Celebrating Dartmouth Engineering faculty and student achievements, appointments, awards, publications, and more.
Better Sea Ice Monitoring
As part of a new $1.8-million investment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a team led by Professor Donald Perovich was awarded $296,000 to enhance ocean-monitoring technologies in the Arctic. He will use the award to increase the number and capability of seasonal ice mass balance (SIMB) buoys, which compares the amount of winter ice growth and summer ice melt. There are approximately one dozen SIMB buoys in the Arctic collecting data on temperature, air pressure, and ice thickness, and NOAA has been funding the deployment of Dartmouth’s SIMB buoys in the Beaufort Sea, just north of Alaska, for the past six years. With this additional funding, the Thayer team will develop additional buoys with added sensors for sunlight, water salinity, and snow depth. Perovich has relied on the expertise of many engineering students to help design and build buoys that are both robust and cheap.
The original SIMB was developed by James Whitlock Th’18 and Cameron Planck Th’21, who founded Cryosphere Innovation, which provides data-collection equipment worldwide. Meanwhile, PhD student Ian Raphael ’18 Th’21 (shown, right, installing a SIMB) is developing a new system for observing and tracking snow thickness. As for light, “We have some simple light sensors ready because a few years ago Mary Tobin ’20 Th’20 did her senior thesis on how to put optical sensors on the buoys,” says Perovich. Meanwhile, PhD Innovation Program student Savannah Byron is interested in building on Tobin’s work to design more sophisticated light sensors. “It amazes me what these students accomplish,” he says. —Catha Mayor
With NOAA funding, the Thayer team will develop additional SIMB buoys with added sensors for sunlight, water salinity, and snow depth.
HONORED Professor Eric Fossum was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the White House in recognition of his pioneering work creating digital imaging sensors that power modern cameras.
PRESENTED PhD student Ene Michelle Igomu earned first place in the 3-Minute Thesis competition at the Ivy Collective for Inclusion in Engineering Doctoral Symposium for her presentation on “Revolutionizing 3D Catalyst Design for Green Hydrogen Production.” Fellow PhD students Allaire Doussan and Yanqiao Li were among the nine finalists.
AWARDED Professor Wesley Marrero earned a Best Paper Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) as coauthor of a paper in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management that uses optimization to design clinically intuitive hypertension treatment protocols.
PUBLISHED PhD students Simon Agnew ’22, Sam Ong, and Saifur Rahman, research associate Anand Tiwari, and Professor Will Scheideler coauthored “Hypoeutectic Liquid Metal Printing of 2D Indium Gallium Oxide Transistors” in Small magazine.
FUNDED Professor Geoffrey Luke received a $2.2-million, four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to combine ultrasound imaging with tumor-targeted nanodroplets to detect the presence of oral cancer in lymph nodes.
PITCHED PhD student and Surgical Innovation Fellow Peter Bertone won the 2024 Orthopaedic Research Society International Section Fracture Repair 3-Minute Research Pitch Competition with “Post-Radiation Renovation: Re-building Stronger ‘Homes’ with Better Bones.”
PUBLISHED Research associates Yihuang Xiong and Jiongzhi Zheng, PhD student Shay McBride, and Professor Geoffroy Hautier coauthored “Computationally Driven Discovery of T Center-like Quantum Defects in Silicon” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
AWARDED PhD students Yanqiao Li and Bahlakoana Mabetha, advised by Professor Jason Stauth, received $50,000 from the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps training program to commercialize their novel high-voltage, low-power drivers for haptics.
PUBLISHED PhD students Huan Zhao and Xiangbei Liu and Professor Yan Li coauthored “Architecture Design of High-Performance Piezoelectric Energy Harvester with 3D Metastructure Substrate,” featured on the cover of Advanced Theory and Simulations. And with PhD student Ya Tang, they coauthored “Design of Metamaterial Thermoelectric Generators for Efficient Energy Harvesting” in Energy Conversion and Management: X.
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