Dartmouth Engineer

DESIGNING WOMEN: Elizabeth Gerber ’98 founded Design for America. Photograph courtesy of Elizabeth Gerber.

Elizabeth Gerber ’98 knows a good design isn’t just about technical function—it’s about developing a product that is both usable and desired. Trained as a product designer and behavioral researcher, the Northwestern assistant professor of mechanical engineering uses behavioral science to understand and inform the design of products and services.

Gerber’s “aha” moment came while working on an aircraft fuel gauge while at B.F. Goodrich Aerospace Engineering. “At the very end of a long discussion on functionality, very casually someone introduced the fact that a mechanic refueling the plane is going to need to read the gauge—while standing on a ladder leaning against the side of the plane,” she says. “One of my favorite parts is talking to people about how they actually experience a product—understanding the technical, behavioral, and emotional needs.” She is exploring that interface as the principal investigator for the Creative Action Lab at Northwestern’s Segal Design Institute, which investigates the role of technology in supporting individual and group creativity. There she applies behavioral sciences to the design of tools and practices to improve creative performance.

Gerber is also the founder of Design for America (DFA), an extracurricular, design-based learning initiative building creative confidence in students through design for local and social impact.

“DFA is a ‘product,’ a pipeline for future innovators,” says Gerber. “My dream is that all DFA students firmly believe that they have the ability to innovate solutions to challenging societal problems and believe that their ideas are valued.”

Her efforts came full circle this spring, when DFA staff led an innovation workshop at Dartmouth. More than 70 participants from various academic departments—anthropology, geography, English, and engineering—gathered to tackle a single design problem: helping out elderly people living in rural New Hampshire and Vermont.

Gerber says she first found inspiration for unconventional design education when leading Dartmouth’s first-year outdoors orientation. “I realized the potential of peer-to-peer learning and the transformational power of physical and mental immersion experiences in transforming our identity and confidence,” she told Dave Seliger ’12 for his first post in Core77, the leading industrial design blog. “I danced the ‘Salty Dog Rag’ with the first years…then sent them off on their trips with a sense of excitement of what they would learn from each [other] and about themselves.” You can read the whole post at core77.com.

A new Dartmouth chapter of DFA, led by Alison Polton-Simon ’14, Sean Hammett ’14, and Lucas Yamamura ’14, begins this fall.

Elizabeth Gerber gave a Jones Seminar entitled “Designing to Enhance Confidence and Effectiveness” at Thayer School on January 15, 2010.

>> M.E.M. grad Gabe Farkas Th’02 is putting his second graduate degree, in statistics, to work in the San Antonio Spurs’ front office as coordinator of basketball analytics. Farkas, a former contributor to Mike Kurylo’s CourtsideTimes.Net, says his research is used primarily as part of game strategy and to build the roster. The amount of data being collected—publicly and privately—is growing exponentially, he says, and the next big thing in sports analytics will be the development of systems that integrate all the disparate data sources. A basketball fan since he was a kid, Farkas brings a passion for and understanding of the sport to his review of the numbers. “The NBA is definitely the sport I’ve followed the closest,” he says. “To work in professional sports, you need to be really dedicated, since the hours sometimes can be long and the workload demanding. Also, you need to have a solid, non-numerical understanding of the game to be able to gauge if your results pass ‘the laugh test.’ ”

>> Dave Lindberg ’09 Th’10 is bringing his experience working on Thayer School’s Formula Hybrid racecar to Mombasa, Kenya. As the lead engineer of Mobius Motors, Lindberg is hoping to create the next generation of reliable and affordable transportation across Africa. The challenge is to create a vehicle capable of handling the continent’s unpaved and poorly maintained terrain while keeping it inexpensive. “My company plans to incorporate low-cost components available from small-production cars into a welded tubular steel chassis, sparing the amenities and using only the most essential systems,” says Lindberg. “We hope the end result gives lower-income people access to mobility and also serves as a platform for transportation entrepreneurs, giving even the most impoverished access to employment.” He’s working on developing two prototypes (Mobius Two and Mobius Three), lowering costs, and organizing production. A majority of the parts are off-the-shelf Toyota components, he says, but the steel chassis and all custom parts were modeled in SolidWorks for fabrication by local workers in Kenya. After spending the last two months in the shop, Lindberg has almost finished his first prototype. Then it’s on to the development of Mobius Three before he returns to the States this winter.

CAR GUY: Dave Lindberg ’09 Th’10 engineers affordable cars for African conditions. Photograph courtesy of Dave Lindberg.

ASK THE EXPERT

The Expert: Philip Coyle ’56 Th’57

Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs,
White House Office of Scientific and Technology Policy

Photograph by Dennis Cook/Associated Press.

When it comes to national security, there’s not much Philip Coyle hasn’t handled in his 40-year career. He spent 33 years developing and testing nuclear weapons, lasers, and other high-tech systems at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—and worked for several Democratic and Republican administrations.

During the Carter administration, he oversaw the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons programs, nuclear safeguards and security, arms control, and non-proliferation. During the Clinton administration, he served as assistant secretary of defense. President George W. Bush appointed him to the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission. President Obama appointed Coyle to his current position in 2010.

The going hasn’t always been easy. Coyle attracted both praise and criticism following his 2009 assessment before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee that America’s missile defense program suffers from technological and testing shortcomings and questionable strategic value.

In the following, Coyle discusses his career in national security.

What lessons from your years developing and testing weapons did you bring to your current position?
This answer isn’t original, but it’s true: I learned that the devil is in the details. Success can hinge on persistent attention to engineering details. In products for everyday life as well as for our soldiers in battle, those details also involve the expected operational environment and the expectations of the end user in practice.

You’ve worked for Democratic and Republican administrations. What challenges come with that territory?
All administrations feel vulnerable to accusations that they aren’t doing enough to solve this or that particular problem, even as they are doing everything that they can, and doing it as well as anyone could. Why haven’t we solved cancer or world hunger or world peace? It’s certainly not for lack of trying, but rather because the problems themselves are so difficult.

What is it like working at the Office of Scientific and Technology Policy?
From one day to the next we may not know what issue we are going to have to grapple with. It may be the outbreak of a new disease strain, something new happening in the Middle East, or something to do with cybersecurity. We worked hard to help the Japanese with the aftermaths of the earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent nuclear reactor accidents near Fukushima. We need to be able to adapt quickly, and we do.

We also work on America’s energy security. For example, the Navy and Air Force are experimenting with biofuels made from algae in fighter jet aircraft. The Department of Defense (DOD) can help America develop a clean-energy economy by being an early buyer of effective clean-energy technologies, much as DOD investments in semiconductors spurred commercial industries in computers and cell phones.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of your career?
My entire career has been devoted to American national security. I’ve worked on developing and testing some of America’s nuclear weapons. I’ve worked on experimental new sources of energy. In the DOD my job was to make sure that the systems we provide our troops would be effective in battle. It has been rewarding to see the things I have worked on come to fruition and contribute to a strong national defense.

Let’s spool backwards. What did you study at Thayer?
My degree was in mechanical engineering, but at Thayer I studied fluid mechanics, heat transfer, optics, electronics, economics, and many other fields. That turned out to be important because my career was never limited to mechanical engineering. My education at Thayer gave me the confidence that I could solve just about any technical problem that came my way.

Did any professors particularly influence you?
Professor J.J. Ermenc was an important influence for me. He was studying renewable energy decades before it was “cool.” All the professors at Thayer engaged students in a way I’d never experienced. They discussed each topic with us, taking our feedback and questions until they were sure we understood. They didn’t just lecture at us; they worked with us. It was a wonderful experience, and it changed my life.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Events and People and Summer 2011 sets of images on Flickr.

Ashifi Gogo Th’09 was awarded $10,000 by the Clinton Global Initiative to develop his anti-counterfeit drug technology venture, Sproxil.

WORLD CLASS: Sproxil founder Ashifi Gogo Th’09 was awarded $10,000 by the Clinton Global Initiative. Photograph courtesy of Clinton Global Initiative.

During the Global Initiative’s annual meeting in September, Gogo presented an update on Sproxil’s progress. The mobile phone-based service enables customers to confirm a medication’s authenticity via text messaging. By the end of 2010 the service was available for up to 2.5 million items in Nigeria. “This is a genuinely remarkable accomplishment,” former President Bill Clinton remarked after Gogo’s presentation, adding that “putting people in charge of their own healthcare” is “empowering.” You can watch Gogo’s full presentation at sproxil.com. The company also earned the People’s Choice Award at the 2010 Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition and an honorable mention at IBM’s SmartCamp, which highlights start-ups that are making the planet smarter.

>> With counterfeit drugs making up about 10 percent of the global market, Gogo isn’t the only grad developing mobile phone solutions to the problem. Nathan Sigworth ’07, who had his first entrepreneurial success as co-inventor of the Gyrobike, the ENGS 21 project that is now for sale commercially (see “A Few of Our Favorite Things”), and his former Dartmouth roommate, Taylor Thompson ’08, co-founded PharmaSecure in New Delhi, India. The company announced that the pharmaceutical firm Unichem has bought 70 million PharmaSecure codes to verify the quality of its products. Customers check the code via text messaging. “Putting the codes on the market, having the consumers authenticate, this is all building a very, very valuable network and communications platform with consumers,” Sigworth told The Christian Science Monitor in December.

>> Drew Wenzel ’08 Th’10 is living at the intersection of technology and business. To get there Wenzel, who now works on green building designs at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, needed a solid engineering education and a firm understanding of the business world. He needed a master’s in engineering management (M.E.M.), a degree that is gaining popularity among students and employers, the Financial Times reported in an article on the rise of the business-savvy engineer (PDF). “The M.E.M. gives you the ability to speak both languages,” Wenzel told the paper. The degree is “for engineering grads who know they don’t want to spend their entire careers in design or in a lab,” Thayer Dean Joseph J. Helble explained to the Financial Times. “They want to do broader, systems-based engineering by identifying promising new product lines. They want to create a vision for the technology in the broadest business sense.” More students than ever are following Wenzel’s path: Applications to Thayer’s M.E.M. program have doubled in the past five years to more than 250 applications for 50 spots.

>> “Recalling the events on a small Pacific atoll in 1945, I am reminded how camaraderie can spring up in the unlikeliest situations,” Sam Florman ’46 Th’46 wrote in The New York Times on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender to the Allies on September 2, 1945.

PEACE OFFERING: Sam Florman ’46 Th’46 stands beside a note of friendship a Japanese officer gave him after World War II. Photograph courtesy of Sam Florman.

Florman described his first engineering experiences after leaving Thayer School. As one of the newly commissioned ensigns in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps, he began the voyage across the Pacific to join one of the Seabee battalions being mustered for an invasion of the Japanese mainland — only to arrive the day before the surrender.

During World War II Sam Florman was in charge of building a dam for the U.S. Army in Truk. Photograph courtesy of Sam Florman.

Now it was time to rebuild a country, or at least Truk, an atoll in the Caroline Islands that had served as headquarters for the Japanese fleet and was now a pile of rubble. Florman was put in charge of one of the less imposing projects: building a small earthen dam on a mountain stream for the American military’s water supply system. Florman was assigned three Seabees and about two dozen Japanese men and their lieutenant. He recalls how both sides faced off the first day until he ceremoniously unrolled the drawings he had prepared. Soon some were driving stakes while others attacked the earth with shovels and picks. “Within a few days the two groups had settled into an efficient working routine interspersed with episodes of playfulness,” he remembers. “The anticipated generation-long era of fear and hatred seemed to have been reduced to mere days.” The crew completed the project in several weeks and planned a dedication ceremony — where the Japanese lieutenant presented Florman with a small ceramic statue and a note of friendship. “The Thayer experience was a wonderful preparation for work in the Seabees,” Florman, now the chairman of the Kreisler Borg Florman General Construction Co. in Scarsdale, N.Y., tells Dartmouth Engineer. “The hands-on activity — field trips, drafting, surveying, lab work with concrete, metals, water in flumes and pipes — was memorable. Joe Ermenc’s thermodynamics classes, which started with a problem on the board every day, were a preparation that stood me in good stead for any theoretical challenges that life was to present.”

>> He’s done it again: Dallas-based racer and businessman Charles Nearburg ’72 Th’74 made history at the Bonneville Salt Flats in his Spirit of Rett streamliner, breaking a 45-year-old land-speed record and also setting the fastest single-engine car record in history with an average speed of 414.5 mph.

FASTER THAN EVER: Charles Nearburg ’72 Th’74 made history at Bonneville Salt Flats. Photograph courtesy of Mark K. Nearburg.

On September 21 the Spirit of Rett, named for Nearburg’s late son, made back-to-back speed runs under the watchful eye of FIA officials, breaking the 409-mph record set by the Summers Brothers’ Goldenrod in 1965. According to FIA rules, the team must make a first run out, service the car in one hour, and then make a return run in the opposite direction. “We didn’t realize that an FIA record required you to beat it by 1 percent,” Nearburg told BangShift.com. “After finding that out we changed gears, tune-up, and a bunch of stuff just hoping we could make it go that fast.”

Ask the Expert

The Expert: Tom Brady ’66 Th’68

Should we avoid plastic bottles because of waste and safety concerns?

If you drink soda or use liquid laundry detergent, chances are you’ve purchased polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles designed and manufactured by one of several companies Tom Brady ’66 Th’68 founded and runs, including Plastic Technologies Inc. (PTI), Preform Technologies, and Phoenix Industries International — the largest producer of recycled PET for packaging in this country. With plastic bottles such a ubiquitous part of modern life, Dartmouth Engineer asked Brady, who earned his Ph.D. in plastic materials engineering from the University of Michigan, for his take on recycling and safety.

PET PROJECTS: Tom Brady displays plastic packaging products made at his company Plastic Technologies Inc. in Bowling Green, Ohio. Photograph courtesy of Tom Brady.

Here are his views:

PET is the most recyclable packaging plastic. When you recycle most plastics, the molecular chains break apart and become shorter. However, PET has a unique chemistry that allows the shorter chains to grow back together during the recycling process, so you can recycle PET forever if you remove the non-PET contamination. Modern recycling processes accomplish that extremely well.

Today in this country, about 30 percent of the PET used for bottle applications is recycled. Much of that recycled PET (RPET) goes into fiber for clothing and carpet and other items, but increasingly RPET is being used in food packaging, the highest value application.

All plastics are recyclable in principle. PET (#1) and high density polyethylene (HDPE, #2) are the most commonly recycled plastics because they are the most intensively used plastics. The other numbered plastics are used less frequently. The economic feasibility of recycling depends on having a large supply available.

More than half of the RPET in this country is shipped to China. Ships that would otherwise return empty to Asia can offer low shipping rates compared to shipping within the United States. The limited supply of RPET in this country keeps the price of RPET close to virgin PET.

There will always be a market for recycled plastic resins. The world will eventually have to begin reusing all materials when raw materials become increasingly difficult to find and therefore more expensive to use. At some point there’s going to be a whole industry around not just waste disposal and recycling, but around reusing all materials as a mined resource.

BPA has nothing to do with PET. BPA (Bisphenol A) is one of the two components you put together chemically to make polycarbonate, a material that’s tough and is used to make shatter-resistant products. Polycarbonate has been used in packaging applications that require heat resistance, such as in baby bottles and sports bottles. Studies have shown that BPA can be extracted from polycarbonate plastic articles, and there is some evidence that BPA can act as an estrogen mimicker, so eliminating polycarbonate from food packaging is prudent. Polycarbonate is no longer used in baby bottles and water bottles.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Events and People set of images on Flickr.

RESEARCH FELLOW: Renee Cottle is pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, thanks to the National Science Foundation. Photograph by Douglas Fraser.

Renee Cottle ’07 Th’09 and Kristen Lurie ’08 Th’08 have received 2010 Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation to support their graduate studies. Lurie is studying electrical and electronic engineering at Stanford University. Cottle is pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“I plan to develop microRNA biosensors and a mathematical model that will distinguish between normal and breast cancer cells and predict the stage of breast cancer. The biosensors will be designed to target six specific microRNAs that are significantly over-expressed in blood samples of breast cancer patients,” says Cottle. “Once optimized, the biosensors will be incubated with microRNA extracted from blood samples of breast cancer patients and the fluorescence of each biosensor will be measured. The fluorescence signal from the biosensor will be correlated with the known stage of breast cancer so that a mathematical model will be optimized for a strong correlation with the disease stage. I am hoping that this project will be a novel diagnostic approach for non-invasive detection of diseases.”

Cottle got her start in biomedical engineering as an undergraduate at Dartmouth. “My most critical research experiences were my honors thesis on peptide mimics of Vibrio cholerae LPS and my capstone design project, in which I worked with two other students to develop a medical device that sterilizes intravenous fluids,” she says.

Echo II. Image courtesy of nasaimages.org.

>> Ron Muller ’55 Th’56 appeared in a PBS series “History Detectives” in their Season 8, Episode 1 presentation on NASA’s first communications satellite, a 100-foot Mylar balloon called Echo. Muller, who worked on Project Echo early in his long career with NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center, explains on camera how the satellite was made, launched, deployed, and used. “Anybody could use it. It’s just flying up there. It’s just a passive thing. It’s like a mirror,” he says on camera. Echo I, launched in 1960, and Echo II, launched in 1964, boosted the United States into the space race against Russia, enabled the first coast-to-coast satellite telephone call, and set the stage for global communications.

>> Fred Schleipman, director of Thayer’s machine shop from 1969 to 1980, is fondly remembered by many alumni for teaching them to build Stirling engines. Today, at age 90, Schleipman works in his Norwich, Vt., machine shop on his start-up venture Telescopes of Vermont, which offers a $43,000 hand-finished cast bronze reproduction of the Porter Garden Telescope. The elegant telescope, first created in the 1920s, caught Schleipman’s eye in 1973.

STILL TOOLIN' AROUND: Fred Schleipman recently recast the 1920s-era Porter Garden Telescope. Photograph by Russ Schleipman ’71.

“It was love at first site. I was determined to have one,” he recalls. One problem: fewer than 20 were known to exist. Schleipman concluded that the only way he could own such a telescope — a work of art with high-end optics — was to build several of them and keep one from the production run. In 2007 Schleipman finally assembled a team, including a pattern maker, optics experts, and foundryman, that met his exacting requirements.

Schleipman’s Porter Garden Telescope. Photograph by Russ Schleipman ’71.

Most crucially, Schleipman was loaned an original Porter Garden Telescope to digitize. He then had to design and build all the tools to machine the castings. It was a long and expensive process. The patterning alone cost $150,000. Despite his success selling the telescopes (he even appeared on the CBS show Sunday Morning), there is one glitch he has yet to overcome. Not unlike the shoemaker’s son, he still hasn’t assembled a telescope for himself. At least now he has all the parts.

>> Dinsie Williams ’97 Th’97 volunteered with Doctors Without Borders in earthquake-torn Haiti this spring. “Many of the Haitians I met were amazed to learn that I was a Sierra Leonean (an African) and expressed being proud that I was part of the team, especially as an engineer,” she says.

To Haiti with Doctors Without Borders
April 2010

By Dinsie Williams ’97 Th’97

Photographs courtesy of Dinsie Williams

Dinsie Williams in Port-au-Prince.

I was recruited by Médécins Sans Fontières (Doctors Without Borders) to volunteer in Haiti in April. I was asked to help out with the biomedical services at three hospitals in Port-au-Prince (the capital). As health care professionals depend more on technology, it has become increasingly important to monitor and plan around medical equipment, especially in emergency conditions. The MSF database did not have anyone with biomedical skills; therefore I was contacted for a special assignment. I played a very small role compared to those who were on the ground immediately following the earthquake; however, I was able to perform duties no one else could at the time I was there. The fact that I was not a minority in Haiti also made my mission atypical.

When I arrived in Port-au-Prince, there were a lot of security measures in place. I soon learned that two MSF volunteers had been kidnapped a month earlier but later released. We had to travel through the town in convoy and return to the house before 5:30 p.m. every day. We woke up at 5 each morning, so it wasn’t too hard to meet the curfew. Non-essential excursions were prohibited. Within the NGO world, MSF is known to be frugal with its volunteers. Shared accommodation was provided in a rented house. I spent the first night sleeping on a cot out on the balcony. I later transferred to a mattress before finally finding a free bed in the living room area a couple of days later. Accommodation was mixed and privacy was nonexistent.

Unpacking a mobile x-ray generator.

My assignment involved installing equipment, repairing failed systems, hiring and training technicians, and identifying improvements for biomedical services. I worked with Siemens Mobilett mobile x-ray units, CareStream CR 120 and CR500 (Computed Radiography x-ray) cassette readers, Devilbiss oxygen concentrators, and Tuttnauer and TBM autoclaves. Most of the large systems had to be protected from power surges and outages using voltage stabilizers. Installation of the x-ray units involved defining specifications for the imaging rooms, taking initial measurements, and training technicians. The primary challenge for biomedical services in Haiti is unstable power supply. Frequent power surges and outages cause damage to equipment. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether a power surge had caused a system to fail or whether the system failed through regular wear and tear. Everything I had learned about troubleshooting equipment required stable power. I had to adapt to the new environment. Another challenge was inappropriate donations. For example, boxes of glucometers remain unused because they were donated without measuring strips. One of the mobile systems that came in as a donation was manufactured in 1994! It took images all right, but the exposure cord was too hot and the collimator light worked only intermittently. It is my opinion that donors must refrain from disposing of decrepit equipment on unsuspecting recipients. If the recipient country does not have the infrastructure or man-power to support a donation, it is by far better to cancel a donation. Donating aging equipment may prove to be costlier financially and environmentally for recipients than the burden of unhealthy patients.

Doctors Without Borders clinic in Port-au-Prince.

One of the hospitals in which I worked was dedicated to orthopedics. Within hours of our setting up the radiology equipment, patients were lined up. Almost all of them had a completely broken leg, thigh, or arm. Some had severely dislocated or fractured hips or spine. Many had surgical pins holding their bones in place. Others had been in temporary casts for weeks, waiting for surgical services. Unfortunately, a lot of people had their limbs amputated in the days after the earthquake because there were inadequate resources for reconstructive or orthopedic surgery. Patients were of all ages, babies to grandparents. The earthquake was equally unkind to all. It was very difficult to witness children with severe injuries. It was equally disturbing to see those who were staying at the hospital despite the fact that they were not injured. They were there because their lone surviving relative was hospitalized. I once saw a perfectly healthy toddler hopping along on one leg. Apparently, she was mimicking what she saw the amputees doing around her. Normal looked different there.

Tents house orthopedic units.

The second hospital was located at Cite-de-Soleil (loosely translated at “Sun City”), a neighborhood that’s inappropriately named. The sun just does not shine on Sun City! Almost every time I was at that hospital a patient with a gunshot wound was admitted. There were gang members and felons at large. Apparently hundreds of prisoners had escaped during the chaos following the earthquake. Our convoy drivers had to check the routes before every trip to avoid getting caught in police raids. Everyone had to be accounted for at all times. The third hospital was in an equally notorious area called Martissant. I trained the technicians on how to use computed radiography systems. These are x-ray systems in which the image is taken on a phosphor screen and transferred to digital format. The system cuts down on costs associated with film processing, and it produces clearer images in most cases. It was at this location that I experienced an aftershock. All I can say about it is I’d rather not live through another. All the patients and nurses ran out of the hospital. Even the women waiting to deliver babies slowly made their way outside. After a few seconds, all you could hear was loud laughter mixed with audible gasps of joy. I now know what relief sounds like. The patients were just happy it was not another earthquake. Getting some of them to return to their beds in the hospital was somewhat challenging. The aftershock brought back traumatic feelings. Months after the earthquake Haitians continue to live on edge.

Setting up an x-ray machine.

Since I was in Haiti during an emergency situation, I ended up working on other tasks. I did not have a set routine. I had to show up at the site that was having the most problems on any particular day. On more than one occasion, I had to put on a radiation vest and hold a crying child in place while an x-ray was being taken. Since French and French-Creole are the official languages in Haiti, being able to communicate in (limited) French helped. English is not widely used in Haiti. Many of the patients were surprised to find out that I was non-Haitian.

On my return from Haiti, the question I have heard most often is: “So, what was Haiti like?” It’s a difficult question to answer. There are multiple sides to Haiti, but I can only report from one perspective. As we arrived by plane, I was struck by the number of tents on the ground — hundreds, maybe thousands. On the ground, it looked worse. When I saw multi-story houses that looked like giant piles of pancakes, I quickly realized the inhabitants had no chance of getting out. There was rubble everywhere, clearly hiding corpses. The majority of the structures that were still standing had cracks running through their entire length. All are waiting to be torn down. Months have passed since January 12th, and what’s most fascinating in Port-au-Prince today is the will power of people trying to get on with their lives. Every morning on the drive to the site, I would stare at the elementary school children being led to school on foot by parents, friends, relatives, or driven by motorcycle or van (‘tap tap’). They were all in clean uniforms, white socks and black shoes. The little girls had their hair neatly plaited and filled with barrettes and ribbons that matched their uniforms – blue, white, yellow, green. The boys likewise wore clean matching uniforms. Where did they get the time, energy, and motivation? Half of them were headed to classes in tents or dilapidated buildings but that did not stop them from hurrying to school in the morning. After all, Haiti’s future existence rests mostly on their tiny shoulders. What a weight to carry.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone can have hope in Haiti. The street vendors there only have very dusty roads and trenches from which to sell their wares. And very few people are buying. Most have to take on jobs as daily workers even though they have professional experience. There are lines everywhere: for transportation, drinking water, money, basic household supplies, and visas. Telephone land-lines are practically nonexistent; many side roads are treacherous; the heat is unbearable; electricity supply is intermittent at best; and sanitation management is minimal. There were literally tons of plastic bottles, styrofoam boxes, and rags filling up drains and conduits/canals and spilling on to the roads. Close your eyes, imagine a very, very large number of plastic soda bottles and styrofoam littering the streets. Double that number and you might be close. There is no chance those items will be recycled. And that’s just the beginning. The garbage appears to stretch out as far as the eye can see. Since people are living in temporary housing, they mostly only have access to disposable utensils and accessories. There isn’t enough water to wash plates and utensils. It’s true that everyone does not live like this: There are still Haitians living in huge houses, driving flashy cars, and going out to restaurants or the beaches. They are, however, by far in the minority.

Devastation from the earthquake remains widespread.

MSF’s directive is generally to provide emergency help to people regardless of where they are located. In Haiti the mandate includes both medical care and distribution of tents and household kits. As I met the volunteers, what struck me the most was that everyone was willing to talk and share stories. The first conversation I had was with someone who, in another life, used to be a diamond polisher in Brussels. He now volunteered full time. Fascinating! I was surprised to find out that many people have made a career out of volunteering. Prior to this I assumed volunteering was only done on weekends. Most of the volunteers will risk personal safety in order to get the job done. A surgeon from Italy epitomizes the general attitude of the volunteers. One day on the ride back from the hospital, volunteers were swapping “war stories.” The surgeon held up his arms to show us very hairy forearms and hairless fingers. When asked what happened, he was happy to tell that he lost all the hair on his fingers by operating under x-rays in the field without adequate protection during a different mission. He probably saved a lot of lives that way. We joked about how he may have found an alternate to hair removal by laser! Some of the volunteers are married, some are single. Some have families, some don’t. Some have savings, some don’t. Some have full-time jobs, some don’t. I discovered volunteers had different reasons for going on missions. Surprisingly few in my group were there for philosophical or religious reasons. Some were there because volunteering gave them an opportunity to go to different places, some were there because NGOs paid more than local employers, others were there because of the flexibility of the schedule. The one thing they had in common was that they were there “to get the job done.”

On my way back, I asked one colleague why he chose Kandahar, Afghanistan for his next volunteer mission with MSF. I asked whether he was scared. “No one wants to go there. If I do not go, who will do the work that needs to be done there?” he replied.

How cool is that?

LOOK MA! The Gyrobike wheel, invented at Thayer School, is for sale at thegyrobike.com. Photograph courtesy of Gyrobike.

The Gyrobike is rolling off the production line — six years after a team of students in ENGS 21 tackled the eternal problem of learning to ride a bike. “This will really be the fun part: to finally get to see children out there riding the bike,” says co-creator Debbie Sperling ’06 Th’07, who is in medical school at the University of Michigan. “I have a lot of friends and family who are eager to finally give the Gyrobike a spin.” The stabilizing bike — heralded with a Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics in 2006 — was created by Sperling, Hannah Murnen ’06 Th’07, Nathan Sigworth ’07, and Augusta Niles ’07 in 2004.

Gyrowheel. Photograph courtesy of thegyrobike.com.

“I think the Gyrobike’s success as a classroom-to-market project is really the success of the Thayer/Tuck entrepreneurship potential,” says Niles, pointing to the collaboration between the Gyrobike team and Errik Anderson ’00 Tu’07 and his venture capital firm, Seven West Ventures. “He was pivotal in bringing crucial media attention to the product and found Daniella Reichstetter Tu’07 to be the startup’s CEO in April 2007.” Reichstetter drew on her previous start-up and consumer-products experience with Method Home and Jetboil to lead the design through two years of product development. The original design used a disk to spin independently inside the wheel; modifications have revved up the speed of the disk, enabling it to create enough force — gyroscopic precession — to help stabilize a bike at a low speed. “The design improvements have been significant, and I think we are all quite proud of the product that is now available to buy,” says Murnen, who now focuses on the self assembly of biomimetic polymers as a grad student in the chemical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. The final product, which easily replaces the front wheel of standard kids’ bikes, comes with an enclosed, motorized disk and is available for $100 at thegyrobike.com. “Seeing children use the bike has always been the most satisfying part about this project,” says Niles, a modeling and simulation engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. “But it is also great to know that all the team’s work on the product design and business proofing will all be worth it.

­­>> A few days after setting one streamliner motorcycle speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats world finals last October with a 382-mph run, Charles Nearburg ’72 Th’74 pushed it even harder, averaging 394.1 mph and exiting the track at 402.9 mph. With this, the Spirit of Rett — named after Nearburg’s son, who died of cancer in 2005 — set a 392-mph record at Bonneville and became the first single-engine, normally aspirated car to go over 400 mph. Nearburg plans to return to Utah’s salt flats this summer with a new supercharged, 2,000-horsepower V-8 engine and break a 19-year-old 409-mph world speed record for wheel-driven cars. “Rett and I did a lot of gearhead stuff together — we rode dirt bikes and sport bikes together and built up a hot-rod Mustang,” says Nearburg. “His death was partly the catalyst that got me to think about what in life I hadn’t done. Every run I make, I feel him there with me.”
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Photograph courtesy of Thierry A. Blanchet.

>> Thierry A. Blanchet Th’88, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the highest elected grade of membership in ASME. Fellowship is conferred upon a member with at least 10 years of active engineering practice and who has made significant contributions to the profession. Blanchet is noted for his contributions in the area of materials tribology, particularly self-replenishing solid lubrication. His models of vapor phase lubrication have been adapted to DLC coatings and MEMS environmental tribology. He has chaired the ASME/Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers’ International Joint Tribology Conference, serves as associate editor for the Journal of Tribology and Tribology Transactions, and has earned the National Science Foundation’s Young Investigator Award.

OLYMPIAN: Ben Koons made New Zealand’s Nordic skiing Olympic team. Photograph by Phil Walter/Getty Images.

>> Ben Koons ’08 is a powerhouse on the slopes — when he’s not bringing a different kind of power to Africa. Koons, who appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Dartmouth Engineer in a story about his efforts to bring hydro-power to the rural village of Banda, Rwanda, became the first male cross-country skier to represent New Zealand at the Winter Olympics. Ben, who was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, and moved with his family to Maine eight years ago, captained Dartmouth’s cross-county ski team while studying mechanical engineering at Thayer. After graduation, he and brother Nils Koons ’11, also a Dartmouth skier, embarked on some “altitude training” — a two-month cycling trek across Tibet.

>> Hypertherm, a top manufacturer of plasma cutting tools with almost 900 employees working in Hanover and Lebanon, has been feeling the international slowdown in the production of heavy equipment. Shipbuilders, auto manufacturers, the construction industry — any field that would use Hypertherm products to cut flat steel — have slowed production in the last year, and orders for the cutting systems are down 50 percent. But, as National Public Radio highlighted in November, the company is sticking to its no-layoff policy. It has put employees to work doing other things: ground maintenance, training, on a team to rejigger the production line. The goal is to emerge from recession in a better position to compete. “Once you have a highly skilled workforce, the last thing you want to do is lay them off,” says Dick Couch ’64 Th’65, the company’s founder and CEO and a Thayer School Overseer. “This isn’t altruism. It’s good business.” It’s probably also a reason why Business New Hampshire magazine recently named the firm the Best Large Company to Work for in New Hampshire.

>> John Ballard ’55 Th’56 has earned a Dartmouth Alumni Award for his extensive volunteer service to Dartmouth. In addition to leading his class as vice president and on its executive committee, the Los Altos Hills, Calif., resident has served on the Thayer Board of Overseers since 1989 and chaired it from 1998 to 2007. While chair, Ballard joined with fellow Thayer Overseers and a former chair of the Medical School Board of Overseers to form Angeli Parvi (little angels), a group of industry leaders who mentor aspiring Dartmouth entrepreneurs by guiding development of business plans and strategies. So far, the group has helped found, co-found, fund, or advise 10 companies, earning $1 million for Thayer in the process. “The real pay-off came as a pleasant surprise,” he says. “Most of these enterprises are largely run by recent Dartmouth graduates. They generally ask for guidance when they feel the need, generally accept the guidance, and then execute with amazing energy and skill. We really do produce graduates who can change how health science, energy storage, signal processing, and environmental issues are addressed, and all very much for the better.” Ballard’s advice for fellow alumni interested in giving back: “Try and help students and alumni in ways that require some hands-on time. You’ll be rewarded.”

>> Start-up SustainX Energy Solutions is trying to find better ways to compress and store air to help utilities take full advantage of intermittent sources of energy such as wind and solar power. As Ph.D. students, Dax Kepshire Th’06, ’09 and Ben Bollinger ’04 Th’04, ’08, with previous grad Troy McBride Th’01, began engineering and entrepreneurial work on SustainX, joining with Professor and Dean Emeritus Charles Hutchinson to launch the company.

THE SUSTAINX SOLUTION: Start-up company SustainX has developed a new way to store wind and solar energy as compressed air — and then turn it into electricity. Image courtesy of SustainX.

“The initial vision was for an inexpensive, reliable, clean energy storage system to pair with wind and solar to allow these renewables to perform as reliable, totally clean non-intermittent energy generation technologies,” says McBride. Existing small- and moderate-scale energy storage technologies tend to be expensive, short-lived, and use toxic or rare materials. By using air, off-the-shelf industrial components, and core thermodynamic innovations, SustainX can cut costs and offer a long lifetime. SustainX’s novel approach allows higher efficiency and pressures, so air can be stored in off-the-shelf tanks rather than in underground caverns (the traditional method). To store energy, the SustainX system uses an electric motor driven hydraulic conversion system to isothermally compress and store air. To make electricity, the process is repeated in reverse; the air is released and run through the SustainX conversion system, turning an electric generator to make electricity. The team is aiming to pack a megawatt-hour worth of stored energy in a 40-foot-long container, says Kepshire. The company received $4 million in funding from Polaris Venture Partners and Rockport Capital last summer and $5.39 million from the U.S. Department of Energy in November to develop its technology and eventually deploy a full-scale demonstration of its method. The company spun out of Dartmouth last year and now employs 10 people at its site in West Lebanon, N.H. Says Bollinger, “Starting SustainX feels like having stepped aboard a roller coaster that keeps on going.”

For more photos, visit our Alumni Projects and Alumni People and Events sets on Flickr.

EASY RIDER: Alex Streeter ’03 Th’05 has engineered medical devices for the Mayo Clinic. Photograph courtesy of Alex Streeter.

As a Mayo Clinic engineer, Alex Streeter ’03 Th’05 tackled doctors’ and patients’ requests as he did the ENGS 190/290/390 sequence: Define the problem, develop several ideas to address it, then prototype and test one or more solutions until the problem is solved. Streeter was one of more than 50 engineers at Mayo who work on inventions to make doctors’ jobs easier and patients’ lives better. Some of his designs have included life-sized models of pediatric scoliotic spines for presurgical planning; a physical therapy chair/bench for a set of conjoined twin infants; a “knee-walker” for a 7-foot-8-inch, 600-pound patient with a bad foot; a wheelchair attachment for a mother to use to hold her infant; high-speed videography of breaking bones; and a horizontal mill for grinding out the inside of a femoral head to harvest bone graft material. “Some of our work has a high impact on patient care at the clinic, sometimes for just a single patient. Some of our work seeks to enable the kind of medical and technological research and development that will bring about the next revolution in medicine, and will have a high impact beyond the clinic,” he says. Streeter will be bringing that revolutionary approach to DEKA Research as he returns to New Hampshire for his wife’s medical residency.

>> Husband and wife team Mark ’80 and Paula Ness Speers ’80 first combined their R&D and consulting talents 18 years ago to found Health Advances, LLC. They’ve built their 60-person firm with offices in San Francisco and Boston into the go-to consultants for advice on commercializing new medical technologies, guiding decisions on which applications, diseases, and conditions to target, optimizing pricing, sizing sales forces, and negotiating channels of distribution. With his engineering training, Mark focuses on the medical-technical and diagnostics clients, and is currently developing a medical device to reduce the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia. “I find that my familiarity with materials science and manufacturing processes gains me instant credibility with new clients and often leads to brainstorming sessions that create new product ideas,” he says. Paula, who served in the Peace Corps as a tuberculosis worker in South Korea after graduating from Dartmouth with a degree in international relations, continues to work in the developing world. She’s currently working on a new diagnostic platform to enable infectious disease diagnostics. “Once in a while we work together,” says Mark. “We fondly recall one of our first successes: the development of the Acticoat antimicrobial wound dressing. The product has become the best-selling burn dressing in the world and has saved hundreds of patients’ lives.”

>> Rick Greenwald Th’88 is turning his wide range of engineering and manufacturing expertise to the problems of personal injury among elite athletes, soldiers, and the elderly. As founder and president of Simbex in Lebanon, N.H., he is currently working on ActiveStep technology to train people to recover from a fall. With the system — highlighted on “Good Morning America” in a May segment titled “A Smart Way to Fall? New Technology Prevents Tragedy” — a therapist uses a body harness, treadmill, and sensors to analyze patients’ movements and retrain their responses to tripping or slipping. The therapy can be life-saving, as one in three adults over 65 fall every year. Such falls annually cause 300,000 hip fractures, one-fifth of which lead to death. “Simbex stands for Simply Better Exercise and is the realization of a dream to solve important large-scale health problems related to personal injury with appropriate cost-effective technology,” says Greenwald. It’s an approach Time magazine recognized in its “Best Inventions of 2007” issue, highlighting the group’s Head Impact Telemetry system (a head-impact monitoring system designed to prevent mild traumatic brain injury) and PowerFoot One (a robotic foot and ankle prosthetic).

HUMAN ENGINEERING: Plastic surgeon Jason Altman ’97 (center) performs corrective surgery on kids all over the world. Photograph courtesy of Jason Altman.

>> Plastic surgeon Jason Altman ’97 has spent the last year traveling the world — Ecuador, Peru, China, India, Vietnam, and Zambia — performing plastic and reconstructive surgery on children in need as a Jerome P. Webster Fellow for the global health organization Interplast. “Usually I am traveling with a team of doctors and nurses; however, on occasion I will also go by myself to work with and teach a local surgeon in some more remote areas,” says Altman. His surgeries include cleft lip and palate repair, congenital hand deformities, congenital facial deformities, and burn and trauma reconstruction. “Plastic surgery is the practice of human engineering!” he says.

>> After 10 years as an audiologist — most recently as the director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia cochlear implant program — Kevin Franck ’92 is providing clinical strategy to Cochlear Ltd. “I’ve been drawn to this field because I grew up with deafness in my family (my sister),” says Franck, who trained as a biomedical engineer at Dartmouth. “The cochlear implant is truly amazing. Deaf babies can grow up listening and talking, and adults who lose their hearing can once again communicate with their spouses and colleagues with phones and all that stuff we take for granted.” He is now involved in the global marketing of Cochlear’s implantable hearing devices, which are used to replace damaged parts of the cochlea. (Hearing aids, on the other hand, attempt to get the damaged parts to work better, and are usually appropriate for those with mild or moderate hearing loss.) Franck says the cost — about $30,000 in the United States, plus the cost of surgery and rehabilitation — is covered by most insurance companies, due to the high cost efficacy.

Kevin Franck ’92 provides clinical strategy for Cochlear Ltd.’s Nucleus® Freedom™ cochlear implant system, which consists of an external sound processor (A) and coil (B) and an internal implant (C). Image Courtesy of Cochlear Ltd.

>> Dr. Andrew Mannes Th’83 believes that killing the messenger — pain-responsive neurons in the sensory ganglia — can be a practical way to manage intractable pain. Mannes, who works in the department of anesthesia and surgical services for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., is testing a new pain-relieving drug called resiniferatoxin, a single-shot dose of analgesic that lasts forever. The experimental drug targets sensory neurons that convey pain to the spinal cord. Interrupting this one specific class of pain-sensing neurons will eliminate the connection and some types of pain, including that seen with advanced cancer. In animal studies — including treating dogs for refractory end-of-life pain and goats for severe arthritis — the drug has shown remarkable improvement or elimination of pain symptoms, he says. The FDA has approved clinical trials, and Mannes and colleagues are now looking for cancer patients who are experiencing severe pain that is unresponsive to conventional therapy. Under this treatment, the patient is placed under general anesthesia for an hour or so while Mannes injects the resiniferatoxin into the cerebrospinal fluid space around the spinal cord, where it eliminates the pain neurons. If the treatment is successful, he says, patients should be able to discontinue their medications, including high doses of morphine or other opioids to control pain. Unlike other pain medications, his treatment appears to have no side effects (such as sedation or hallucinations) and no addictive potential.

An ailing dog feels no pain while on resiniferatoxin.
Video courtesy of Dr. Andrew Mannes Th’83.

>> Terry McGuire Th’82, co-founder of Boston-based Polaris Venture Partners and chairman of Thayer’s Board of Overseers, is the new chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). “Although the NVCA has long been an advocate for public policies that encourage innovation and economic growth, our work today is as important as ever,” he said. “It is critical that the government and the venture capital industry continue working together to support risk-taking and long-term investment so that we as investors can continue to create new jobs and bring breakthrough technologies to market.” Prior to forming Polaris Venture Partners, he spent seven years at Burr, Egan, Deleage & Co. investing in early-stage medical and information technology companies. McGuire has co-founded three companies: Inspire Pharmaceuticals, Advanced Inhalation Research Inc. (AIR), and MicroCHIPS.

>> The sky’s the limit for Jim Zierick ’78 TT’80, who brings 25 years in building technology companies to “cloud storage” platform provider Nirvanix. In his new role as president and CEO of the San Diego-based firm, he’s using his business acumen to grow the company’s global cluster of storage nodes. He presented the company’s strategies during the spring Red Herring Conference, where he accepted a Red Herring 100 Award, given to the top 100 U.S. tech companies based upon their technological innovation, management strength, and market size.

>> Dartmouth javelin-throw record holder Sean Furey ’04 qualified for the International Association of Athletics Federations World Track & Field Championships held in Berlin in August after placing third at the USA Track & Field Championships in Oregon in June. “This is something that I’ve been dreaming of and working towards for so many years,” says the former engineering major.

>> Energy-capture expert Brian S. Hendrickson ’06 Th’07 has been named to the advisory board of alternative energy technology developer Octillion Corp. An engineer with Veryst Engineering, LLC, in Needham, Mass., Hendrickson is credited with various innovations in the capture of wasted energy for generating electricity. The September 2008 issue of Mechanical Engineering Magazine, in an article titled “Harvest of Motion,” highlighted his development of a small-scale device that uses human motion to generate five-times greater power output (per volume) than conventional energy harvesting systems.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Projects and Engineering in Medicine sets on Flickr.

Chris Crowley Th’75 is a research engineer by vocation and a wildlife photographer by avocation. During his 31 years managing research projects for Hanover-based Creare he also logged 1,000 scuba dives in locations such as Indonesia, the Galápagos Islands, Fiji, and the Caribbean. After earning his M.E. at Thayer, Crowley worked on nuclear reactor safety, gas and oil transport in pipelines, ocean mining, thermodynamic power cycles, and spacecraft system development projects. Recently retired from Creare, he sees connections between engineering and photography. “Wildlife photography is like running an engineering project. You have an objective: to photograph a certain animal or animals. You have to develop a work plan to get the shots. You have a limited budget. And the wildlife ‘clients’ are often only slightly less cooperative than business clients!” His images and articles have been published in magazines, textbooks, and a Nature Conservancy poster.

>> Chris Yule ’70 points to Thayer students’ work as an example of how cars can solve the energy crisis in a recent Boston Globe opinion piece. “Students in Dartmouth’s Thayer School Formula Hybrid program are having a great time building hybrid race cars,” he writes. “Imagine if the torpid design studios in Detroit suddenly came abuzz with exciting futuristic designs that treated the world’s precious hydrocarbons like newspapers or beer cans. They would create exciting new jobs in a field that has worldwide appeal. And maybe, just maybe, we could save the planet while we’re at it.” Yule has been saving the planet one parcel at a time as president of Yule Development Co., a real estate development firm in Newton Center, Mass., that specializes in designing energy-efficient solutions for “distressed” buildings and sites.

>> Veteran Wall Street analyst Brian E. Wong Th’00 is the new director of research at AMI Research, a leading provider of issuer-paid research coverage and independent stock reports. Wong will direct the production of independent analyst research reports for AMI, based in Key Largo, Fla. Wong previously conducted sell-side equity research with Broadpoint Capital and First Albany Capital, where he was a member of the Wall Street Journal’s Top Five Equity Analyst Team in 2002 and 2003. With a background in medical technology and health care, Wong provided investment research reports on companies in the diabetes, orthopedic, neurotechnology, plastics, and general surgery sectors.

>> There’s a hot new install-it-yourself solar water-heating system on the market. Called Hot2O, it’s a lightweight polymer system developed by Freeman Ford ’63, president and CEO of FAFCO, the nation’s oldest and largest solar thermal panel manufacturer. A closed-loop design allows it to serve up hot water even during winter cold. The system is compact enough to be shipped in a small box to homeowners, who can easily add it to their existing water heaters.

>> For years Tom Brady ’66 Th’68, founder of Plastic Technologies Inc., has been at the forefront of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle industry. Now he is developing and commercializing a PET recycling technology to deal with all the empties. The technology, he says, “will have huge implications for reducing waste and decreasing the carbon footprint for PET packaging.” A pilot line is running in Bowling Green, Ohio, with installation of the first production line scheduled for early 2009. Brady plans to license the system worldwide and expects to have 25 operations running within three years — for a total processing of some 200 million pounds of PET annually. “The breakthrough was our patent, which recognizes that reducing particle size allows the decontamination and purification to proceed exponentially faster as a function of particle size,” he says. “One engineering challenge we faced was using a powder instead of a pellet, which is the industry standard. We solved that by agglomerating the powder into a pellet form that dries and heats like a powder but handles like a pellet for shipping and processing. A second engineering challenge was that we no longer melt-filtered the plastic to remove solid contamination. We solved that by demonstrating that when hard contaminants are reduced in size, they no longer present an issue for secondary processing and reuse.”

>> Zoe Courville Th’03, ’07 digs snow — specifically in Antarctica on a recent three-month expedition to drill through two miles of snow to collect atmospheric data from the past 140,000 years. “From the ice core you can actually tell a whole bunch about past climate and temperature,” Courville recently told the New Hampshire Union Leader. The self-proclaimed “snow freak” earned her Thayer Ph.D. in materials science and engineering, doing research on the impact of snow accumulation in Greenland and East Antarctica. Now a research mechanical engineer at the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, she works with mentor and adjunct Thayer professor Mary Albert Th’84 on the effect of climate change on the polar ice caps.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Flickr page.

LIVE WIRE: John McNeill ’83, left, gets raves from his students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Photo courtesy of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Electrical engineering professor John McNeill ’83 is charging up his students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “He’s unbelievable in terms of not only bringing the practical, but also making it so that you can understand the material,” senior Charles Gammal told the ­­Worcester Telegram & Gazette this spring. Under McNeill’s guidance, Gammal and fellow students are designing a low-power integrated circuit for handheld biomedical applications such as portable ultrasounds. The project placed in the top five out of 47 teams in a design contest sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corp. and will be presented at an industry conference in Austin, Tex., this fall. Another of his student teams recently demonstrated a design modification to standard wall adapters — dubbed “wall warts” — which have losses in the transformer magnetics, regardless of whether they are powering anything. “Put ten or 20 of these in a house and this can add up to a significant fraction of total power usage,” says McNeill. His students developed a modification that detects when there is no device attached to the wart and disconnects the adapter from AC power to avoid transformer losses. “In addition to the technical problem,” he says, “the students also researched the social and economic implications to determine how much of a problem there is from power losses in the existing design (significant!), what additional cost would be feasible in the market, brainstormed several approaches, then chose one and designed a solution that worked-and beat the target cost.”

>> Scott Sabol ’88 Th’88, a Vermont Technical College professor and chair of the architectural and building technology department, received the school’s Henry G. Wirtz Master Teacher Award in May. The honor recognizes him as a role model for other faculty and as an exceptional teacher.

>> Three Thayer alums are finding greener transportation solutions throughout the Upper Valley — and beyond. “Our work is focused on transportation solutions that reduce the amount of driving, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions by shifting travel to walking, biking, transit, and shorter car trips,” says Norm Marshall Th’82, a principal along with Lucy Gibson Th’88 and engineer Sandy Beauregard Th’07 of Smart Mobility in Norwich, Vt. The company recently developed a new transportation plan for Burlington, Vt., and is now helping Chicago consider multimodal transportation networks and strategies, helping Austin and Baltimore develop more efficient land use and transportation, and aiding citizens groups and townships in several states as they face highway expansion proposals. “Our practice focuses on activities that promote sustainable transportation alternatives — we do not work on building new highways or construction of new big box stores,” says Gibson.

>> “America’s biggest drinking problem isn’t alcohol, it’s lawn watering,” according to Amy Vickers Th’86. Vickers is an Amherst, Mass.-based water conservation consultant, author of the water efficiency requirements for plumbing fixtures adopted under the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 1992, and author of the Handbook of Water Use and Conservation: Homes, Landscapes, Businesses, Industries, Farms. She made her case for water conservation in a Boston Globe opinion piece last summer. “The extent to which our culture’s irrigation-fueled lawn watering binge is acting like a wrecking ball in our rivers, streams, and lakes is a specific challenge to the security of our water supplies, even here in ‘water rich’ New England,” she writes. She advocates two immediate actions: limiting the number of watering days allowed per week and enforcing watering rules no matter the water source — public supplies or private wells. “If Massachusetts and other New England states act soon, we need not be fated to the long-term water shortages and chronic droughts now predicted for much of the nation.” Read the full article.

TRAFFIC STOPPER: Jonathan Kling ’04 Th’04 steers Din and Tonic in the Red Bull soapbox derby. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Kling ’04 Th’04

>> The Din & Tonic racer barreled down Freemont Avenue in Seattle, Wash., last fall with driver Jonathan “Kling-a-Ling-a-Ding-Dong” Kling ’04 Th’04 at the wheel. While the soapbox racer never crossed the finish line — it crashed into hay bales lining the half-mile race course after losing all four of its wheelchair tires — its bells and whistles were one of the highlights of the 2007 Red Bull Soapbox Race. Kling, who rallied coworkers to assemble the soapbox car, was one of 36 contestants in the human-powered race. “As employees of Synapse Product Design in Seattle, these teammates are used to creating buzz in the world of medical devices and consumer products with their design solutions, and now they’re ready to just create some buzz…literally…with noisemakers,” according to the race website. Inspired by kinetic pieces displayed in the Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland, which he saw last summer on a biking trip across Europe with Bing Knight ’05 Th’06, Jeff Hebert ’04 Th’06, and Joe Horrell ’04 Th’06, Kling designed a gravity-powered racer that drove a bass drum, a stuffed gorilla banging cymbals, and two air-raid sirens that peaked at 120 decibels as the car reached top speed, all while the co-pilot was banging out a tune on blocks, cowbells, and Kling’s helmet! While his building philosophy may be a bit offbeat, Kling knows what it takes to construct a quality car — his racing résumé includes assembling a few Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) race cars while at Dartmouth. Although Kling and his team lament the use of non-pneumatic tires, they still placed 14th, ahead of many cars that did finish the course, because of high marks in showmanship and creativity. RedBull moves the city of the SoapBox race every year, but there’s rumor of a RedBull Flugtag (a race of human-powered flying craft) in Portland, which Kling and Synapse have already been invited to enter.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Flickr page.

William B. Conway ’52 Th’54, P.E., received the John A. Roebling Medal for lifetime achievement at the International Bridge Conference in Pittsburgh, Pa., last June. He is the chairman of Modjeski and Masters Inc., a structural engineering firm in St. Louis, Mo., that specializes in bridge engineering for federal, state, and local agencies, railroads, and port authorities. His works include the first Newburgh-Beacon Bridge across the Hudson River, the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati, the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge over the Potomac, and the Iowa-Illinois Memorial Bridge and seven other bridges across the Mississippi. He recently served as principal-in-charge on the seismic retrofit of the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge in San Francisco and the vessel collision vulnerability study assessment of bridges on the lower Mississippi.

LIFESPAN: Roebling honoree Conway’s I-130 Mississippi River Bridge at Luling, La., was the nation’s longest cable-stayed bridge. Photograph courtesy of William Conway.

>> Heinz Kluetmeier ’65, whose career as a photojournalist for Sports Illustrated spans nearly four decades, was honored in October for outstanding achievement in sports photography with a Lucie Award, an international photography award. Kluetmeier, who was already shooting pictures for the Associated Press at age 15, majored in engineering and worked as an engineer for a steel company until 1969, when he joined Time Inc. as a photographer for Sports Illustrated and Life. He has since shot more than 100 covers for SI, and in 1986 was named the director of photography at the magazine. “Technique and technical stuff is absolutely irrelevant to the picture in terms of what you do as a photographer,” he told PDN Legends Online. “I think the most important thing is to have a vision, to have an emotional feeling, to care about what you’re photographing, and to have something that’s already there in your heart, in your eye.” View his images at pdngallery.com/legends/heinz/.

>> The American Society of Civil Engineers recognized Philadelphia Inquirer science reporter Tom Avril ’89 with an Excellence in Journalism Award honorable mention for his article about skyscraper construction, “Water to Tame Wind Atop New Skyscraper: Giant Bathtub in the Sky.” His lead was a grabber: “It’s a great big bathtub in the sky, but hold the soap. A 300,000-gallon, double-chambered tank of water is going in near the top of the Comcast Center — a creative solution by engineers to keep Philadelphia’s tallest building from swaying too much in the wind.”

>> Bert Yankielun Th’92 offers step-by-step instructions on building igloos, spruce traps, bivy bag shelters and drift caves in his new book, How to Build an Igloo and Other Snow Shelters (Norton Press). As a doctoral student at Thayer and then a research engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, Yankielun developed ground penetrating radar systems and other geophysical instrumentation. He is now a consulting engineer in private practice.

>> Charlie Nearburg ’72 Th’73, ’74 set three new land-speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats World Finals in October. Driving “The Spirit of Rett,” a 35-foot-long streamliner, Nearburg beat two 10-year Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) records with two-way runs averaging 348 mph and 351 mph over a course with five miles for acceleration and two to three miles for shutting down. Three days later he set a Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) record with a two-way average run of 359.5 mph over a course with six miles for acceleration and five miles for shutting down. “In the first FIA run I exited the timed mile at 375 mph. It was pretty awesome,” he says. “This puts me seventh on the all-time fastest list at Bonneville and makes the ‘Spirit of Rett’ the fastest gasoline powered car in history.”

Owner of Nearburg Producing Company and a member of Thayer School’s Board of Overseers, Nearburg has been racing since high school. “I enjoy the engineering of it and the skill,” he says.

The “Spirit of Rett” is named after Nearburg’s late son, Rett. Watch Nearburg in action at rett.org.

ZOOM, ZOOM: Charles Nearburg, third from right, pictured with his crew, hit 375 mph at Bonneville Salt Flats. Photograph courtesy of Charles Nearburg.

For more photos, visit our Alumni page on Flickr.

Yi-Heng Percival Zhang Th'02. Photograph courtesy of Josh Armstrong/Virginia Tech.

Esquire magazine has named Yi-Heng Percival Zhang Th’02 to its Best and Brightest 2006 list. Honored for his “crazy idea of the year: ‘sugar cars’ ” — their phrasing, not ours — Zhang has formulated a chemical process that can turn agricultural waste into cheap ethanol and, according to the magazine, possibly solve the “hydrogen puzzle” — the holy grail of alternative fuel.

The typical process of ethanol production uses corn kernels. Zhang’s approach leaves the kernels for food and instead uses the most abundant agricultural residue in the United States: corn stover (leaves, stalks, and cobs). And, rather than the high-cost, low-yield standard approach — blowing cells up under high pressures and temperatures to unlock the cellulose within the plant cell walls — Zhang thought to use a solvent. He and Thayer professor Lee Lynd Th’84 co-patented a recyclable biochemical pretreatment that generates cellulose that is more easily converted to sugar and doesn’t require special facilities.

An assistant professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech since August 2005, Zhang began his research at Thayer, where he received his Ph.D. and worked as a postdoctoral research associate and research scientist. Zhang is now collaborating with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, using NREL software to analyze the economic costs of various ethanol production strategies and ORNL facilities to test different enzymes and material performance. “We hope to soon establish the first pilot plant in Virginia based on this new technology with switchgrass,” says Zhang.

But the sweet spot for Zhang is hydrogen. His pretreatment process can cleanly deliver the high energy of the gas while avoiding the pollution, costly storage tanks, and infrastructure of standard technologies. He envisions “sugar cars” fueling up at “sugar stations,” which would allow a driver to pump solid sugar into the car’s tank; a converter would extract hydrogen from the sugar, and a fuel cell would convert the hydrogen to electricity. His recipe for making hydrogen from sugar: start with his ethanol-pretreatment process to release sugar from corn stalks, then add water, using the energy stored in those sugars in combination with a novel enzymatic system to divide the molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. So far he’s had high yields and modest reaction conditions. “We do not store and distribute gaseous hydrogen anymore. We can do it through solid sugars,” Zhang tells Esquire. “This new technology could change the whole world energy future completely.”

>> Good Dirt Radio in April profiled FrontRange Earth Force, a nonprofit service learning organization led by board president Kit Ambrose ’86 Th’90. “We work with teachers and nearly 2,000 students in the less-privileged areas of Denver, Colo. We teach teachers how to coordinate wonderful and innovative student-led projects that focus on solving community issues of the students’ choice,” says Ambrose, who works for Microsoft and is also on Thayer’s executive committee. “More than anything, my time at Dartmouth and Thayer helped with the desire to make a contribution and effect change as well as the confidence to participate.”

>> Hector J. Motroni ’66 Th’68 has earned a Dartmouth Alumni Award for his career accomplishments as well as extraordinary service to the College and civic organizations. Currently the senior vice president, chief staff officer, and chief ethics officer at Xerox Corp., where he has worked for the past 35 years, Motroni also chairs the Xerox Political Action Committee. He was recently named the National Hispanic Achiever of the Year by National Hispanic Corporate Achievers, Hispanic Trends magazine selected him one of the 25 top Hispanic executives, and Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology magazine included him on its list of “50 Most Important Hispanics in Business and Technology.” He has served Thayer as its representative on the Alumni Council; as secretary, vice president, and president of the Dartmouth Society of Engineers; and as a member of the boards of the Thayer School Dean’s Fund Executive Committee, the Thayer Campaign Executive Committee, and the Thayer Corporate Advisory Board.

>> CNNMoney.com recently asked top venture capital investors — including Amanda Reed ’86 — for great start up ideas. Reed is a partner in Palomar Ventures, a northern California-based VC fund in which she invests in early-stage technology companies with fellow alum Randy Lunn ’73 Tu’75 Th’75, a member of the Thayer Board of Overseers. CNNMoney.com says: “What she wants now: a Web-based platform to make company spreadsheets — for revenue forecasting and other analytical chores — more easily viewed, updated, and shared by managers. Many small-business execs still rely on e-mailing Excel files around the office to share data forecasts. Software apps like NetSuite import data but not the formulas embedded in spreadsheets. What she’ll invest: $5 million for a team of five engineers to create a prototype in less than two years.”

>> “Few can claim that they have revolutionized a sport as much as Judy Geer ’75 Th’83.” So reads the citation marking Geer’s induction last winter into the Choate Rosemary Athletics Hall of Fame. The first captain of the Dartmouth women’s rowing team, Geer spent the next decade pursuing honors. She was on both the national and Olympic teams in 1976, captured the national singles championship in 1979 and 1982, and joined the Olympic teams again in 1980 and 1984. But perhaps her greatest contribution to the sport came after she earned her Thayer degree: She developed software that displays motivational graphics and monitors performance for rowing machine company Concept 2. Now on the company’s marketing team, she and husband (and Concept 2 co-founder) Dick Dreissigacker are raising three children, including Hannah ’09.

For more photos, visit our Alumni page on Flickr.

DuPont recently honored Richard Livingston ’43 Th’44 by naming a new consultation room after him at DuPont Singapore. The capstone of Livingston’s career with DuPont was an innovative manual he published, which details melt nylon properties responding to chemical and mechanical inputs. The manual was a central reference document for DuPont’s mathematical simulations and nylon solid melt processing.

Beginning in 1970, Livingston gathered data for modeling of nylon chemical processes. He presented all of the data with charts, a unique approach that had not been tried before. “This was very early in the computer era,” Livingston says. “We were manufacturing nylon at the plant where I worked, and it was hard to cope with the multiple chemical changes. I attempted to categorize all of the changes.”

He experimented with applying computer power to the engineering technology for the manufacture of nylon. An early assignment was to work out a simple element of the process to demonstrate it could be modeled on computers. He connected relationships between what happened to nylon under increases in temperature and pressure. “I was shocked to find how little we really knew in terms of specifics, absolute relationships,” he says. “It forced me to play around and gather together sources and that went on for several years.”

Livingston and his colleagues were allowed to run tests on DuPont’s IBM machines at night. “More often than not, they wouldn’t work,” he says. Livingston assembled all of the information he collected in a manual titled Polymer Relationships, which is still in use at DuPont. Livingston says the results that he compiled in Polymer Relationships were long-lasting because they were useful in many areas. “What we found turned out to be fundamental truths,” he says. “The chemistry is the same even though the equipment is modified. The relationships are not specific to a certain application.”

While he says he is flattered by DuPont’s recent recognition of his contribution, he has no plans to travel to Singapore to check out the Livingston room in person. He is just as proud that his work is useful more locally. “There are some people who live in Seaford [Delaware] and work at the DuPont plant here,” he says. “They tell me they still use the manual.”

Livingston, one of three students in the first mechanical engineering class at Thayer School, served with the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II and joined DuPont in 1946. He spent seven years in Buffalo, N.Y., at a DuPont rayon plant and then moved to Seaford, where he worked until his retirement in 1982. He stayed with DuPont as a consultant for another 20 years.

—Jennifer Seaton

>> Ariel Dowling ’05 Th’05 received a National Science Foundation grant for three years of graduate study leading to a research-based master’s or doctoral degree. Dowling is working on an M.S./Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Stanford University, focusing on biomechanics with a project on anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries of the knee. She is looking into the mechanism of an ACL injury — as well as how a person’s gait changes before and after ACL reconstruction surgery — in an effort to improve the surgical procedure. This year’s honorable mentions include Erik M. Dambach ’04 Th’05 and Kara K. Podkaminer Th’09.

>> Benton Routh ’86 Th’87 has advanced from his position as chief marketing officer of fuel card provider FleetCor to president of its new division. Routh, a 15-year veteran of the oil and credit card industry, heads FleetSource, which offers products and services customized to independent petroleum marketers. Prior to joining the Atlanta-based FleetCor, Routh was the global manager of the commercial vehicles and card business at Exxon Mobil Fuels Marketing Co.

>> John McNeill ’83, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ outstanding paper award at its International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco in February, 2006. He is the coauthor of “A Split-ADC Architecture for Deterministic Digital Background Calibration of a 16b 1 MS/s ADC.”