Dartmouth Engineer

What do high-speed rail, spinal implants, and lie detectors have in common? They’re all among the technologies Thayer Master of Engineering Management (M.E.M.) students investigate in ENGM 178: Technology Assessment. By analyzing prevalent and emerging technologies, students can recommend and justify actions for the technologies’ future development — and acquire analytical experience for future careers.

“A technology assessment task or function is likely one of the things they will get assigned to do early in their careers,” says Professor and M.E.M. program director Robert Graves, who teaches the course. “The nature of technology assessment and the way we do the course causes them to sometimes move outside the specifics of their engineering discipline preparation. We might have a student who’s a civil engineer in preparation but doing a technology assessment project on a chemical-related project area like methane hydrates, so it broadens their technical breadth.”

The approximately 50 students in the fall-term course spent the first few weeks learning assessment tools, such as the Delphi method (querying experts on a problem until a consensus is reached), cross-impact analysis (identifying the effects that multiple events have on each other), and exponential smoothing for forecasting data. Then teams got down to assessing actual technologies under the guidance of a faculty advisor and an outside mentor associated with the field.

For their project, students Prateek Reddy and Yiming Liu chose to study the LCD monitor technologies for General Electric Healthcare’s C-Arm surgery device. The two worked on cutting costs by finding off-the-shelf LCD monitors to replace the current custom-made monitors that GE Healthcare has been using. “We’ve found a few alternative monitors that meet most requirements,” Reddy reported during the term, “and we want to explore the future of these devices as well as the possibilities of using other technologies to make the monitors more user-friendly.”

Reddy likes what the course demands. “The course blends my technological background and the skills that I wanted to develop in the M.E.M. program, like teamwork and communication,” he says.

Reddy’s project advisor, Professor Solomon Diamond, says he tries to prepare students for the competitive global marketplace. “I guide them to challenge the assumptions that they encounter and develop their own understanding of the technology,” he says. “Then I guide them to envision the unanticipated future trajectories and consequences of the technology. I hope that the students learn how to think critically and operate intelligently in a world of complex technology, fiercely competitive markets, and multifaceted social, political, environmental, and ethical factors.”

— Elizabeth Kelsey

By Kathryn LoConte

Professor Keith Paulsen, Thayer School’s Robert A. Pritzker Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a radiology professor at Dartmouth Medical School, arrived in class fresh from the Advanced Imaging Lab at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. As he walked into Rett’s Room at Thayer School, his ENGS 7: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Medical Imaging class was waiting. The 15 students were prepared for the last class of the term. Their task: present position papers on the uses — and potential abuses — of medical imaging.

INSIDE INFO: Imaging has ethical as well as medical implications. Image courtesy of Keith Paulsen.

A seminar for first-year students, the course reviews the development of modern radiographic imaging, the basic physical principles behind common approaches to imaging, including computed tomography (CT), ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and the pros and cons of each technique. Students consider the broader picture behind bringing imaging into clinical use, such as animal testing, human trials, costs, and the training technicians require. Paulsen, lead investigator on several imaging technology research collaborations between Thayer and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (see Engineering in Medicine), also invites students to probe ethical issues surrounding insights that medical images unlock.

So, one by one on this final day of class, students discussed how increasingly sophisticated imaging techniques can lead to earlier diagnoses of breast, lung, and other cancers, and early detection of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. One student reported on how imaging can be used in assisted reproduction to help with genetic screening of pre-implanted embryos — and then considered moral dilemmas arising from creating a baby to provide bone marrow to another family member. Another student discussed implications arising from the fact that imaging has revealed structural differences between the brains of people with schizophrenia and those without. Some people with structural pre-symptoms go on to develop schizophrenia, but some don’t. Should all these people be pretreated anyway? What about unnecessary procedures, costs, and potential stigmatization and discrimination? What about insurance companies using imaging to identify structural differences and then denying coverage?

“The overall goal is to expose students to the field of medical imaging and have them learn the basics, how the systems work, and some of their strengths and weaknesses,” says Paulsen.

“Medical imaging in general is rich with applications of engineering and physics because the instrumentation is technically complex,” he says. “Many of the body’s systems and functions can be modeled, controlled, and investigated using engineering principles and methods. The instrumentation that is used to deliver health care is also very technical and rapidly evolving. As a result, engineering is becoming an increasingly important field of study in both biomedical research and medical delivery at all levels of the health-care system.”

For more photos, visit our Engineering in Medicine set on Flickr.

By Kathryn LoConte

HEAD OF THE CLASS: Oliver Goodenough. Photograph by Douglas Fraser.

Professor Oliver Goodenough guides Thayer School graduate students through the intricacies of the legal system that surrounds entrepreneurial enterprises. It’s not enough for students to have an innovative idea to unleash onto the world, he says. They have to scale legal hurdles as well.

“Understanding the legal frameworks available for creating productive alliances of invention, capital, management, and labor is a critical skill for people who bring ideas to fruition,” says Goodenough, a Vermont Law School professor and Thayer adjunct professor who has taught ENGM 188: Technology, Law, and Entrepreneurship for five years.

During fall term, 22 students from Thayer and Tuck School of Business filled 202 Cummings Hall to learn about the law of intellectual property, contractual transactions, business structures, debt and equity finance, and securities regulation in this country and abroad.

In leading students through these issues, Goodenough demystifies the way the legal world works. “My goal is to convince you that at least in certain domains, the law is your friend,” he told the class. “By having a core understanding of what lawyers are doing, you will understand the context, ask better questions, and make things better for yourself.”

Goodenough, who practiced business and property law earlier in his career, gives students a blunt look at his profession. “Lawyers are bossy people. They’re also often cautious people. That can be a very good thing. But there may be places in engineering and business where you want to take some risk. You should manage the lawyers, not be managed by them,” he told the class. “By the end of the term, I hope that you will not be intimidated by a 20-page contract. You may be bored, but you won’t be intimidated because you’ll have the tools to unpack it and manage it, not be managed by it.”

—Kathryn LoConte is assistant editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

For more photos, visit our Faculty and Instructors and Student Projects pages on Flickr.

By Kathryn LoConte

Brian T. Mengwasser '09 (left) Wendy Chen Th'09 (middle) and Nandan H. Shetty '07, BE Candidate (right) work on their site model.

For their class project in ENGS 44: Sustainable Design, 20 students aimed to improve not only a nearby community but also the environment. “The challenge of this course was to make a net-zero community that produces as much energy as it uses and contributes no new traffic on the existing main artery,” says Professor Peter Robbie, who co-taught the course with Thayer professor Benoit Cushman-Roisin and Dartmouth studio art and architecture professor Karolina Kawiaka.

Student groups worked on a real-life site: 254 wooded acres between Hanover and Lebanon. Designing residential and community space for employees of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and nearby businesses, the groups calculated electricity, heating, and cooling demands, conducted feasibility studies on population density and transportation issues, and determined ecological footprints and LEED certification ratings. One team designed a ground-source heat pump, photovoltaic panels, and an innovative woodchip furnace to produce 3500 Mbtu/month. Another suggested community greenhouses, hybrid shuttle routes, and a community bike program. Students proposed a geothermal heat pump, composting toilets, a forced air ventilation system, and structural insulating panels and triple glaze windows for the building envelope design. One group designed a community that mimics the natural topography and devised an ecological wastewater treatment system.

“This course provides a model for integrated design practice that is emerging among the best firms in the country,” says Robbie. “An engineer’s understanding of what’s possible — using technology to make efficient buildings, minimizing use of artificial light, using photovoltaics so that buildings take care of themselves — is completely changing the game.”

The course appeared to change the students as well. “Environmental design really resonates among this group of students,” says Robbie. “They really see it as a moral issue and know that they can help make a difference.”

— Kathryn LoConte is assistant editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

For more photos, visit our Energy Technologies and Sustainability Flickr page.

On one Thursday morning in September, students piled into MacLean B01 as the ten-o’clock hour approached, filing into their seats, lining up along the walls, and dragging up chairs to attend ENGS 11: Technologies in Homeland Security. “If we’re going to have this many people interested in the class, we’re going to need a larger room,” said Professor Susan McGrath. The following week, the class moved to Spanos Auditorium, capacity 120.

Professor Susan McGrath

The size of the class underscores how large homeland security looms in today’s American psyche. But as McGrath points out, concerns about defense are nothing new.

“Homeland security concerns have existed ever since humans have, as long as there was a home to protect. It is not something that started with 9/11,” she says. “Various technologies have been developed over the centuries to assist with protecting nations. Homeland security encompasses much more than terrorist events.”

In class, McGrath provided examples of threats to homeland security, including the 1918 influenza epidemic, World War coastal protection initiatives, and Hurricane Katrina. “I want my students to gain an appreciation for the complexity and variety of incidents that are considered ‘homeland security’ events,” says McGrath. She also wants students to understand the need for a wide variety of relevant technologies. “There is not one technology that represents the Holy Grail,” she says. “Homeland security requires incorporation of many technologies that apply to each of the emergency response cycle phases: mitigation, planning, response, and recovery.”

The technological possibilities cover everything from electronics to materials to infrastructure and beyond. “Some obvious historical technologies include firearms and defensive structures, such as castle walls and moats,” she says. “Others include satellite technologies to monitor activities throughout the world, and health measures, such as vaccines to prevent disease from spreading.”

McGrath’s class examines advances in personal protective equipment, physical and cyber security systems, communications and information technologies, intelligence gathering, robotics, and simulation and training technologies. McGrath tells them about new ways to detect chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear events, including handheld units that emergency responders can use to sample air for radiation and chemicals. “Research is also going on with sensor networks, where you would have sensors distributed throughout major metropolitan areas,” she reports. “With such widespread systems, radiological or chemical events could be detected automatically.”

Since 2001 McGrath has been working with civilian emergency responders and the military to use sensors and wireless networks to monitor the health of troops and responders in the field. Director of the Thayer School-based Emergency Readiness and Response Research Group, McGrath encourages students to contribute their ideas for new technologies.

“There will always be threats: earthquakes, disease, pressure from other countries. There is no such thing as 100-percent protection,” she says. “Homeland security is something everyone should be concerned with, as the effects of our failure to properly address potential events will have an enormous impact on our society. And since homeland security technologies are so varied, just about every engineering discipline has something to offer.”

— Kathryn LoConte

WASTE-BUSTER: Cushman-Roisin. Photograph by Mark Washburn.

By Kathryn LoConte

On a Thursday evening in April, Professor Benoit Cushman-Roisin walked into his ENGS 171: Industrial Ecology class in Cummings Room 200 holding a large cardboard box. He opened it and took out a smaller box, then another box, then paper filling, then plastic wrapping, then a tough plastic package that held a tiny electronic item. “All this just to make you believe you’re getting something useful,” he said as he held it up to the class. “To me, it is just so wasteful.”

Waste is one of the many topics Cushman-Roisin covers in the course, in which he encourages students to think in terms of everything from product redesign to ecological responsibility.

“I want my students to be able to think broadly about the many ramifications of one’s technological activities and to consider the entire life cycle of the product,” he says. “They also need to structure their thinking.” He instructs his class that they need to be industry-minded and realistic. “We need to design a system that makes what’s good for the environment also good for business.”

Cushman-Roisin tries to impart the sense of environmental responsibility he clearly feels. “Engineers are the technology professionals, and technology has caused countless environmental problems,” he says. “For some time, environmental engineers have been those called upon to mop up after the other engineers. This is no longer acceptable, and all engineers ought now to incorporate environmental thinking into their practice. Industrial ecology offers a framework to do this.”

Cushman-Roisin’s students put their studies to use by redesigning real-life products, including home appliances, sneakers, office chairs, disposable plates, and automotive parts. “While most redesigns have revolved around increased energy efficiency and material substitution, some have been radical, going for complete elimination,” he says. For example, one student suggested replacing paper lift tickets with a reusable plastic card.

“I want to give my students hope and optimism,” Cushman-Roisin says. “There are many green technologies available and, although technological barriers exist here and there, for the most part much can be accomplished when we approach the problem in an organized way, learn the lessons from the pioneers, think creatively to adapt these lessons to our own case, and have the will to go forward.”

-Kathryn LoConte is assistant editor at Dartmouth Engineer.

Students routinely get a healthy dose of the future of medicine in ENGS 5, “Healthcare and Biotechnology in the 21st Century,” a popular Thayer School course aimed at non-majors. The class takes students on a tour of technological challenges and possibilities, including regenerating missing organs and limbs, using robots as replacements for human parts, and cloning.

The course is co-taught by longtime biotechnology collaborators Peter Robbie and Dr. Joseph Rosen. Robbie, a Thayer School lecturer, is a product designer with a research focus on medical imaging. Adjunct professor Rosen is a practicing plastic surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and an expert on neurological repair, tissue engineering, and artificial nerve grafts. The two share the podium with guest speakers who acquaint students with a wide range of technological advances. For example, guest lecturer Norman Badler headlined one class last spring with the topic “Representing and Parameterizing Embodied Agent Behaviors.” Badler, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on modeling and animating human images in 3-D graphics, explained part of the difficulty involved in substituting virtual characters for real people: viewers need less than 10 seconds to judge the effectiveness of a computer-generated character.

Student Kenneth Muigai ’07, an English and film studies major, says that his favorite class focused on artificial limbs. The lecture was delivered by a man with a prosthetic arm — and by the doctor who fitted it to him. The patient showed the class his collection of artificial arms — manual, battery-powered, and cosmetic — and talked about the capabilities and limitations of each. “The lecture definitely made me think about the future,” Muigai says. “The fact that doctors and engineers are designing limbs with the specific goal of getting the patients back to where they can participate in their normal activities is not only sensational but extremely uplifting.”

The course explores issues behind such advances as well. The professors discuss the ins and outs of getting Food and Drug Administration approval of new treatments. They pose ethical questions surrounding cloning and other technologies. And they entice the imagination by examining what would be needed to create wings for humans or how to get virtual humans to follow instructions. From these flights of medical fancy to the current state of implants and robotics, the professors challenge students to think about how technologies could be used to solve real-world problems in the future.

“Unless you read Scientific American regularly, you’re not going to know this stuff,” says pre-med student Courtney Chau ’08.

Biology major Jennifer Cech ’08 likes the way the class meshes biology with engineering. “You’re right at the cutting edge of what is going on in the world,” she says.

For more photos, visit our Engineering in Medicine set on Flickr.

“If humans had never learned to smelt metals, we would still be living in caves.”

That’s what materials scientist Ron Lasky told the 60 students taking ENGS 3 “Materials, the Substance of Civilization.” The course, one of several Thayer School offerings aimed at non-majors, gives students a glimpse of the interplay between technology and lifestyles. From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, the interplay is more than a historical footnote. According to Lasky, “The foundation of civilization rests on humankind’s ability to work with materials.”

MATERIAL WITNESS: Professor Ron Lasky demonstrates the modern version of a technology wrought from wood, sinew, bone, and feathers 40,000 years ago. Photograph courtesy of Judith Hertog.

“Students usually don’t realize the extent to which materials determine their everyday life,” he says. “Almost anything we touch has been affected by improvements in materials: the clothes we wear, the objects in our houses and offices, the equipment we use, the materials we build with.”

Marching chronologically through history, Lasky cites numerous examples of the societal impact of technological breakthroughs. “Tools and clothing enabled early humans to survive the ice age,” he says. “The Romans’ production of superior steel and their development and use of concrete and masonry created an empire. The gold rush accelerated the development of the western United States by generations. Sir Henry Bessemer’s process for producing steel inexpensively in the 1850s led to railroads, enabled the industrial revolution, and made architectural innovations such as skyscrapers and elevators possible. Turning sand into silicon chips gave us the electronics/information age.”

Even if none of the students enters engineering, Lasky hopes the course will stick with them. “I hope that as they view the world, they will never again take materials for granted,” he says.

—Judith Hertog

History’s Top Materials

By Professor Ron Lasky

1. Wood — the most widely used building material from earliest times to today
2. Fired clay — the first transformation of one material into another
3. Precious metals — mainstays in the transfer of wealth
4. Smelted materials — transforming several materials into a single material; heating copper-bearing minerals to produce copper was arguably the most significant technical development in all history
5. Glass — used as early as 2500 B.C. for beads and 1000 A.D. for magnifiers, glass is ubiquitous in modern life
6. Petroleum — beyond energy,  a base for detergents, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and plastics
7. Nuclear materials — fission of uranium and plutonium led to nuclear power and weapons
8. Composites — with tremendous strength-to-weight ratios, fiberglass-epoxy carbon fiber-polymer, and other composites make cars, planes, and other products lighter
9. Silicon — the foundation of computer and communications technology
10. Biological and nanomaterials — today’s groundbreaking materials

For more photos, visit our Faculty and Instructors set on Flickr.

(Left to right) Bing Knight ’05, Michael Beilstein ’05, Spencer Boice, and Kelly Cameron ’04 crafted a single-hull boat. Photograph courtesy of Paula Berg.

A flotilla of model sailboats chased by land-bound students with radio controllers took over Hanover’s Occom Pond at the end of spring term. This was no mere afternoon frolic. It was the ENGS 146 regatta, a demonstration of what students learned from a shop-based approach to computer-aided mechanical engineering design.

The premise of ENGS 146: “Computer-Aided Mechanical Engineering Design,” taught by Professor Laura Ray, is that the most important aspects of design aren’t found in a textbook. Students in this class head straight to the shop, where they work with software, handle tools and materials, and develop an intuitive feel for the process of designing and manufacturing a product.

“It gives them experience in things that are hard to learn except by doing,” Ray explains. “You can’t teach them the impact of the planning stage on the final fit of the pieces. They have to see it.”

Each boat had to meet the following requirements: a length of 1 meter or less; a hull manufactured either by Rapid Protoyping, thermoforming or composite layout; one vacuum-cast piece; and one injection-molded piece.

Software instructor Paula Berg, who taught design and modeling techniques, says she “pushed the students to think about their choice of materials, and about accommodating their designs to their chosen manufacturing and assembly processes.” Students discovered, for example, that large composite hulls are harder to manufacture than small ones and that structural protrusions don’t thermoform well. “They had to experiment,” Ray said, “They had to redo things. But I like experimentation, and I was really pleased with the quality of the parts they produced.”

Ray organized the regatta in lieu of formal project presentations. After all, she points out, the true test of a sailboat is how well it sails. Some boats struggled just to reach the starting gate, while others skimmed through with ease. A scaled-down 1901 America’s Cup craft, Shamrock II, finished the course three times before others were halfway through. Shamrock II co-builders Nathaniel Merrill Th’04, John McCall-Taylor ’03, and Nicholas Schaut ’05 think they know why: Their boat was the only one with an integrated keel, which required fewer parts, lightening the hull. “It was amazing to watch her heeling over in the wind, just like a real sailboat,” says Schaut.

Students made several other discoveries: Boats with larger rudders tacked more successfully than those with small ones. Boats with tightly bound rudders had difficulty coming about. Hull weight affected performance more than the number of hulls per boat.

Ray is eager to assign sailboats again. She’d like to improve the matching of parts to processes and have students spend more time designing the sails. Then it will be back to Occom Pond.

— Annelise Hansen

For more photos, visit our Student Projects set on Flickr.