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VIDEO: Engineering Career Fair
September 2014

VIDEO: Engineering Career Fair

The Cullen College of Engineering Career Fair drew crowds of nearly 2,000 students and more than 400 company representatives to the UH Hilton on Sept. 18. The Engineering Career Fair connects engineering students with regional and national employers offering positions for co-ops, internships and full-time jobs. In total, 114 companies were represented and collected at least 1,800 resumes from Cullen College students. Watch the video to learn more about the Engineering Career Fair and why it’s so important to our students!

News

Ballarini

Cullen College Welcomes Roberto Ballarini as Civil Engineering Department Chair
The UH Cullen College of Engineering is proud to welcome Roberto Ballarini as the new chair of the civil and environmental engineering department. Ballarini comes to UH from the University of Minnesota, where he served as the James L. Record Professor of Civil Engineering for eight years in addition to heading the department from 2007 to 2012. Read more..

Shih

Professor Developing New Technologies for Detecting Subsea Oil Spills with DOI Award
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has awarded electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Wei-Chuan Shih with nearly $900,000 over two years to investigate new sensing techniques for detecting oil spills and hydrocarbon leaks in subsea oil and gas operations. Read more.

Faculty Members Honored with Cullen College Teaching and Research Excellence Awards
At this month’s Cullen College of Engineering faculty and staff meeting, dean Joseph Tedesco announced the recipients of the 2013–2014 teaching awards, which recognize faculty members with outstanding performance in teaching, research and service. Read more.

cells

Professor Examines Underlying Mechanics of Nucleus Membranes in Biological Cells
Ashutosh Agrawal, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, said he likes to tell his students at the Cullen College that many lessons on mechanics and structures can be gleaned from nature. “There is so much diversity and beauty in nature, and biological cells are a wonderful example of this,” he said. Agrawal was recently awarded $382,000 over three-years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the underlying mechanics of the outer membranes of the nucleus that encapsulate the DNA of the cell. Read more.

Han

Professor Earns Grant to Develop Device-to-Device Communication
Zhu Han, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Cullen College of Engineering, earned two National Science Foundation grants to develop and employ technology that allows smart phones and other devices in close proximity to communicate directly. The foundation awarded Han with $185,000 to optimize the performance of cellular networks through device-to-device communication and $227,500 to apply the improved technology to mobile social networking. The three-year grants enable Han to employ two doctoral students, Yanru Zhang and Yunan Gu. Read more.

Professor and Student Commercialize Smartphone-based Rapid Diagnostic Tests with NSF I-CORPS Award
A professor and doctoral student in the chemical and biomolecular engineering department at the Cullen College of Engineering have won the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) award. The UH I-Corps team will use the $50,000 award to develop highly sensitive rapid medical diagnostic tests that use “glow-in-the-dark” nanoparticles to signal the presence of a disease target. “Translational work is what they call it. To turn basic research into technologies and products with an actual benefit to society,” said Balakrishnan Raja, a chemical engineering Ph.D. student who is serving as the Entrepreneurial Lead on the I-Corps grant. Richard Willson, Huffington-Woestemeyer Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, is the grant’s Principal Investigator. Read more.

Art

Professor Teams Up with Local Artist to Study Aesthetic Experiences in the Brain
It’s rare to find science and art so inextricably tied together. It’s rarer still to find yourself playing the role of scientist, artist and art observer all at the same time. But patrons of the Menil Collection will have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do just that at Houston conceptual artist Dario Robleto’s exhibit, The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed. Each Saturday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. through January 2015, visitors to Robleto’s exhibit will be met by a team of researchers from the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering led by Jose “Pepe” Luis Contreras-Vidal, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor of electrical and computer engineering. The research team will give museum-goers the option of wearing an EEG skullcap to record their brain activity while they observe Robleto’s artwork. Read more.

Robertson

Professor Wins Grant to Develop Plant-Based Materials for Wind Turbines
Megan Robertson, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Cullen College of Engineering, has won a $100,000, two-year Norman Hackerman Advanced Research Program (NHARP) grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to develop fruit and vegetable-based materials for wind turbines. Out of 45 proposals submitted for the NHARP grant, only 11 received funding. The purpose of the NHARP grant program is to encourage and provide support for basic research in biomedicine, energy and the environment. Read more.

Ghasemi

New Mechanical Engineering Professor Gains Steam with Heat Transfer Technology Research
Hadi Ghasemi, a new professor in the department of mechanical engineering at the UH Cullen College of Engineering, is researching ways to create steam more efficiently, and the possibilities are revolutionary. So revolutionary, in fact, that he has been nominated for the 2014 World Technology Award in the Energy category, an award presented by The World Technology Network (WTN) in association with media giants Fortune and Time Magazine. Read more.

Grabow

Secrets Behind Gold’s Unexpected Oxidation Uncovered by Chemical Engineering Professor and Student
A professor and Ph.D. student at the UH Cullen College of Engineering have created the first-ever model to fully explain what happens during the catalytic oxidation of carbon monoxide. Lars Grabow, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering with the Cullen College, conducted this research alongside his Ph.D. student, Hieu Doan. The collaborators on this project were Bert Chandler, Johnny Saavedra, and Christopher Pursell at Trinity University in San Antonio. Together, they have published their findings in the latest issue of Science. Read more.

SURF Program Provides Undergrad Researchers ‘Enlightening’ Experience
As a Tier One research university, the University of Houston places a strong emphasis on research in and out of the classroom. But for undergraduate students, hands-on laboratory opportunities can be scarce, as researcher spots are usually filled with graduate students and post-doctoral associates. The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) is designed to provide younger students with these valuable laboratory positions for several months over their summer vacation. Several Cullen College students participated in the SURF program last summer along with several Cullen College faculty members, who mentored SURF students in their laboratories. Read more.

Society for Women Engineers Travels to Brazil for ‘One Day in Engineering’
The Society for Women Engineers (SWE) once again travelled to Teresopolis, Brazil this summer for “One Day in Engineering” (“Um Dia na Engenharia”), an outreach event organized by the student group to introduce local high school students to the engineering discipline. Read more.

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