Engineers have lots of answers to lots of questions. At Momentum, we figured we should take advantage this fact with Ask the Engineers, in which we ask one question to various folks in the School of Engineering. And readers, if you have a question you’d like to pose to the engineers, please send it our way.

This issue, we asked faculty members the following question: What engineering-related goal do you most want to accomplish in 2015?

Dr. Mehdi Anwar, Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department: I have been thinking about this for quite a while, but this year will make an effort. I believe, similar to electromagnetic wave focusing in plasma, that under certain conditions we could create focused electron beams by manipulating material properties. It’s something that might be used in energy production.

Dr. Nicholas Lownes, Associate Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering departmennt: My goals for 2015 are to launch our new public transportation planning web application, t-HUB (www.thub.uconn.edu), successfully and to publish an interconnected statewide map of Connecticut’s public transit system built on open data within the application.  The intent is that these tools will open up new possibilities for transit planners and operators in evaluating, designing and planning their systems.