Brown School of Engineering to Host Open House for Prospective Students

The Brown University School of Engineering will hold an open house on Saturday, September 29, from 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. in room 166 of the Barus and Holley building (184 Hope Street / Corner of Hope and George Streets). The faculty of the School of Engineering and the Office of College Admission invite prospective applicants, parents, teachers, and guidance counselors to attend this open house.

The program will include an overview of the undergraduate programs of study, information about faculty and student research interests, opportunity to meet faculty and undergraduates from the School of Engineering, and a brief overview of admissions and financial aid.

Students are asked to please RSVP online by Monday, September 24. Students may call (401) 863-7930 for further information.

The Brown undergraduate engineering program enrolls 400 students, and is the oldest in the Ivy League and the third oldest civilian program in the nation.  Students may earn a bachelor of science degree in one of six ABET accredited programs: biomedical engineering, chemical and biochemical engineering, computer engineering, electrical engineering, materials engineering, or mechanical engineering.

For any students arriving on campus early, the admission office offers regularly scheduled information sessions at 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. and campus tours at 9:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m., and 11:00 a.m. Tours leave from the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center located at 75 Waterman Street.

Brown School of Engineering Hosts Eastman Conference

The Brown University School of Engineering is hosting the 2012 Lester Eastman Conference on High Performance Devices from August 7-9, 2012. The conference will include sessions on green technology; high speed devices; infrared photonics; terahertz technology; power conversion, switching, and transmission; and next generation devices.

The conference will have three plenary speakers: Professor Umesh Mishra (USCB) on Recent Advances in High Frequency Semiconductor Devices; Professor Hideo Ohno (Tohoku Univ., Japan) on Spintronic Devices for VLSI; and Dr. Kamiar Karimi (Boeing Corporation) on High Power Semiconductor Devices.

Larry Larson, Dean of the School of Engineering at Brown, will give a talk on the “Internet of Things”.

The conference is being organized locally by Domenico Pacifici, assistant professor of engineering at Brown. The general chair of the conference is Professor Paul Chow of RPI.

For more information, please go to: http://www.leconf.com/

Do girls need lacrosse helmets?

Joseph Crisco, professor of orthopaedics, wanted to measure the impact of hits to the head in girls’ lacrosse. He invited some players into his lab to take some shots at a test dummy. The data could inform an eventual standard for girls’ and women’s lacrosse.

A little more to the left
To analyze what happens in a girls' lacrosse game when
stick meets head, Joseph Crisco equipped a test dummy
with accelerometers and invited players to take some shots.
Credit: Mike Cohea/Brown University

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Dr. Joseph "Trey" Crisco, the Henry F. Lippitt Professor of Orthopaedics and Director of the Bioengineering Lab, recently invited female lacrosse players ranging in age from 12 to 28 into his Rhode Island Hospital lab to swing their sticks for a project titled “Head Accelerations from Various Stick Checks in Girls’ Lacrosse.”

The research, funded by US Lacrosse, the national governing body of men’s, women’s and youth lacrosse, and by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, will provide data on how the head is accelerated after being hit by a stick. Video analysis of players taking whacks at a helmeted dummy, taken at 1,000 frames per second, could inform an eventual standard for girls’ and women’s lacrosse headgear.

For years, Crisco has studied head impacts in sports such as football, hockey, and lacrosse by embedding accelerometers in the helmets of collegiate teams and gathering data from actual practices and competition.

by David Orenstein

Quantifying the magnetic nature of light emission

In collaboration with The Institute of Photonics Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Brown School of Engineering researchers in the lab of Rashid Zia ’01, Manning Assistant Professor of Engineering, have just published an article in in Nature Communications. Visiting scholar Tim Taminiau from the lab of Niek van Hulst at ICFO worked alongside Brown engineering graduate student Sinan Karaveli to demonstrate how the natural magnetic dipole transitions in lanthanide ions can be used to access optical-frequency magnetic fields.

Authors: Tim H. Taminiau, Sinan Karaveli, Niek F. van Hulst, and Rashid Zia

Examining how light emission is distributed in energy-
and momentum-space can reveal fundamental
information about optical transitions. This image
shows an energy-momentum spectrum of europium ions.
Following bright emissions lines, you may notice
several points where the contrast inverts - these
changes are direct visualizations of the opposite
symmetries of electric and magnetic dipoles transitions.

Abstract:
Tremendous advances in the study of magnetic light-matter interactions have recently been achieved using man-made nanostructures that exhibit and exploit an optical magnetic response. However, naturally occurring emitters can also exhibit magnetic resonances in the form of optical-frequency magnetic-dipole transitions. Here we quantify the magnetic nature of light emission using energy- and momentum-resolved spectroscopy, and leverage a pair of spectrally close electric- and magnetic-dipole transitions in trivalent europium to probe vacuum fluctuations in the electric and magnetic fields at the nanometre scale. These results reveal a new tool for nano-optics: an atomic-size quantum emitter that interacts with the magnetic component of light.

To access the full article, please go to:
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n7/full/ncomms1984.html

Venture for America fellow Tim Dingman '11 hired by Accio Energy

Accio Energy (Ann Arbor, Mich.) is taking on one of the first Venture for America fellows this month, hiring Tim Dingman '11, an electrical engineering graduate from Brown University.

Venture for America is launching its inaugural class of fellows this summer, pairing 40 fresh college graduates with start-ups in economically challenged regions. The New York City-based non-profit is modeled after Teach for America where it pairs top talent from U.S. universities with innovative start-ups growing in urban areas, such as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Cincinnati and Providence, Rhode Island. The idea is to give college grads an open door into entrepreneurship in the hopes they will launch their own start-ups in their host cities one day.

Metro Detroit companies are receiving 11 of these fellows, and Accio Energy is the only firm from Ann Arbor to receive one. The alternative energy start-up is reinventing the wind energy generation with new technology that creates clean energy from static electricity generated from the wind.

"The novelty of it combined with the size of the company were two huge draws," says Dingman.

Dingman also founded his own start-up, which makes a showerhead efficiency upgrade for dorm rooms. He has been interested in developing clean tech for most if his college career, but wanted to get his professional start working for a young company creating disruptive technology.

"There is a lot of energy there," Dingman says. "There is a lot of room for innovation which is what I was looking for in my placement."

Source: Tim Dingman, fellow with Venture for America
Writer: Jon Zemke

Joseph Calo Named a Fellow of the American Chemical Society

Joseph Calo, Professor Emeritus at the Brown School of Engineering, has been named a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Calo is one of 96 fellows in the 2012 class and will be honored at the society’s national meeting in Philadelphia in August.

A founder of the chemical engineering program at Brown, Calo was honored for his research contributions in chemical kinetics and transport phenomena as applied to carbon materials, environmental characterization/remediation, and energy conversion.

He served as treasurer, councilor, technical program secretary and representative of the Fuel Chemistry (now Energy and Fuels, ENFL) Division to the Multidisciplinary Program Planning Group (MPPG), and Divisional Activities Committee (DAC) member of ACS.

"I'd like to congratulate Professor Calo on this spectacular achievement,” said Dean Larry Larson. “Becoming a Fellow of the ACS is a recognition of a lifetime of technical contributions and service to the American Chemical Society. Professor Calo's contributions to Brown and to Chemical Engineering have been and continue to be extraordinary."

The fellows program began in 2009 as a way to recognize and honor ACS members for outstanding achievements in and contributions to science, the profession, and ACS.