Tau Beta Pi (Maryland Delta Chapter) Officers

March 1, 2016

UMBC Engineers Week 2016

            DiscoverE Engineers Week was celebrated nationally from February 21-27, 2016, and Tau Beta Pi Maryland Delta officers were motivated to plan a successful campus-wide celebration. Tau Beta Pi’s main objective is to promote and recognize engineering excellence, not only for its members and chapter, but also for all engineering organizations and the rest of the UMBC community. The best way to showcase this is through Engineers Week. Here at UMBC, TBP, all the engineering organizations, and the engineering faculty have been collaborating extensively from early October through February to plan our second annual E-Week celebration.

            Throughout E-Week, engineers from all disciplines participate in a variety of events and activities, during which they may build camaraderie and a greater sense of community. Professors, alumni, professionals, and non-STEM majors are actively encouraged to participate as well. A few highlights from our celebration include: Dr. Hrabowski (President of UMBC) as the opening speaker, a fierce and friendly game of dodgeball, and Corey Fleischer (‘05 UMBC mechanical engineering alum and the winner of “The Big Brain Theory” on Discovery Channel). culminating E-Week as the closing speaker. Lastly, all of the engineering majors competed on the last day of the week to overcome a series of engineering challenges and minute-to-win-it games in the Battle of the Engineers to take home the coveted Battle of the Engineers trophy.

            Overall, Tau Beta Pi Maryland Delta and all of the UMBC engineering student organizations involved are honored to have hosted Engineers Week and greatly appreciate all of the support from the College of Engineering and Information Technology and the UMBC community. We hope that the college will continue this wonderful tradition of week-long celebrations and further assimilate Engineers Week to UMBC.

Making Medicine Mobile

UMBC researcher Govind Rao wants to bring the bounty of the information age to a drugstore near you.

By Joab Jackson ’90

“You’re watching history being made.”

I am in the basement of UMBC’s Center for Advanced Sensor Technology (CAST), speaking with its director, Govind Rao. The “history” that Rao speaks of is a large metallic suitcase, filled with snaking tubes and strange components, being attended to by a swarm of graduate students.

The suitcase is an early prototype of a device that might, one day, be able to produce many medicines the world needs. What’s happening in this basement might radically change a $300 billion health care industry.

Rao is leading 30 people to build the device, as part of a project called BioMOD, short for “biologically-derived medicines on demand.” The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded CAST with a $15.7 million grant over four years to make the device happen.

The heart of the unit is a “bioreactor,” which combines a dried extract of cellular machinery with specific DNA to create the medicine that is needed. The unit is also filled with other equipment to warm the resulting combination to the required temperature, as well as purify the mixture into medicine that can be placed in syringes or vials.

“The goal is to replace an acre-sized plant costing a billion dollars and taking three months to ship out medicine,” says Rao, “with a suitcase sized device” that can produce medicines where they are needed – be it a disaster zone, or a battlefield, or even a far-flung community.

February 9, 2016

by Megan Hanks

New blood-clotting agent shows promise for soldiers in combat zones with extreme temperatures

When soldiers suffer traumatic battle wounds in combat, there is a window of just around 10 minutes for medics to apply blood-clotting agents before they will likely lose too much blood to survive. The U.S. military has relied on injectable blood-clotting agents to save soldiers’ lives for years, but many are unstable at extreme temperatures. This is where the Lavik Lab comes in.

Erin Lavik, professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering (CBEE) and a new faculty member at UMBC, has developed nanoparticles that “act like bridges between platelets to make clots form faster.” The have effectively stimulated platelet aggregation in cell culture, remained stable temperatures, and performed well in animal testing. Her team’s research, including a recent successful phase of testing in rats with traumatic liver injury, was featured in Chemical & Engineering News.

To test their ability to remain effective after storage at high temperatures, similar to those found in many combat zones, the nanoparticles were heated to 122 degrees Fahrenheit for one week. Lavik found that the agents performed just as well as in earlier tests. Further tests will determine if this blood-clotting agent could be applied clinically, to serve as a more stable and less expensive alternative to current drugs.

Read more about Lavik’s work in “Artificial Clotting Agent Could Treat Internal Bleeding in Combat Zones,” in Chemical & Engineering News.

This year, the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) hosted a Student Video Competition.  The theme of the 2015-16 competition was “Environmental Engineers Protect Public and Ecological Health.”

The AEESP Student Video Competition sought to highlight environmental engineering and science to increase awareness about the field and encourage young people to learn more about stewardship of water, land, air, mineral, and energy resources.  The competition was open to undergraduate and graduate students studying environmental engineering and science worldwide.

Ten teams from around the country submitted videos on a diverse set of topics.  Judging was conducted by a panel of environmental engineering and science faculty, as well as K-12 science educators.  Videos were evaluated based on originality and creativity, content accuracy, and potential to motivate middle and high school students to pursue a career in environmental engineering and science.

The top three videos, which include prizes of $1,000, $750, and $500, respectively, were:

1. UMBC, “What do Environmental Engineers do?”
2. Virginia Tech, “The Flint Water Study Team (Virginia Tech) | An ode to Environmental Engineers and their field”
3. Yale University, “The Work of an Environmental Engineer”

In addition, three honorable mentions were awarded:

• Stanford University, “The world without environmental engineers”
• University of California Riverside, “The Salton Sea: Obstacles and Opportunities in Environmental Engineering and Science”
• University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, “Environmental Engineers: Heroes of Our Future”

We hope that you enjoy these videos and share them widely to promote the general public’s understanding of environmental engineering and science.  They have also been uploaded to AEESP's YouTube Page.

AEESP Membership and Demographics Committee

Congratulations to Kiranmayi Mangalgiri, who works in the Blaney Lab, on receiving a 2016 Graduate Student Award in Environmental Chemistry.  This award is sponsored by the Division of Environmental Chemistry of the American Chemical Society.  The award recognizes promising graduate students working in areas related to environmental chemistry, and comes with a complimentary one-year membership to the Division and a cash prize.