Mechanical Engineering Student News

Senior Sam Hollenbach starts as the incumbent quarterback for the Terrapins football team for the 2006 season while balancing mechanical engineering undergraduate coursework. This fall he is enrolled in ENME 361: Vibration, Control and Optimization, in pursuit of an automotive design emphasis to his mechanical engineering degree. Sam gets tutoring help from a Ph.D. student for his courses and maintains a 3.93 GPA. How does he do it?

“I try to break down the test questions into what I feel comfortable with and what I need work on, and just do a lot of practice problems,” states Hollenbach. “It’s not uncommon for me to spend 7 or 8 hours of the day being up for a test studying.”

Kickoff for the first Terrapins football game on Saturday, September 2 against William and Mary is set for 6:05 p.m., from Chevy Chase Bank Field at Byrd Stadium. The game will be a televised taped delay by Comcast SportsNet, available online live pay per view on ESPN360 and broadcast on the Terrapin Sports Radio Network. Radio pregame starts at 4:30 p.m..

Reliability Engineering Ph.D. student William McGill recently won the 2006 Society of Risk Analysis Student Merit Award from the Economics and Benefits Specialty Group of the Society for Risk Analysis, for his exceptional paper entitled "Quantitative Methods for Terrorism Warnings Analysis". The award will be presented at the 2006 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting in December 2006 at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland, and includes a $500 check in addition to the recognition. William works at the Center for Technology and Systems Management as a graduate student under the advisement of Dr. Bilal Ayyub.

Ph.D. student Arvind Ananthanarayanan was awarded a travel grant from Arizona State to present his research “Development of In-Mold Assembly Methods for Producing Mesoscale Articulated Joints” at the National Science Foundation's Division of Design and Manufacturing Innovation (DMI) Grantees Conference this July in St. Louis . Arvind was among 87 students selected from over 300 students who applied for the grant. Arvind is advised by Associate Professor S.K. Gupta.

Research conducted by Ph.D. student Prahalad Parthangal was highlighted on nanotechweb.org, the website for Nanotechnology, a prominent interdisciplinary nanotechnology science journal. A brief abstract for Parthangal’s research on self-assembled nanoparticles over nanowire arrays which inspire novel nano-sensors, can be viewed here. Parthangal is advised by Professor Michael Zachariah.

ME Undergraduate student Mai Phuong Le was one of three Clark School students to win the Gates Millennium Scholarship. The Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS), funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was established in 1999 to provide outstanding low income African American, American Indian/Alaska Natives, Asian Pacific Islander American, and Hispanic American students with an opportunity to complete an undergraduate college education in any discipline area of interest.

Published August 15, 2006