“moon shot” approach to renewable energy,
challenging the nation to commit to producing
100 percent of our electricity from renewable
energy and truly clean carbon-free sources
within 10 years.
Ten percent or 100 percent … both figures
represent an order of magnitude increase in the
amount of electricity now generated in America
from renewable energy. Wind and solar currently account for less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity generation (compared to 7 percent for
hydroelectric and 19 percent for nuclear power).
Add to that the extra burden of at least partially
powering the nation’s fleet of 244 million registered motor vehicles by electricity, hydrogen, or
some other clean energy source, and the enormous scale of the challenge becomes evident. In
14
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
October, Dean Jones asked four Hopkins faculty members whose research relates specifically to
the Terawatt Challenge to make a presentation
before the Whiting School’s National Advisory
Council. Jones is increasingly convinced that
Johns Hopkins has an important role to play in
our energy future. “Our traditional strength is
to be able to pull faculty together from disparate
disciplines and set them loose on a big, nasty
problem,” he says. “And this is the big, nasty
problem for the 21st century.”
Finding New Catalysts
for Fuel Cells
“I always try to remember
what Moore’s Law meant
to electronics,” says
Engineering’s Benjamin
Hobbs, professor of geography and environmental engineering. Hobbs
has spent more than two decades applying
his mathematics, economics, and engineering
expertise to find optimal ways of efficiently
distributing energy to large markets. He
believes that Intel Corporation co-founder
Gordon Moore’s famous observation in 1965
that the number of transistors that could be fit
on an integrated circuit was doubling every two
years or so correlates to what we will soon see
in the field of new energy development. Just as
advances in microelectronic design brought
about a revolution in computing, communications, and culture, so could similar advances in
generating, storing, transmitting, and using
electricity radically change how we work, play,
and live our lives. “In 10 or 15 years things
could be really different,” says Hobbs of today’s
energy markets. But he cautions that neither he
nor any of his fellow energy market analysts at
this point has a clear idea of what that future
will look like. “I’ve been doing this stuff since
the 1970s and I’m always blindsided. You can’t
predict. There might be an advance in photovoltaics [for solar cells], but there might be
entirely new technologies that are transformative. We just don’t know.”
This much seems evident: The Terawatt
Challenge will require not just new powergenerating plants, but entirely new ways of
producing energy. And for that, there will
need to be plenty of groundbreaking work in
basic research. Jonah Erlebacher is a surface
physicist interested in crystal growth and catalysis. An associate professor in the Department
of Materials Science and Engineering,
Erlebacher is finding fundamentally new ways
to improve an old technology—the fuel cell,
an electrochemical conversion device in which
a fuel is combined with an oxidant in the presence of an electrolyte to produce electricity.
“Most people don’t realize that the fuel cell
was invented in 1839,” he says, referring to
British physicist William Grove’s early experiment using hydrogen and oxygen to generate
photos: WILL KIRK
— Ben Hobbs, professor, Geography and Environmental Engineering
“It is only in the last 15 years or so that innovations
have allowed fuel cells to be used more widely.”
— Jonah Erlebacher, associate professor, Materials Science and Engineering
electricity on platinum electrodes. “But it is
only in the last 15 years or so that innovations
have allowed fuel cells to be used more widely.” Advances in materials engineering focusing
on the catalyst have increased the efficiency,
improved the affordability, and extended the
longevity of today’s hydrogen fuel cells.
Specially built buses in Reykjavik, Iceland, are
powered this way, for example, and both the
Russian and German navies have submarines
that can run silently for weeks below the surface on fuel cells, making them virtually undetectable. What has yet to be developed, however, is a relatively inexpensive fuel cell design
that could be mass manufactured to power the
millions of cars and trucks on the road today.
“For now,” says Erlebacher, “this is still a specialty application technology.”
Because fuel cells convert chemical energy
directly into electrical energy, they are inherently high-efficiency energy devices. Compare this,
for instance, to a conventional coal-fired power
plant, which burns coal to create heat to produce steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. The simpler process and greater efficiency of fuel cells means less fuel and a smaller
storage container are required for a fixed energy
requirement. Plus, fuel cells can be easily
scaled to fit whatever application is required.
Imagined uses for affordable fuel cells range
from a belt-clip-size device meant for charging
cell phones and other portable electronics, to a
washing machine-size contraption that would
sit quietly in your basement fulfilling all your
home’s electrical needs (and selling excess
electricity generated back to the grid). This flexibility is one reason why they are so often mentioned as the ideal clean automotive engines of
the future. Fuel cells can convert fuel to useful
energy at efficiencies as high as 60 percent,
whereas the internal-combustion engine is limited to efficiencies of less than 40 percent. And
when hydrogen is catalyzed with oxygen, the
only byproducts are electricity, excess heat, and
pure water. Fuel cells do not pollute.
But one persistent problem has always
constrained the financial viability of fuel cells:
Those platinum electrodes are tremendously
expensive to produce, relying as they do on an
element that is 30 times rarer than gold. Says
Erlebacher, “If we could make them without
platinum we could have them everywhere.”
In his lab Erlebacher is trying to invent new
catalysts more efficient (and much cheaper)
than simple platinum by building porous micro
layers of precious and nonprecious metals.
“The architecture of the materials used is key to
this problem,” he says. Recently, Erlebacher was
named the first L. Gordon Croft Investment
Management Faculty Scholar in recognition of
his exceptional achievement in nanostructured
materials and their application to energy generation and other uses. His lab has been instrumental in unlocking the secrets of nanoporous
materials, including the notable co-discovery of
mathematical equations describing how porous
gold evolves. These are precisely the kinds of
advances that are expected to lead to the next
big breakthrough in affordable fuel cell design.
The invention of a new composite catalyst
at the U.S. National Laboratory in Los Alamos
improved current fuel cell power by a factor of
10. Basic advances in materials design might
further improve efficiencies and reduce cost.
“These kinds of advances have been part
serendipity and part informed inspiration,”
Erlebacher says. Musing on the short-term need
for a small, inexpensive and powerful fuel cell
to excite more people about the possibilities of
hydrogen power, he says: “A fuel cell–powered
lawn mower would be a killer app.”
The Right Chemistry
for Solar Power
But there is a great challenge facing this “hydrogen
economy”—the oft-discussed
but still imaginary future in
which hydrogen is the universal energy carrier (as opposed to an energy
source) that would power all kinds of fuel cell
vehicles. Fundamental to a hydrogen economy
is the need for inexpensive plentiful hydrogen.
Although hydrogen makes up three-quarters of
the known universe, most of the hydrogen on
Earth is locked in more complex compounds,
primarily water. Currently, almost all hydrogen
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
15
“The solar profile of our country is quite good, and
my hope is that we can...optimize solar harvesting.”
— Gerald Meyer, professor, Chemistry
produced and used around the globe comes
from hydrocarbons such as methane and natural gas, but breaking out the hydrogen from
these compounds creates carbon dioxide, thus
amplifying global warming. Hydrogen can be
removed from water by electrolysis leaving pure
oxygen, but this is a fairly energy-intensive
process, requiring about 50 kilowatt-hours of
electricity for every kilogram of hydrogen
produced. The critical need will be to find a
carbon-free way of generating ample electricity
to power electrolysis and provide plentiful
hydrogen. If that electricity comes from a
power plant burning coal, oil, or gas, the carbon dioxide and other pollutants produced in
the process effectively eliminate hydrogen’s
environmental advantages.
“Of all the things we have confronted as a
society, I think carbon is going to be one of the
toughest,” says Kenneth DeFontes, a member
of the Whiting School’s National Advisors
Council and the university’s Presidential Task
Force for Climate Change. He knows the scope
of the challenge firsthand. DeFontes is president and CEO of Baltimore Gas & Electric
Company (BGE), which provides electricity to
more than 1.2 million business and residential
customers in Central Maryland. He says it is
important not to underestimate the scale of the
problem confronting us: “We are so dependent
on fossil sources that it is really a very fundamental change that is needed. But you have to
recognize we cannot solve our problems of
16
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
energy in any single way.”
One widely anticipated component of
future clean energy production is photovoltaics,
the production of electricity by sunlight. It’s
another old technology that is new again. The
first solar cell was produced by American inventor Charles Fritts in 1883. His version used
selenium and gold to generate electricity from
sunlight, and produced a sunlight-to-electricity
conversion efficiency of only about 1 percent,
rendering the pricey technology commercially
worthless. Even then, however, visionaries
imagined the seemingly limitless possibilities of
electricity from the sun and rhapsodized about
“the total extinction of steam engines, and the
utter repression of smoke.” However, it was not
until 1954, when Bell Laboratories scientists
discovered that silicon wafers could be made
sensitive to sunlight, that the first practical solar
cells were created, realizing a conversion efficiency of about 6 percent. Today commercially
available silicon solar cells typically realize efficiencies of about 15 percent, and solar energy is
now the fastest growing source of electricity,
expanding at an annual rate of 35 percent over
the past few years.
“Last year the planet used about 14 terawatts
of electricity, and the United States was responsible for roughly a quarter of that [usage],” says
Gerald Meyer, a professor of chemistry in the
Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “Depend­
ing on how you count, greater than 95 percent
of that power was generated from nonrenewable
resources such as coal, oil, and natural gas.
So we are clearly using up a finite resource.”
Five years ago Meyer was asked by the National
Science Foundation to organize a workshop on
sustainability, and in particular, what chemistry
could do to help promote sustainable development and energy use. He brought together
22 scientists from around the country to consider the issue. Their conclusion, published just
last year: “Energy stood out to everybody as the
critical need for finding sustainable solutions,”
Meyer says. It just so happens that has been his
focus for many years now. “My research group
makes molecules that absorb light and then
enable us to take the energy that is stored and
convert it to electricity.”
But photovoltaics still account for only a
small percentage of the electricity generated in
America, and will probably continue to do so
until manufacturing costs can be significantly
reduced. Meyer and his team have been conducting research into a new generation of “thin
film” solar cells that are cheaper and easier to
produce. “The solar profile of our country is
quite good, and my hope is that we can create
applications that will allow us to optimize solar
harvesting,” says Meyer. “But to do so we have
to reduce cost.” Although silicon is the second
most abundant element on the planet, it is
normally bound in silica sand. Processing it to
produce the pure silicon needed for solar cells is
a high-temperature, high-energy operation that
produces considerable carbon dioxide. At cur-
“It’s very clear that wind energy
is on a really steep growth path
globally.” — Charles Meneveau, director,
Center for Environmental and Applied Fluid Mechanics
rent efficiencies it takes more than two years for
a solar cell to generate the amount of energy
that was used to make the silicon it contains.
Thin-film solar cells attempt to overcome
this problem by using only a fraction of the
silicon found in conventional cells, but they
are considerably less efficient as a result.
Meyer is working on a novel alternative technology pioneered by scientists Michael Grätzel
and Brian O’Regan at the École Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne in 1991. The dye-sensitized solar cell, or DSSc (also known as the
Grätzel cell), is made of low-cost materials, is
not brittle like conventional silicon wafer solar
cells, and should be relatively easy to mass
manufacture. Meyer has been experimenting
with high surface area nanocrystalline films
and titanium dioxide (a common paint pigment) to create Grätzel cells in his lab. “We
can make cells routinely in the 5 percent range
of efficiency, and our champion cells have
been in the 10 percent range. If we can get it
to the 15 percent range, then this technology
is practical,” he says.
In addition to lower costs, dye-sensitized
solar cells (because of their different chemical
nature) can generate electricity at low-light levels, such as a cloudy day or in indirect sunlight.
They also can be manufactured in flexible
sheets, are considerably more resilient, and can
achieve better operational efficiency at higher
temperatures than conventional glass-covered
solar panels. “There is now a robust market for
photovoltaics, but the likelihood of a solarpowered future really comes down to an economic issue,” Meyer says. “Right now the cost
per watt just doesn’t line up with fossil fuels. It’s
just too expensive. But the gap is closing. What
we are looking for is a leap-frog or fundamental
discovery to move it along.”
Wind Energy’s Wake
While sunlight and hydrogen remain largely energy
sources of some future day,
modern windmill technology has begun to contribute
a significant and growing portion of world
energy production. Denmark now generates
about a fifth of its electricity needs by wind
power. Today’s electricity-generating windmills
can reach the height of the Washington
Monument, with blade circumference of 100
meters. These mammoth machines are rated at
up to 5 megawatts generating capacity, enough
to supply 100 homes each with truly green
energy. Their technology is proven, their reliability is sound, and in the last few years, they
have been popping up wherever there is steady
and reliable wind. Last April, Rock Port,
Missouri (population 1,395), became the first
city in the U.S. to get all its electricity from
wind power with the opening of a 5 megawatt,
four turbine wind farm there that is expected to
provide more electricity to the local power grid
than the town’s annual consumption. By the
end of 2007, U.S. wind power capacity had
exceeded 18,000 megawatts, enough to serve
4.5 million average households; it accounted
for nearly a third of all new power-producing
capacity added during the year.
“The average life expectancy of wind turbines is expected to be about 20 years, and
their energy pay-back period [to generate the
amount of energy needed to manufacture the
units] is only a matter of months,” says Charles
Meneveau, the Louis M. Sardella Professor in
Mechanical Engineering and director of the
Center for Environmental and Applied Fluid
Mechanics. “It’s very clear that wind energy is
on a really steep growth path globally.”
But Meneveau notes that despite this enormous increase in wind energy, some of the basic
scientific understanding of how wind turbines
interact with and affect the local environment
is still lacking. Since wind turbines are generally
built together in “farms,” what is the best way
to arrange the structures—paralleled or staggered? What is the optimal number of towers
that can be erected within a certain space? And
does the action of the wind turbine’s blades
affect the local climate?
Meneveau is an internationally recognized
expert in fluid mechanics, including the behavior of air in contact with today’s massive wind
turbines, which are the largest rotating
machines ever built. Using a wind tunnel,
smoke, scale model turbines, and a sophisticatJOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
17
United States Wind Resource Map
Wind Power Classification
Wind Resource
Power Potential
Class
3
4
5
6
7
Fair
Good
Excellent
Outstanding
Superb
Wind Power
Density at 50m
W/m2
Wind Speed*
at 50m
m/s
Wind Speed*
at 50m
mph
300
400
500
600
800
6.4
7.0
7.5
8.0
8.8
14.3
15.7
16.8
17.9
19.7
–
–
–
–
–
400
500
600
800
1600
–
–
–
–
–
7.0
7.5
8.0
8.8
11.1
–
–
–
–
–
15.7
16.8
17.9
19.7
24.8
This map shows the annual average wind power estimates
at 50 meters above the surface of the United States. It is a
combination of high resolution and low resolution datasets
produced by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and
other organizations. The data was screened to eliminate areas
unlikely to be developed onshore due to land use or environmental issues. In many states, the wind resource on this map
is visually enhanced to better show the distribution on ridge
crests and other features.
*Wind speeds are based on a Weibull k value of 2.0
ed laser photography system, Meneveau has
been carefully measuring the fluid dynamics of
airflow around wind turbines with the intent of
creating a computer model for optimizing the
placement and design of wind turbine farms.
The National Science Foundation recently
awarded his team a three-year, $321,000 grant
to support the project.
“Because of their effect of enhancing the
turbulence downstream, there is some implication of changed wind patterns and maybe
increased evaporation,” says Meneveau of his
wind tunnel work to date. In theory, at least,
dense clusters of wind turbines could affect
nearby temperature and humidity levels, in turn
leading to changes in local weather conditions.
18
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
Could a lot of these smaller changes eventually
lead to significant climate change on a global
level? Build enough windmills and that scenario
seems at least theoretically possible. But no one
knows for sure what outcomes to expect. One
fact that Meneveau does note is that to generate
the current national electricity usage in the U.S.
entirely by today’s wind turbines would require
wind farms covering approximately 750,000
square miles—or roughly the size of Texas,
California, Montana, and Florida combined.
Considered from that perspective, the potential
weather effects of wind turbines seem considerably more significant. With more and more
large-scale wind projects planned, such as the
4,000 megawatt, 400,000-acre wind farm pro-
posed for the Texas panhandle by oilman T.
Boone Pickens, Meneveau’s research offers a first
glimpse of the likely impact of a new global reality. “We need to develop the tools to predict
what effect these arrays will have,” he says. “We
currently have a pretty good idea of what happens when you put one wind turbine in a clean,
nonturbulent wind stream. But when you put
many of them together, and they receive realworld uncertain airflow, then it’s much less clear
what will happen.”
In 1997 United Nations member states
adopted the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases to approximately 5 percent below 1990 levels. Achieving
that goal—or even coming close—while meet-
“Global energy is a big
challenge, just like going
to the moon in 1961 was a
big challenge. But I believe
our nation will get it done
in the same way as we did
then—by pulling together
a lot of folks from many
different disciplines and
setting goals.” —Dean Nick Jones
ing the planet’s increasing demands for more
energy may be the greatest challenge of this
generation. “We want a healthy environment
but [we still want] cold beer and warm showers,” is how Hobbs describes it. “The only way
to do that is to learn to produce energy in new
ways.” And that may be the essence of the
Terawatt Challenge: learning to perform familiar tasks in entirely new and different ways.
“I’m not necessarily a fan of big science done in
big labs,” says Hobbs, pointing instead to the
need for many smaller solutions instead of one
big answer. “Hopkins has people here who are
fundamentally good scientists. And that’s what
we need. That’s where we will find the
answers.”
“Global energy is a big challenge, just like
going to the moon in 1961 was a big challenge,” says Jones. “But I believe our nation will
get it done in the same way as we did then—by
pulling together a lot of folks from many different disciplines and setting goals. If you’d asked
me this summer I would have been very confident that with oil at $150 a barrel, you had a
lot of people’s attention. Now, at a third that
cost, we’ve come back a bit from that assessment. But there is a change in Washington and
the issue is on the table. I’m optimistic that a
switch has been thrown. This is the future and
Hopkins will be there.”
n
In recent years the amount of electricity
big question—Can we store energy in an
generated by wind turbines and photovoltaic
efficient way?” asks DeFontes. “Roundtrip
cells has grown enormously. According to
efficiency of batteries is only about 75 per-
the Wind Energy Council, worldwide wind
cent, and using pumps or flywheels to store
power capacity doubled in the past three
energy (for later reconversion to electricity)
years and promises to continue to grow
is even less efficient. It’s hard to envision a
at a similar rate for many years to come.
world where we can solve our energy needs
Grid-connected photovoltaic electricity was
with wind and solar alone if we can’t solve
the world’s fastest growing energy source,
this problem.”
increasing by 83 percent in 2007 alone.
Nearly half the increase was in Germany,
systems without some kind of storage
now the world’s largest consumer of pho-
capacity,” agrees mechanical engineering
tovoltaic electricity, followed by Japan.
Professor Charles Meneveau. “There is an
Worldwide solar cell production has been
urgent need for improved methods of storing
doubling every two years.
energy.”
But as BGE president and CEO
Kenneth DeFontes notes, there is still one
been a challenge for electrical grid systems.
glaring difficulty with our sudden love affair
One method already in common use in
with these greenest of green energy resourc-
the United States and other countries is
es: sometimes the wind doesn’t blow, and
pumped storage hydroelectricity, in which
at night it’s, well, dark. “Out in the Midwest
excess electricity produced during low load
where they have taken a lead installing
time periods (typically at night) is used to
wind turbines, there was a peak potential of
pump water uphill to a reservoir. During
generating 2500 megawatts by wind power
high demand periods the water is run back
in 2006,” DeFontes says. “Yet when a heat
downhill through turbines, generating extra
wave hit that summer and demand for
electricity for the grid. Although the system
electricity was at its peak, there was hardly
ends up consuming more electricity than
a breeze. Wind generation was only able to
it generates, giving it a negative efficiency,
add about 8 megawatts of power, just when
the timing of electricity use and availability
it was needed the most.”
makes pump storage capacity attractive.
New proposals call for pumped storage to
Matching supply to demand has
“It’s clear you can’t build these
Storing excess energy has always
always been a tremendous challenge for
utilize wind turbines or solar power that
electric utilities. But any move to generating
drives water pumps directly, in effect creat-
sources that are by their very nature erratic
ing energy-storing wind or solar dams that
and unpredictable makes the challenge that
would effectively flatten the peaks and val-
much greater. In an energy environment
leys inherent in a generating system that
focused exclusively, or even largely, on wind
depends on the wind blowing and the sun
and solar power, electricity storage capac-
shining to make electricity. —MF
ity takes on a vital significance. “That’s the
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
19
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dead Calm, Dark Night
Photo courtesy of John Costa
The Great Meanderer
By Maria Blackburn
In his 51 years at Johns
Hopkins, where his Friday
afternoon field trips have
become the stuff of legend,
Reds Wolman ’49 has
shaped the brightest minds
in geomorphology—and
forever changed the field.
20
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
O
n a crisp, cloudless morning in
late October, on
the kind of day
that you hope for
when someone
utters the word
“fall,” Markley
Gordon “Reds” Wolman stands on the grassy
banks of Western Run in northern Baltimore
County and surveys the water trickling a few
feet below.
Wolman knows the winding creek. He
knows it well. Every year for the last 51 years
he’s brought the graduate students in his geomorphology class to this narrow, twisting tributary of the Gunpowder River to measure the
dimensions of the channel, and to record the
geometry of its orderly, repeated bends—what
geologists refer to as its “meander.” With nary a
glance, he can tell you where the soil is sandy
and where it’s full of clay, why the banks on the
near side aren’t as steep as the ones across the
way, and the overall nature of the run’s fluvial
geomorphology—why it looks the way it does
right now and how it will look in the future.
It’s more of a conversation than a lecture,
one that Wolman ’49 energetically leads with a
lot of pointing and gesturing. He could spend
hours out here.
The air is cold. The wind persistent. And
the terrain—a horse pasture—is pretty rugged
for the 84-year-old professor of geography.
Wolman, dressed in a bright orange Marmot
shell, a navy blazer, khakis, and a polka dot
bow tie, has few complaints, however.
Well, really he has one: He hates the
walker that he has been using lately. “Maybe
I should have quit teaching after 49 years,” he
says. He is smiling.
B
ack in 1958, when Wolman joined the
Hopkins faculty as an associate professor
and chair of the geography department, then
part of the School of Arts and Sciences, he was
a brisk walking, fiery-haired, 34-year-old geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who had
already made major contributions to the field.
His 1953 paper on sampling particle size
distribution of riverbeds led to the “Wolman
Pebble Count” as a standard technique for
geomorphologists everywhere. Fluvial Processes in
Geomorphology, the book Wolman co-authored
with Luna Leopold and John Miller in 1964,
remains a seminal text more than 40 years after
it was published. And through his policy and
public health work, Wolman has given us new
ways to think about the effects of land use,
urbanization, and dams on channels and helped
frame the international discussion on sustainable development.
“Reds was a critical member of the generation who brought geomorphology from a
qualitative historical discipline into a modern
quantitative and quasi-engineering field that sat
astride its roots in geology and geography and
also tried to make engineering recommendations for the betterment of society and social
use,” says Jack Schmidt, PhD ’87, a former
Wolman advisee who is now a professor in the
Department of Watershed Sciences at Utah
State University.
Wolman’s research has earned him membership in the National Academy of Sciences
and the National Academy of Engineering as
well as dozens of other prestigious honors and
awards. But research has never been all that
defines him. He is a teacher, one who has made
his mark over the last five decades by shaping
some of the brightest minds in the field. On
the wall of Wolman’s cluttered third-floor office
in Ames Hall, there’s a framed copy of an “academic family tree” crafted by a former student.
It shows how many academic careers have
sprouted from the man everyone (from the
lowliest undergraduate to the most distinguished university president) calls “Reds.” The
first few lines show the names of some of
Wolman’s early graduate students. Branching
off of these names are Wolman’s students’ graduate students in geography and geology and
then, those students’ students in these fields.
“Reds has a very rare combination
of crystalline intelligence, brilliance,
commitment to students, charm,
and modesty.” — Gordon Grant, PhD ’86,
research
hydrologist, USDA forestry service
As of 1995, the tree boasted 47 children, 106
grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren, and four
great-great-grandchildren. It’s still growing.
“Reds has a very rare combination of crystalline intelligence, brilliance, commitment to
students, charm, and modesty,” says Gordon
Grant, PhD ’86, a research hydrologist with the
USDA forestry service and courtesy professor
of geosciences at Oregon State University. “You
can find people who are pretty bright but don’t
have the other qualities Reds has. It’s rare to
find it all in the same person.”
If you want to know what kind of a teacher
Wolman is, don’t ask him. Doing so will cause
the articulate, witty man with the seemingly
insatiable curiosity to clam up like a firstsemester graduate student. Sitting in his office
one recent afternoon, surrounded by stacks of
papers and books, with various maps and photographs strewn here and there, he searches for
the right assessment of himself. “I guess you
can say I’m enthusiastic,” is all he’ll say.
Ask Wolman’s former students and colleagues about him, however, and the accolades
and anecdotes flow. Grant calls his former
advisor “a Zen master with overtones of Woody
Allen.” He recalls with great delight the Friday
afternoon field trips he made as part of
Wolman’s geomorphology class. Crammed into
a rattling Hopkins van with no seat belts, the
smell of brake fluid in the air, the class would
visit a series of fields and streams around
Baltimore with Wolman at the wheel. While
the students would take measurements and jot
down notes, Wolman would walk around and
smoke a cigar. Then he’d embark on a sort of
Socratic dialogue, asking question after question
about what they saw and why it looked as it did.
“We were all cold and fumbling for
answers,” Grant says. But Wolman never hand-
Equipped with Stogies to honor their esteemed leader, students in Wolman’s geomorphology
class in the early 1980s relax after a Friday afternoon field trip.
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
21
Photo by Gordon Grant
“There’s no substitute in a field science for
going out and seeing what it’s like…it’s
indispensable. It’s also a lot of fun.”— Reds Wolman
ed them out. Instead he challenged his students
to make connections and think for themselves.
“Reds has an unusual talent for making the
people around him, including his students, feel
smarter than they really are,” Grant says. “He
creates this illusion that you can actually think
better than you really can and after a while
you’ve actually created some new synaptic connections. Fundamentally, he taught me to trust
my scientific instincts.”
Wolman relishes the field trips, and nothing, not even a couple of hip replacements, has
led him to stop doing them. Now he just
brings along a folding chair. “There’s no substitute in a field science for going out and seeing
what it’s like,” he says. “It’s indispensable. It’s
also a lot of fun.”
In the classroom, Wolman works from a
bare-bones syllabus containing such diverse
elements as excerpts from Ulysses and Peanuts
comic strips. During his informal lectures he
might veer from the topic at hand to tell a story
22
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
about the time he was on the Yellow River or to
hand around snapshots he took while cruising
down the Mississippi. There is a purpose to it
all, says Thomas Dunne, PhD ’69, a professor
of geography at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, and one of the most prolific
branches of Wolman’s academic family tree.
“Reds has this way of seeding little things
in your mind that might not come back to you
until much later,” Dunne says. “It’s seamless,
his attitude about learning and passing on the
learning.”
Whether in a classroom or out in the field,
Wolman exudes warmth. He seems genuinely
interested in what people have to say and
doesn’t discount opinions that he disagrees
with. At the same time, he’s always challenging
people to think for themselves. Just parroting
back what you’ve read isn’t going to cut it in a
Wolman class, Dunne cautions.
“In graduate school, students come in predisposed to believe that if something is pub-
Wolman, in nontraditional field garb,
shortly after disembarking from a threeweek field trip down the Colorado River
in the Grand Canyon in 1985.
lished it’s correct,” Dunne says. “Reds is always
trying to remind you that there are all different
ways of thinking. He’s always undermining his
own authority and other people’s authority so
you will think for yourself and not just accept.”
T
eaching comes so naturally to Wolman
you would think it has always been his
life’s calling.
It hasn’t. As a child he spent a couple of
summers on a family friend’s Connecticut farm
and from the time he was about 12 until he
was a Hopkins undergraduate, he wanted to be
a dairy farmer. “I was a member of the 4H
Club and living in a rowhouse in Baltimore,”
he says, laughing.
Wolman’s family has been involved with
Hopkins for the better part of a century. His
father, Abel Wolman ’13 A&S, ’15 Eng, is
known as the “father of sanitary engineering.”
The elder Wolman pioneered the chlorination
process in public water, thereby bringing clean
drinking water to millions of people worldwide.
Abel Wolman established the Department of
Sanitary Engineering in the School of Engineering and the School of Hygiene and Public
Health, and chaired it from its start in 1937
until 1962. He was involved with Hopkins until
his death in 1989 at the age of 96.
Father and son had a close relationship, one
based on reading about and conversing about a
wide range of issues, and Abel Wolman’s
involvement and interest in the field of natural
resources made an impression on young Reds.
He decided to pursue his love of the land by
studying in the basic sciences related to the
landscape. After graduating from Hopkins, he
went on to earn an MA and a PhD in geology
from Harvard.
Wolman loved his work with the U.S.
Geological Survey, where he worked from 1951
until 1958, but when Hopkins offered him the
job as chair of the Isaiah Bowman Department
of Geography, there was no question he’d accept.
“I’m a Baltimore boy, a Hopkins product,” he
says. Committed to the concept that the department become interdisciplinary and focus on all
aspects of science and water policy, he was
instrumental in bringing together the Department of Geography with the Department of
Sanitary and Water Resources Engineering to
create the Department of Geography and
Environmental Engineering within the Whiting
School of Engineering. Wolman chaired the
department from 1970 to 1990 and made sure
that it retained ties with the School of Public
Health. During his years at Hopkins, Wolman
has also served as interim provost and vice president of academic affairs. Twice.
“I don’t think it’s possible to imagine
Hopkins without Reds,” says Erica
Schoenberger, a professor and colleague of
Wolman’s in the Department of Geography
and Environmental Engineering since the
1980s. “He’s worked in every corner of the university, from engineering to public health to
central administration. Everyone knows him.
He knows everybody. If you did a poll to determine the person who most represents the
Hopkins ideal, everybody would say Reds. It
would be a landslide.”
“If you did a poll to determine the
person who most represents the
Hopkins ideal, everybody would say
Reds. It would be a landslide.”
— Erica Schoenberger,
professor, Department of Geography
and Environmental Engineering
W
olman jokes about quitting teaching,
but it’s doubtful that he ever will. Sure
he “sort of retired” back in the 1990s, but he
has continued teaching his water resource
development class each fall and his geomorphology class in the spring.
What he likes about teaching, he says, is
that it allows him to talk about and experience
the landscape with new generations of intelligent, energetic young scientists. “It’s the graduate students that make you,” he says. “If we
have a program that attracts some good graduate students, it is they who help set the tone
and the character of the enterprise. It is they
who will encourage other people to come. It is
their energy, their productivity, their thinking
that matters,” he says. He pauses to consider his
words. “And if what they publish makes you
look good, well then it’s as if you did something,” he says, laughing.
The relationship may start off as one
between professor and student, but it usually
doesn’t stay that way. “Reds makes it possible to
establish a lifelong friendship,” says Schmidt.
After Wolman’s students are awarded their
degrees and leave Hopkins, they don’t ever really leave Reds. He comes to visit them. He
writes. He calls. They do, too. Just as Wolman
shared conversations with his father over the
course of many years, he stays in touch with his
former students because he wants to keep the
conversation going, to keep learning about
what they’re doing and to share his research
with them.
His students take note of this relationship
and try to carry it on with students of their
own. However, Reds Wolman is not an easy act
to follow, says John Costa, PhD ’72, a retired
geologist and university professor who lives in
Vancouver, Washington.
Costa remembers one spring day near finals
time when an open window in the geography
department office allowed in the noise of a
particularly spirited game of lacrosse on the
Keyser Quad. “A secretary in the office grumbled something about how the students should
be in the library,” he says. “Reds [a former
All-American lacrosse player at Hopkins] takes
off his glasses, looks out the window, and starts
yelling at the students outside, ‘No, no, no.
Curl that ball.’ He didn’t care that they weren’t
in the library. He wanted to make sure they
were playing the game right.”
Costa marvels at the story as he is telling it,
almost four decades later. “Reds has the perfect
reaction to every situation at every point in
time,” he says. “How could you not want to be
like him?”
n
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
23
24
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
Five years ago, the Whiting School of
Engineering and the Applied Physics
Laboratory decided to formally combine
their research and design expertise for
a wide range of cutting-edge projects.
The results have been nothing short of
groundbreaking.
Joint Strength
By Geoff Brown
I
n a small workroom at Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory
(APL), Jacob Vogelstein, PhD ’07, picks up a red and silver
mechanical hand—a beautiful collection of joints, pulleys, wires,
and alloys. “In a human hand, many of the muscles and tendons
that control the hand itself are actually located in the forearm,”
explains the biomedical engineer.
But for someone who has lost only a hand, the intricate mech-
anisms, motors, and gears needed to artificially operate the mechanical
fingers, thumb, and wrist must be contained within the hand itself—
a feat of engineering that even evolution hasn’t managed to pull off.
With this sleek prosthetic device, known as the Proto 2
Intrinsic Hand, Hopkins engineers are striving to improve upon
Illustration by Scott Roberts
nature itself. The Proto 2 houses a dizzying number of components,
all of them intricate, powerful, and miniature. “Some of the fine
motor assembly is done in Switzerland, by craftspeople who also
manufacture and assemble gears for watchmaking,” Vogelstein says.
“Our tiny motors have the same level of complexity and need the
same level of precision.”
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
25
“We’re leveraging the strengths
of the two organizations, and it’s
allowing us to pursue all sorts of
work on larger problems, larger
than either APL or Homewood
could pursue individually.”
associate dean of the Whiting School’s
Engineering for Professionals (EP) program
— Stuart Harshbarger, APL, team leader
Complexity is commonplace at APL’s
since 2001 and before that a full-time scienRevolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 (RP 2009)
for Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009.
tist at APL for 31 years. “Now the faculty at
facilities, as dozens of researchers are working
the Whiting School are more open to applied
to create and fine-tune an artificial hand (and
research, and that helps.”
hand/arm combinations of varying lengths)
The formal mechanism for change came in 2003 with the establishthat will offer previously unimagined function and use for potentially
ment of the WSE/APL Partnership Program, which grew out of a task
thousands of amputees. One of the main intellectual and research
force organized by university President William R. Brody. The program
strengths that Laurel, Maryland–based APL was able to bring to the proj- laid out steps and policies aimed at encouraging the two institutions to
ect was a newly rejuvenated collaborative relationship with Hopkins’
draw on each other’s strengths.
Whiting School of Engineering (WSE).
“Historically, most of the collaboration between APL and the
“I was very excited when I heard that the project had been awarded,” Whiting School has been driven by principal investigators (PI),” says
says Whiting School Dean Nick Jones. “It struck me as exactly the type
APL’s Harshbarger, who also teaches in the EP program. “We are seeing
of work we had always wanted. It’s a really, really challenging project, and the transition from that PI-centric collaboration to a much larger scope.
the only way of pulling it off was by bringing together people with differ- We’re leveraging the strengths of the two organizations, and it’s allowing
ent expertise and talents.”
us to pursue all sorts of work on larger problems, larger than either APL
Stuart Harshbarger, team leader for the RP 2009 program, says that
or Homewood could pursue individually.”
one crucial part of the project’s success has been the collaboration
In addition to the RP 2009 program, WSE and APL have had sucbetween APL’s researchers and staff and the faculty at the Whiting
cess collaborating in other fields, including two of vastly different scope.
School. “This program certainly wouldn’t have been a success without
First is APL’s civilian space division (which operates separately from the
the collaboration with Homewood, as well as the other partner groups
large and classified work done by the military space division); Whiting
and schools,” says Harshbarger, who also serves as program manager and
School faculty and graduates regularly participate in the design and
systems integrator for the project.
deployment of a variety of satellites and space science instrumentation
RP 2009 is an ambitious multiyear endeavor, sponsored by the U.S.
and missions. These have included, most recently, the Messenger mission
government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
to Mercury, and—at the far reaches of the solar system—the New
Led by APL (which oversees a group of some 30 partner organizations,
Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.
totaling more than 100 engineers) since 2006, RP 2009 aims to redefine
Back on Earth, APL and WSE researchers are working to invent revthe state of the art for upper-limb prosthetics. After the initial phase of the olutionary human speech recognition and analysis tools at the Human
program demonstrated immense success with Proto 1, a first-generation
Language Technology Center of Excellence. Funded by the U.S.
artificial limb and hand with neural control, and showed the feasibility of
Department of Defense, this challenging project involves designing softthe more advanced Proto 2 systems, DARPA approved the subsequent
ware and hardware systems that will be able to listen to a human voice—
$38 million expenditure to develop the final limb.
in any of several dozen languages—and provide a coherent, complete
Engineering projects come in varying degrees of difficulty. One of
report of what that voice is saying.
the top echelons of challenge comes in contracts generated by DARPA,
“We’re an R&D institution,” says APL’s Sommerer. “From our perwhich brings the vast financial resources of the nation to bear on probspective, the academic divisions at Hopkins are closer to the bleeding
lems that may seem insurmountable, and generally benefit national
edge. And importantly, they come with networks to other academic
defense interests. These projects—almost always secret, very expensive,
enterprises. At a place like APL, even with the advent of technological
and always very complex—have their own difficulty designation among
globalization, it’s difficult for us to engage with the international commuengineers: DARPA-hard. This rating is the highest degree of difficulty,
nity. The Whiting School represents an opportunity for us to have intiand consequently is an alluring challenge to the world’s best and brightest mate contact with an academic institution.”
researchers, including those at both APL and the Whiting School.
The current state of collaboration between APL and WSE represents a
Building a Better Hand
major advance of its own. As recently as a decade ago, the school and the
lab would only occasionally interact, owing in part to the differing philos- When the silver-gray finger joints of the Proto 2 hand clench and
ophies, cultures, and missions of each institution.
unclench, the similarity to a human hand is uncanny. This version is an
“In the past there was too much of a tendency for people on both
exponential evolution from the crude hooks and lifeless artificial hands
sides to say, ‘Oh, we can’t do that,’” says John Sommerer, director of
commonly used now as prosthetics for people who have lost their hands
science and technology and chief technology officer at APL.
and arms.
“There was a perception that Homewood was not interested in
But there’s still plenty of work left to be done, because DARPA’s
applied research—that they were only interested in discovery. There was
challenge is all-encompassing: First, build a modular artificial hand and
some truth in that,” says Allan Bjerkaas,
arm system that can be fitted to any amputee, whether they are missing
“DARPA-Hard”
26
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
“We need to compete in the space
of ideas and the collaboration with
Homewood helps us do that. It also
helps in the competition for human
capital; we can hire smart people.
We’d like to hire as many Whiting
tee, for example, the forearm muscles, if
only a hand, a hand and forearm, the arm
they’ve lost only a hand,” explains
below the elbow, the arm above the elbow,
School graduates as we can.”
Vogelstein. “We decode the signals using
or the entire arm. As for the arm and hand:
— John Sommerer, APL’s chief technology
our real-time software algorithms. The
They should be self-contained, have an
computer then uses the output from those
almost-human range of motion, and not
officer
algorithms to guide the Guitar Hero conweigh more than a normal arm, even though
trollers directly, without any mechanical intervention.”
they will contain a vast array of motors, batteries, and gears—all notoriIt’s an ideal solution; the tests are always the same, the game meaously heavy pieces of equipment. The prosthetic hand should be able to
sures accuracy and response at just the necessary levels, and it’s an engagperform almost exactly like a real human hand, and the hand needs to
ing process that keeps everyone interested (and sure beats a test tone).
provide feedback to the user about whatever it is that is being touched,
And it’s just one of the ways that researchers are designing a system that
held, or manipulated. Is it hot? Is it soft? The user needs to know.
takes thought impulses and turns them into a lifting prosthetic arm, or a
And the user needs to control the prosthesis through neural signals,
grasping prosthetic hand.
in real time. When the user thinks, Reach out and pick up that peach, the
That requires a hybrid system, explains APL’s Harshbarger, one using
arm and hand should do it at that exact moment, just like a real arm.
That’s one step in solving one of the most serious challenges of RP 2009: sensors on a variety of nerves to capture as much information as possible.
Sensors will take readings from noninvasive surface electrodes, from small
translating the motor commands from the prosthetic’s wearer into realimplantable devices in residual muscle nerves, and from peripheral nerve
time movement, and sensory data from the arm into feedback for the
and cortical areas—all done in varying combinations, depending on the
user. The difficulty is in collecting these huge amounts of data, analyzing
motion—that are all fed into an analyzer. Algorithms developed by variit, having the software correctly interpret the signals, and then turning
ous universities and labs are applied, the outputs are combined, and the
that decision into arm and hand motion with no noticeable delay—and
system makes the best available decision on what the prosthetic’s wearer
that’s before meeting the requirement to provide near-instant tactile
wants to do—whether it’s pick up a stapler, wave to a colleague, turn on a
information back to the wearer.
coffee maker … or nail the guitar solo for “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”
To push the project forward, team leaders are tapping into the best
research and minds, including many Whiting School faculty and graduate
students. One of them is Nitish Thakor, a professor in Biomedical
A Win-Win
Engineering, who oversees several projects including sensors for touch,
The new spirit of collaboration between WSE and APL is already having
force, and temperature; skinlike cosmesis; prosthetic EEG control; and
an impact on APL’s workforce, much to the delight of its leaders. Jacob
decoding neurons to control individual fingers and dexterous motions.
Vogelstein is just one of five recent Whiting School graduates hired by
Another is Ralph Etienne-Cummings, a professor in Electrical and
the Lab.
Computer Engineering. He consults on the specialized neural circuits
“We need to compete in the space of ideas and the collaboration with
that produce rhythmic outputs to control motor systems. Allison
Homewood helps us do that,” says Sommerer. “It also helps in the compeOkamura, an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering, brings
tition for human capital; we can hire smart people. We’d like to hire as
expertise in sensory feedback, a research field (known as haptics) that
many Whiting School graduates as we can. If we have a competitive
has recently made major advances.
advantage—if they did an internship here, for example—it gives us a realIn the lab at APL, Vogelstein is lead engineer for neural interfaces
ly good chance to hire them.” Last summer, some 22 Whiting School
on the project. While the work is physically and mentally demanding
undergraduates got a taste of what it’s like to work at APL, through a new
(most researchers are working well into the night, nearly every night),
summer internship program established by Johns Hopkins University
Vogelstein says it’s also been, well, fun.
Provost Kristina Johnson (see “APL’s ‘Advanced’ Placement,” p. 28).
By way of example, he points to a Nintendo Wii video game system
The Engineering for Professionals program (formerly EPP), which
that sits on one of the worktables in the lab, and the two Guitar Hero
offers engineering course work and advanced degrees for working engivideo guitar-shaped controllers that rest on a chair. “We were looking
neers, has been a perfect vehicle for building ties between both institufor a way to test the neural controls for dexterity,” Vogelstein explains.
tions. “APL senior staff have the opportunity to teach, and junior staff can
“The historical training paradigms are very slow and basic. One of the
pursue degrees part time in the Whiting School,” explains Bjerkaas. “With
things we need to do as we work is develop the next generation of trainthis collaboration, many people at APL know about the Whiting School
ing paradigms.”
who wouldn’t. In terms of education, it’s a very healthy, vibrant collaboraThe researchers and scientists needed something to test the fingers
tion. Serious workforce development is a worthwhile contribution.”
and control systems that would be used for the Proto 2 hand. Someone
There’s further cross-pollination through a joint appointment prosuggested Guitar Hero—a game based on the timed pressing of five colgram for APL staff, which allows selected researchers to spend one day a
or-coded buttons (located on the faux guitars) to the music of popular
week as a research professor at Homewood.
rock songs. The scientists made some customizations to the equipment,
Vogelstein has a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical
and now they have a perfect testing device.
“What we do is record signals from the residual muscles of an ampu- and Computer Engineering, and is a big fan of the intellectual breadth
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
27
APL’s “Advanced” Placement
Johns Hopkins Provost Kristina Johnson knows firsthand the benefits
of a great internship. “When I was a freshman at Stanford,” she
says, “I was able to work in the Information System Lab with fabulous faculty, making hologram images of CT scans obtained from the
radiology department. I worked 12 hours a week during the year and
then all summer. We published our original research, and it was just
terrific to be part of a research group.”
That experience inspired her to establish the new Advanced
Application Scholars (AAS) Intern Program at the Applied Physics
Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. While APL has long offered
college summer internships, the AAS program (which is paid, and
not for academic credit) is available only to qualified Hopkins undergraduates and graduate students. In its first summer, 23 students
participated in the program, working alongside researchers on
advanced projects being carried out at APL. All will have the option
to return next summer provided they meet the internship’s requirements.
While some students worked in their primary fields of study,
others used the opportunity to branch out.
Alex Thibau ’10 is a mechanical engineering major who had
initially applied for a mechanical engineering internship, but he
ended up working on computer programming. That project was
focused on trying to get the combat and training simulators used by
different branches of the U.S. armed forces to work together more
smoothly. “I thought it was a great, great experience,” Thibau says of
his time at APL. “There were a lot of younger guys in the computer
programming department, so it was a lot of fun, but it was definitely
a strict work environment. I got to see what it was like to be really
energized by what you’re doing.”
Says Provost Johnson, “The motivation of the AAS initiative was
to allow Hopkins students the opportunity to work with world-class
engineers at APL, getting real-world experience, thus preparing them
for future technical careers.” At the same time, she adds, APL gets
to see some of Homewood’s most promising young engineers. “The
program allows APL to identify our best and brightest students for
future positions,” she says. “It’s a real win-win.” 28
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
—GB
of being able to move back and forth between his workplace and alma
mater: “The collaborations with the Whiting School are an excellent way
to see what’s coming up, to see the next generation of technology while
it’s still in the lab.”
“One of the things we’ve been talking about with APL,” says Marc
Donohue, vice dean for research at the Whiting School, “is getting a
complementary joint appointment in place, where Whiting School
faculty would spend one day a week at APL. It would be a good way
to promote even more interactions.”
There’s also a new mechanism for encouraging the exchange of ideas.
The WSE/APL Partnership Fund is a $500,000 pool (administered by
the Whiting School’s Donohue and APL’s Sommerer) that provides
“seed money” to teams made up of researchers from both institutions.
The money supports the work needed to put together a proposal that
will lead to future outside funding.
“This goes to the model of what we believe collaborative research
really is,” says Donohue. “We want two people to work together, like
intermeshing fingers. Not feeding just information to one another but
also ideas. It’s not something that’s revolutionary in concept,” says
Donohue, “but it is in practice.”
Revolutionizing Collaboration
The practice of revolutionizing collaboration has proven to be a critical
part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.
“There are an immense number of materials and components to
integrate,” says Harshbarger, reeling them off. “There’s the virtual environment to train the wearer of the prosthetic. There’s a modular mechanical limb system. There’s a modular neural control system. There’s the
body attachment, which is very different below the elbow when compared
to below the shoulder. It needs to be comfortable, and it can’t cause
irritation.”
Harshbarger believes that it is the magnitude of these challenges that
has inspired researchers to collaborate at every level. Another benefit of
working on a piece of engineering with such an obvious quality-of-life
outcome is the enthusiasm and interest it generates among scientists at
both APL and Homewood.
“Everybody’s excited about this project,” says Vogelstein. “In grad
school, each student is focused on one small piece of a puzzle.
Revolutionizing Prosthetics is attractive because it offers people a chance
to see how all the pieces fit together in a real-world application of science
that directly benefits humanity and society. It makes it very easy to collaborate. Even people not officially on the program are happy to evaluate
and give feedback because of the nature of the work. Almost every part
of what we’re doing is going to be the first of its kind. No one has ever
done this before,” Vogelstein says. “When we succeed, we will have
advanced the state of the art by an order of magnitude over what it was
before. It’s great to come to the lab knowing that.”
n
m a k i n g a n i m pa c t
will kirk
A lu m n i a n d L e a d e r s h i p
Carl E. Heath Jr. ’52
Priming the Pipeline
for Female Engineers
When Carl E. Heath Jr.’s daughter Alison was
11, he gave her a chemistry set for Christmas.
He had received a similar set as a child and had
fond memories of playing with it. “My motherin-law was horrified,” says Heath ’52. “She
thought it was not a very good gift for a girl.”
How did his daughter feel about the chemistry set? “She loved it.”
Some years later, while Heath was working
in Abingdon, England, as an executive for
Exxon Chemicals, he realized that many of the
smart, talented female engineers he worked
with were not advancing in their careers at the
same rate as their male colleagues. He formed
a task force, discovered that women were concerned about balancing work and family, and
helped establish a new maternity leave policy
for the company that became a model for the
entire country. When he returned to the U.S.
in the mid-1980s, Heath continued providing
mentors and support to the female scientists
and engineers he worked with at Exxon and
other companies. He took great satisfaction in
watching their careers blossom.
So during a visit to Johns Hopkins in the
early 1990s, it was only natural for Heath to
inquire how many women faculty members
and students there were in the Whiting School.
What he learned surprised him. “There were
female students, but there were few female
faculty members,” says Heath. “There was a lot
of competition among schools for qualified
women faculty, and there weren’t very many
women in the pipeline.”
Heath decided to help. In 1996, with an
initial gift and a matching contribution from
Exxon, he established the Heath Fellowship
for Graduate Women in Engineering at Johns
Hopkins. The goal of the fellowship is simple:
to provide support for women engineering
graduate students in the hopes that more
women will choose careers in the field. In
1999, the first Heath Fellow was named.
“I feel women in the sciences have not got-
Former and current Heath fellows (left to right, standing) Kate Laflin, Kate Onesios, Chiaka Lo
Prete, Stephanie Wilson; (seated) Ann Irvine and Cindy Byer.
ten all of the credit they deserve and I wanted
the satisfaction of knowing that I was helping
women follow their career goals in science and
engineering, or in whatever careers they
choose,” says Heath, who is a member of the
Society of Engineering Alumni (SEA) and
Johns Hopkins Alumni Council.
The fellows are nominated based on their
academic achievement. Each fellow is provided
with a stipend that is unrestricted and can be
used for such things as research equipment,
travel, or tuition. A total of 17 fellows have
been named to date.
Chiara Lo Prete, a second-year PhD candidate in Environmental Engineering, was named
a Heath Fellow in 2007 and used part of the
stipend to take a summer course in macroeconometrics at the University of Copenhagen.
The rest she used to purchase a new laptop and
books for her first year at Hopkins. She says she
appreciates Heath’s devotion to equality. “These
are problems that aren’t new, but I hope things
are changing and opening up for women. I
really admire Dr. Heath and appreciate how
he’s trying to help make change.”
After graduating from Hopkins with a
degree in chemical engineering and earning a
PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Heath
worked for Exxon for 34 years. In 1990 he
retired and founded the management consult-
“I feel women in the
sciences have not
gotten all of the
credit they deserve.”
— Carl Heath
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
29
ing firm Corporate Transformations
International. Now a full-time volunteer, he
works with his church and is committed to
ending racism and homophobia. Married 54
years to his wife Pat, Heath is a father of two,
grandfather of three, and great-grandfather of
three and lives in Summit, New Jersey.
Every October, Heath returns to the
Homewood campus for Alumni Leadership
Weekend and has the opportunity to meet with
current Heath Fellows. He asks them about their
research and their experiences at Hopkins and
earlier and inquires about what sorts of obstacles
they may have faced as women in the field.
“It’s nice to be able to share with someone
who takes women’s issues seriously and wants to
improve things,” says Stephanie Fraley, a Heath
Fellow who is a second-year PhD candidate in
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
It was at one of these meetings with Heath
that Fraley shared a story about how she walked
into her Engineering Physics class the first
semester of her freshman year at a small state
school and realized she was the only woman
out of 30 students. “Before that, I thought the
gender gap for women in engineering was an
old issue,” says Fraley. Now researching focal
adhesion proteins at Hopkins, she wants to
become a research professor after earning her
PhD. The Heath Fellowship stipend, which she
used to buy a faster laptop for data analysis for
her research, is helping Fraley achieve that goal.
“It’s wonderful that he really takes a genuine interest in each one of us and in the
“
“
research that we are doing,” says Kathryn
Onesios, a third-year PhD candidate in the
Department of Geography and Environmental
Engineering who received a Heath Fellowship
in 2006. Onesios is researching the use of
microorganisms to remove pharmaceuticals and
personal care products from water. She used her
Heath Fellowship stipend to attend a conference and purchase lab supplies.
Heath’s relationship with the Fellows often
continues after they graduate from Hopkins.
He keeps abreast of their careers and their families, receives news of their new jobs, promotions, weddings, and baby announcements. “It’s
like they’re my daughters,” he says.
Currently at the Whiting School of Engineering, women comprise 32 percent of undergraduate students, an increase of 40 percent since
2004. Women graduate students make up 26
percent of the population, a 5 percent increase
since 2004. And the percentage of female faculty
members has gone from less than 10 percent to
almost 20 percent in the last four years.
Heath is pleased by the changes at the
Whiting School, but he remains committed to
the idea that there needs to be more women in
engineering and science worldwide. He wants
to continue to help make this happen. “I’d like
to think this is just the beginning,” he says.
“When women regularly start winning Nobel
Prizes in the sciences and being promoted in
great numbers to very high positions in the
field, then I might relax. Until then, I think
we’ve got a ways to go.” —Maria Blackburn
On the Web: Student Blogs
Want the scoop on the ins and outs of daily life at
Johns Hopkins? Make sure to check out the student blogs
on Hopkins Interactive. Updated regularly by Engineering
and Arts & Sciences undergraduates, the website provides
a behind-the-scenes look at life on the Homewood
campus. From the classroom to the dorms and beyond,
you’ll have the chance to learn about Hopkins from the
true experts! Visit: http://apply.jhu.edu/hi
30
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
Natalie Givans, MA ’89
Self-Assured and
Resilient
Motivated self-starter. Successful executive.
Intelligent engineer.
All of these words describe Natalie Givans,
MA ’89. As a vice president at Booz Allen
Hamilton she directs the work of 1,800 people
on the firm’s Assurance and Resilience
Capability team and is responsible for more
than $300 million in annual sales.
Givans has spent her entire 24-year career
with the company, working her way up from
an entry-level consulting engineer.
“I originally took the job at Booz Allen
because it was not just a technical job but was
also an opportunity to interact with government
buyers and integrate service offerings, and to
learn about people management and marketing
skills and about business development,” she says.
With a freshly inked bachelor’s degree in
electrical engineering from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), her first project
was subcontracting with a company that integrated a system providing secure connections
over desktop telephones. While separate vendors built the actual phones, her role supported
the development of the device’s signaling plan.
“The signaling plan was the heart and soul
of the project,” she says. “We were figuring out
how device A talked to device B, securely. That
was my first project and I was immediately trusted and respected in a technological position.
How exciting is that—to be 21 years old, just
graduated, and trusted by these senior people?”
she says. “Additionally, I was often the only
woman in the room. It was a little intimidating
at times, but I learned I could hold my own.”
It was not long before Givans, who had constantly juggled multiple jobs as an undergraduate, discovered that full-time employment left
her with enough spare time to tackle graduate
school. Just six months after joining Booz
Allen, she began evening courses in electrical
engineering in what is now the Whiting School’s
Engineering for Professionals (EP).
“Because I knew what I was doing with my
life, I could focus my education around it,” she
says. She especially enjoyed the program’s flexibility, the teamwork, and the applied nature of
her course work. “The timing was perfect,” she
says, noting that the topics she learned in class,
such as using CAD programs that ran traffic signals, dovetailed seamlessly with the work she was
doing with signaling and communications plans.
Meanwhile, at Booz Allen, she was quickly
rising through the ranks. She had joined the
firm with a group of about 30 others under the
umbrella of Communications Security. “It was
sort of an experiment on their part to see if
they could hire engineers and train them for
the various aspects of consulting,” she says.
“Obviously, it worked.”
“As my role grew, I brought on junior staff,
developed a team, and became an expert at pro-
tocols and security considerations for devices,
such as voice coders and encryption.” All of this
occurred at the time when communications
security began to merge with computer security.
“What resulted, sometime between 1987 and
1990, was Information Security, the genesis of
IT Security, Information Assurance, and cyber
security,” she explains. “Early on, I had a sense
that all of this was important, and Booz Allen
did too.”
Today, as leader of the firm’s 1,800-member
Assurance and Resilience Capability team,
Givans travels all over the world. She explains
the goal of her team’s work succinctly:
“Assurance is making sure that the customer’s
mission is able to proceed in any degraded
situation, from a hacker to a natural disaster.
Resilience is the ability to recover and operate
as quickly as possible after such an incident and
to resume that mission.”
As a leader, Givans firmly believes that “you
need to build the next generation behind you,
so that you can continue to grow yourself; to
coach and mentor so you can continue to lead
and have more impact.”
She also attributes much of her success to
her family: husband, Charlie; her 20-year-old
twins, Samantha and Andrew; and her 8-yearold son, Zane. “Family added a critical dimension to my ability to do my job,” she says. “I
used to be willing to be a workaholic, but I
have learned to better prioritize time and gauge
what’s really important.”
Not one to waste “spare time,” Givans also
serves as the vice chair for the Armed Forces
Communications Electronics Association,
supports the Corporate Partnership Council
of the Society of Women Engineers, and serves
on the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s
Capital region Women’s Advisory Board.
“It’s extremely important to get girls
involved with and excited about engineering,”
she says. “I have a mission to get more women
into this field and keep them in it.”
By anyone’s measure, Givans sets a fine
example. — Angela Roberts
Society of Engineering
Alumni Career Night
On the evening of September 24, 2008, 37
engineering alumni returned to campus to share
their professional experiences and insights with
engineering students. A panel discussion was followed by a reception, and in this casual setting
students had the chance to speak with alumni
from a wide range of professions and get the
insiders’ scoop on the working world.
“During the reception, I talked to someone
from a relatively small startup and others from
large multinationals like Northrop-Grumman,”
says Shirley Leong, a chemical and biomolecular
engineering graduate student. “The great thing
was that all of the alumni had vast networks I
could tap into. One person I met forwarded my
resume to his friend at a company I’m interested
in. It’s a tough job market this year and any connections I can make will definitely help.”
Alumni panelist Ken Loeber ’84, the executive managing director of CB Richard Ellis Global
Project Management, is committed to improving
the transition from college to the working world
for Hopkins graduates. ”Hopkins was a great
Sarah Thompson ’08 was among the WSE alumni who returned to campus for SEA Career Night.
place to learn how to think at a higher level, but
when I graduated, if you weren’t going on to grad
school, there was little to no support to help
you enter the business world,” he recalls. “Over
the past few years I have felt a recognition by
Hopkins that we needed to improve this. I always
tell my three kids they’re not allowed to complain
about something unless they’re prepared to
engage in a solution—so I offered my help.”
Says Mark Presnell, director of Student
Career Services, “There is no better source for
information about career opportunities than
alumni in the field who can describe duties,
tasks, and challenges that they face every day.”
If you are interested in becoming involved with the
SEA’s activities, including opportunities to serve
as a professional mentor and resource to current
students, please email hopkinssea@jhu.edu.
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
31
A Weekend to Remember
October 3-5, 2008
Each year in the fall Johns Hopkins University
hosts Leadership Weekend for all of the
divisional alumni councils and boards, the
University’s Alumni Council, and the university
Trustees. The Whiting School’s National
Advisory Council (NAC) and Society of
Engineering Alumni (SEA) had several events
throughout the weekend in conjunction with
the university events. On Friday the SEA
hosted an alumni-student picnic on the Engineering Quad which was very well attended—
over 300 students and 50 alumni networked
and enjoyed barbeque food while connecting
on the quad. Friday evening many alumni from
all divisions joined together to celebrate the
20th anniversary of the University’s Alumni
Council, the governing body for the Alumni
Association. On Saturday morning President
Brody addressed the alumni for the last time
before his retirement from Johns Hopkins.
After the president’s talk each of the groups met
to plan for the coming year, and that evening
the SEA and NAC joined together for a relaxing
evening on the Homewood campus at a dinner
in the Glass Pavilion with entertainment by
comedian Jeff Caldwell ’84.
Alumni and students gather for a group photo at the annual student-alumni picnic.
32
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
SEA Council members Tara
Johnson ’02, Frank Krantz
’49 and Amy Dodrill ’95 at
the annual council meeting.
SEA Council member
Marybeth Miceli Newton ’99
networks with students at
the annual student-alumni
picnic.
Alumni Awards
The Whiting School’s
alumni and friends who
attend Leadership Weekend
provide resources that are
invaluable—expertise and
experience. Their guidance
continues to play an
essential role in the school’s
success.
Johna Till Johnson ’86 and Steve Naron ’70,
members of the SEA Council, enjoy a
stand-up routine by comedian Jeff Caldwell ’84.
NAC chair Joseph Reynolds ’69, his wife
Lynn, and SEA chair Joe Strohecker ’53
take time to catch up after the day’s
meetings.
The Heritage Award
Established 1973, the Heritage Award honors
alumni and friends of Johns Hopkins who have
contributed outstanding service over an extended
period to the progress of the university or the activities of the Alumni Association.
Robert F. Bradley, PE’ 73 , MA ’96
Bob Bradley, who
received his BS in civil
engineering at Johns
Hopkins and a MBA
from Wilmington College
in 1982, returned to
Johns Hopkins where he
received a master’s degree
in real estate.
Bradley’s extensive involvement in Johns
Hopkins is remarkable for the years of dedicated
service and the variety of positions he has held.
He has served on advisory councils for both
schools he attended at Johns Hopkins, served
as treasurer of numerous committees and
groups, and was a moderator of the School of
Professional Studies in Business and Education
Leadership Forum. For many years, Bradley
served the Hopkins community as a member
of the Alumni Council. He was also a charter
member of the Society of Engineering Alumni
(SEA).
He has also been instrumental in increasing
financial support for Hopkins by encouraging
other alumni to give and by offering important
introductions to potential corporate partners.
Bradley remains active as a member of the
Society of Engineering Alumni’s Nominations
Committee. He frequently attends alumni
events, including the annual Leadership
Weekend, and has participated in several of the
Alumni Association’s travel programs.
Formerly president of Morris & Ritchie
Associates Inc., Bradley is now retired and
living in Naples, Florida.
Charles “Jack” S. Schrodel Jr. ’57
Jack Schrodel received
a bachelor’s degree in
chemical engineering
from Johns Hopkins in
1957. He followed up
with a master’s degree in
chemical engineering
from the University of
Pennsylvania in 1967.
Schrodel has been an instrumental member
of the Society of Engineering Alumni (SEA)
Council for many years, recently concluding a
six-year term as an officer of the SEA. His most
recent position was Secretary of the Council,
and he has also served as the regional liaison
and treasurer. As regional liaison, he launched
engineering alumni events across the country
and created a base for those events to grow.
As treasurer, he created a budget tracking form
that is still used by the SEA to determine the
allocation of funds. Schrodel remains very
active with the SEA; he and his wife, JoAnne,
regularly attend Hopkins alumni events to represent the SEA and to recruit new members.
The Schrodels have endowed a scholarship
to benefit undergraduates in the Whiting
School of Engineering. In addition, Schrodel
enjoys every opportunity to meet the scholarship recipients to provide support and encouragement.
Schrodel is retired from the Sun Oil
Company, where he was a director of information services. Subsequently, he was vice president of a consulting business specializing in
computer data center support.
Raquel M. Silverberg ’92
Raquel Silverberg’s
dedication to Johns
Hopkins started when
she was a student and
served as a member of
the Senior Gift
Committee, and has
deepened in the years
since she earned her BS
in chemical engineering from the Whiting
School in 1992.
Soon after graduation, Silverberg became
an integral member of the Young Alumni Fund
(YAF), an alumni leadership group that raises
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
33
awareness of the importance of giving back to
Hopkins among recent alumni (graduates of
10 years or less). She became the first engineer
and first female to hold the chairmanship of
the YAF. Under her leadership, the YAF raised
funds, increased participation in giving and
involvement, and contributed funds to the
university to be used for student amenities.
This academic year marks Silverberg’s
eighth year as a member of the Society of
Engineering Alumni (SEA) Council. She has
spent the past six years as a member of the
executive committee serving as vice chair,
secretary, and chair.
Having worked globally throughout her
career, Silverberg emphasizes the importance
of getting students involved in alumni groups.
She has encouraged all members of the SEA
to take an interest in student activities at the
Whiting School and also to support the Dean’s
efforts to fund student group projects.
Woodrow Wilson Award
The Woodrow Wilson Award for Distinguished
Government Service honors alumni who have
brought credit to the university by their current or
recently concluded distinguished public service as
elected or appointed officials.
Robert M. Summers ’76, PhD ’76
There may be no
environmental cause
more dear to the hearts
of Maryland’s residents
than preserving the
Chesapeake Bay, and
Robert Summers has
played a vital role in
protecting and improving
the water quality of the Bay and the Maryland
environment for more than two decades.
Summers, who received a BA in 1976 and
PhD in 1981 in environmental engineering
from Johns Hopkins, was appointed deputy
secretary of the Maryland Department of the
Environment (MDE) in 2007. Together with
secretary Shari T. Wilson, Summers leads the
MDE’s planning, regulatory, management, and
financing programs to protect public health,
restore and protect air and water quality, clean
up contaminated land, and ensure proper
management of hazardous and solid wastes.
34
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
Summers is the governor’s representative on
the Interstate Commission on the Potomac
River Basin and the Susquehanna River Basin
Commission. He is also the MDE’s
representative on the Maryland Bay Restoration
Fund Advisory Committee and the Governor’s
Advisory Committee on the Management and
Protection of the State’s Water Resources.
For nearly 24 years, Summers has served
the citizens of Maryland in various capacities
within Maryland’s progressive and nationally
recognized environmental programs, providing
expertise on scientific and technical issues
related to water pollution control, drinking
water protection, and environmental laws and
regulations.
Linton Wells II, ’73, PhD ’75
Born on the Atlantic
coast of Angola, Linton
Wells II seemed destined
to spend his life connected to the ocean.
He lived for four years
on a houseboat and spent
a year and a half as a
teenager living aboard
trans-Atlantic ocean liners going back and forth
to the Mediterranean before entering the U.S.
Naval Academy.
Wells graduated from Annapolis in 1967
with a BS in physics and oceanography and
went on to earn his MS in mathematical
sciences in 1973 and a PhD in international
relations in 1975 from Johns Hopkins. He
graduated from the Japanese National Institute
for Defense Studies in Tokyo in 1983, the first
U.S. Naval officer ever to attend that institute.
In 26 years of naval service, Wells served
on a variety of surface ships, including as
commander of a destroyer squadron and a
guided missile destroyer. In addition, he
acquired a wide range of experience in
operations analysis, as well as Pacific, Indian
Ocean and Middle East affairs, and
Command & Control systems.
Wells is currently a distinguished research
professor at the National Defense University
(NDU) and serves as the transformation chair.
Prior to his career at NDU, he held several
high-level government positions, serving for 13
years as a civilian in the Office of the Secretary
of Defense.
As Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense (Networks and Information
Integration), and previously as the Acting
Assistant Secretary and Department of Defense
Chief Information Officer (CIO), he worked to
ensure the security and effectiveness of our
nation's critical military networks. Wells also
serves as a member of the Whiting School's
National Advisory Council.
Distinguished Alumnus Award
Established in 1978, this award honors alumni
who have typified the Johns Hopkins tradition of
excellence and brought credit to the university by
their personal accomplishment, professional
achievement, or humanitarian service.
Yih-Ho Michel Pao, Dr. Eng ’62
Yin-Ho “Mike” Pao,
who received his PhD in
fluid mechanics from Johns
Hopkins University in
1962, is a pioneer in the
waterjet and windpower
industries. He has led
efforts to develop and
commercialize new technologies and led the
creation of three new industries: waterjet
machining and trenchless and waterjet surface
preparation.
Currently, Pao is the chairman and CEO of
Floating Windfarms Corporation, which aims
to convert offshore wind to low-cost “green”
electricity, at a cost much below the cost of coal
electricity, using offshore floating and nonfloating vertical axis wind turbines.
Pao was elected a member of the National
Academy of Engineering in 2000 for his
research, development, and commercialization
of waterjet technology for machining, tunnel
boring, and surface preparation. He was recognized in 1998 by Industries et Techniques, a
leading French journal, as one of the 100 most
important innovators for the past 40 years. His
companies have obtained more than 150 patents and received numerous awards, including
the “No Dig” Award from the International
Society of Trenchless Technology.
Charles W. Shivery ’67, ’76
Staying Power
When Charles W. Shivery landed his first job
with Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) right out
of college, he was waiting to see what he really
wanted to do. After more than 36 years with
the utility industry, it seems he may have found
the answer.
Since 2004, Shivery has served as the chairman, president, and CEO of Northeast Utilities
(NU), New England’s largest utility system.
More than 2 million customers across
Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and New
Hampshire get their natural gas and electricity
from the publicly-traded Fortune 500 energy
company, which employs some 5,900 people.
In 2002, when Shivery joined NU as the
president of its competitive businesses, the
company owned and operated several unregulated businesses, including merchant generation, wholesale, and retail marketing. In 2004,
Shivery became chairman, president and CEO,
and in 2005 made the decision to shed the
competitive businesses and focus instead on
developing NU’s own regulated infrastructure
for energy transmission, distribution, and generation. The divestiture, which was complete by
2006, turned out to be a prescient move. “It
was the right decision for NU at the time and
has clearly kept us in good stead in the current
economic environment,” Shivery says.
He adds that NU is committed to being
environmentally responsible. “We provide safe,
reliable energy for our customers, and we
believe it is our corporate responsibility to consider all possible environmental impacts of our
business decisions and our operations,” he says.
Before transplanting to New England with
his wife, Chris, the Eastern Shore native spent
nearly three decades in Baltimore with
Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE), which
he joined in 1972, and then with its parent
company, Constellation Energy Group.
“I had worked at BGE as a student engineer for a couple of summers and, when I
finished my first degree at Hopkins, they
offered me a job,” he recalls. “I wasn’t sure if
I wanted to work for a utility company at that
time, but it seemed like an interesting job. I
had the opportunity to see many aspects of the
company—from facilities engineering to
internal auditing to positions in the treasury
organization—which was a wonderful way to
learn about the company as a whole.”
Shivery ascended the corporate ladder
within BGE and later Constellation, and over
the years held a variety of senior management
positions: vice president, CFO, and secretary
of BGE; director of Orion Power Holdings;
president and director of Constellation Energy
Solutions; chairman and CEO of Constellation
Energy Source; and chairman, president, and
CEO of Constellation Power Source. At the
time of his retirement from Constellation
Energy Group in 2002, he was co-president.
Shivery, who earned an MBA from the
University of Baltimore in 1975, notes that the
single biggest event that occurred during his
tenure at BGE was when the utility industry
deregulated in the late 1990s. The move gave
him a unique opportunity to start Constellation
Power Source, the company’s competitive marketing and trading function.
Looking back, Shivery says that the breadth
and depth of his early experiences at BGE
served him well in the long run. “Any young
individual, no matter their discipline, who
wants to progress further in a company needs
broad experience of many aspects of that organization, which helps not only their career but
their value to the company,” he says.
He adds, “That’s one thing we try to do at
NU; we try to ensure that our employees have
the ability to reach their highest potential but
also see different aspects of the operations of the
company. We feel that is an important path to
becoming part of the senior management team.”
Although clearly a savvy businessman,
Shivery believes it is his engineering background
that played an important role in his success.
“The rigor of an engineering course of study
develops one’s ability to look at problems objectively and analytically,” he says. “Having an
engineering background to me has always been
extremely helpful. Hopkins did a lot to instill
the disciplined approach to solving problems.” —Mary Talalay
Re-challenge yourself.
Online courses: same excellence,
greater convenience.
u The M.S. in Systems Engineering Program is now available
fully online as well as on campus.
u The program offers four concentrations: Software Systems
Engineering, Information Assurance Systems Engineering,
Biomedical Systems Engineering, and Modeling and
Simulation Systems Engineering.
Excellence Matters:
Christian Utara is an instructor in our
graduate Systems Engineering Program.
For more information
about our online offerings:
uwww.epp.jhu.edu
uepp@jhu.edu
u1.800.548.3647
u JHU-EP also offers part-time graduate programs in more
than 14 other engineering and applied science disciplines.
09-00209-01
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
35
WILL KIRK
Stephanie Sobczak lines up El Monstruo while teammates John Falzon
and Vincent Rolin look on. The group’s car made it to the semifinals.
Final Exam
On a Friday afternoon in early December,
students in Allison Okamura’s Mechanical
Engineering Freshman Laboratory, working in
teams of three, wound string around wooden
dowels, carved foamcore with X-Acto knives, and
cut pieces of balsa and plywood.
Their assignment—building a vehicle powered only by two mousetraps and six rubber
bands—is the culminating project in the fall
semester’s introductory mechanical engineering lab. “The mousetrap-and-rubber-band car
is a classic design assignment,” Okamura says.
“What makes this project interesting are the
twists I’ve added.”
The “twists” can be found in the assignment’s 27 rules which, along with weight and
size restrictions and a prohibition on pre-manufactured assemblies (not parts), state that the
cars, when competing in a single-elimination
tournament, must slalom between two two-liter
soda bottles. And, as they traverse the 11-footlong, paper-covered course, they must also lay
down a continuous line from the start to finish
gates. “It’s usually the most mundane things that
cause the greatest frustrations,” Okamura says.
36
JOHNs Hopkins ENGINEERING WINTER 2009
Konstantinos Bertsatos and team have
stripped the wheels and axels from a toy allterrain vehicle. The four tires sit on the lab table
as Bertsatos removes auto parts from a plastic
storage container. There’s a Liquid Glitter eyeliner
in Starlit Black (“The package says it will make a
continuous line,” Bertsatos states, looking at the
tube skeptically), a red plastic Nathan’s Hot Dog
fork, two CDs, a few pieces of bent aluminum,
and the regulation mousetraps and rubberbands.
The car, Flash Gordon, though unassembled,
is predicted to be a strong contender by Jason
Glasser, a first-year grad student and the lab’s
teaching assistant. “It’s a great design,” Glasser
says, “I especially like that they’re tilting the axel
because it takes advantage of the geometry of
the situation.”
On the following Monday afternoon, though,
neither the tilted axel nor the Sharpie marker
(which replaced the eyeliner) really mattered.
Eighteen inches into the course, a piece of string
wrapped around a dowel caught on the car’s
frame and Flash Gordon never made it to the
first soda bottle.
Last One Done, a car that Glasser thought
had potential if the students could resolve
some steering problems, at first appeared to
work beautifully. The crowd cheered as the car,
the first to successfully maneuver through the
course, crossed the finish line. In the starting
line excitement, though, the magic marker’s cap
hadn’t been removed. No line was drawn so Last
One Done was eliminated.
The winner turned out to be Awesome-O.
The secret to the car’s success? Team member
Nicholas Salzman explains, “We built our own
practice course, calibrated the car again and
again and again, and knew exactly how we
needed to angle it. That’s how we did it.” ­
—Abby Lattes
Strength
endurance
will
power
A solid financial future – it’s a goal that
you and Johns Hopkins share. Planning
for this future is crucial, especially in
challenging times like these. You can help
ensure that the people and institutions
you care most about will remain strong
in the future. All it takes is Will Power.
•
Provide for your family.
•
Protect your heirs from
unnecessary estate taxes.
•
Provide for the institutions
close to your heart.
Gift Planning experts at Johns
Hopkins can furnish information about
tax-wise giving, which you can share
with your estate advisor, and provide
sample language for a bequest to
The Whiting School of Engineering.
When you are ready, please contact us.
Johns Hopkins Office of Gift Planning
410-516-7954 or 800-548-1268;
e-mail giftplanning@jhu.edu;
or visit www.plannedgifts.org/jhu/.
If you have already included The Whiting
School of Engineering in your Will but have
not notified us, we would greatly appreciate
hearing from you.
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