{"id":13446,"date":"2012-10-24T19:03:34","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T19:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/d45h139.public.uconn.edu\/sites\/news\/?p=13446"},"modified":"2025-01-30T16:45:22","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T21:45:22","slug":"around-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2012\/10\/around-engineering\/","title":{"rendered":"Around Engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"

School Honors Support Staff <\/em><\/p>\n

Ed Swindelles<\/strong>, a computer technical support consultant in the Engineering Technical Services unit, and Tiffiny Thibodeau<\/strong>, an administrative services specialist in the Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) department, were honored by UConn Engineering for their outstanding contributions in support of faculty, students and staff throughout the 2011-12 academic year and across their careers at UConn.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>Ed and Tiffiny were among the staff members nominated by colleagues for their superior performance and attitude, and they received strong supporting letters from others in their units.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tiffiny, nominated by Dr. Mekonnen Gebremichael, has been with the CEE Department since 2008.\u00a0 Dr. Gebremichael lauded her for her contributions in support of the School of Engineering\u2019s USAID-funded project with Ethiopia, which include hiring and travel arrangements for program instructors; equipment purchase and shipping; and student recruiting and selection procedures. Among those echoing the nomination was Dr. Amvrossios Bagtzoglou, CEE Department Head, who noted Tiffiny\u2019s outstanding support to the CEE on a variety of critical activities.<\/p>\n

Ed was nominate\"\"<\/a>d by George Assard, Director of Engineering Technical Services, who said \u201cEd’s extraordinary success as a System Administrator and his willingness to reach outside his required duties for the sake of the school is creditable of this award. Ed’s technical skills, contributions, reliability, attention to details, willingness to help, and acceptance by all faculty and staff, make him an ideal System Administrator and this school is very fortunate to employ him.\u201d Offering strong support of the nomination were Jeremy Pollack, Director of IT for the UConn School of Business and Tony Molloy, Team Leader of Information Technology Services for the UConn Libraries.<\/p>\n

MSE Students Attend Conference<\/em><\/p>\n

Six undergraduate students from the Materials Science & Engineering program attended the Materials Science & Technology Conference in Pittsburgh October 8-10. \u00a0The \"\"<\/a>students were seniors Kayla Molnar, Bryan Liggett, Jason Chan, Austin Poucher, Drew Capolupo, along with junior Nathan Martin. \u00a0Among the activities in which they competed was a \u201cmug drop competition,\u201d in which they designed and manufactured a ceramic mug that \u2013 along with other teams\u2019 mug entries \u2013 was dropped from increasing heights until breakage.\u00a0 UConn\u2019s students also attended presentations on exciting new research in areas such as additive manufacturing, biomaterials, sensors, nuclear materials and green manufacturing; and toured Carnegie Mellon university.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Mentored Team Wins MIT Grant<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A team of Ella T. Grasso Southeastern Technical High School students mentored by GK-12<\/a> Fellow Jason White won an MIT InvenTeam grant of approximately $6,000 to construct a space heating unit powered by compost. The team will present their invention at MIT\u2019s Eureka Fest in June 2013. The team\u2019s system will be able to provide continuous heat to a greenhouse or small home, particularly in rural locales.\u00a0 In describing their invention, the team explains that, due to the reduced production of heat from maturing compost piles, their system will incorporate multiple compost heating units into one system, where their life-cycles will be staggered such that heat will constantly be provided to the space. This invention will first be used to heat Grasso Tech’s greenhouse, where vegetables and herbs are grown to be used in the school’s cafeteria. Read about the MIT InvenTeam competition here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exciting developments are always percolating within UConn Engineering. Read a few of the highlights here, from outstanding staff service awards to engaged students and pre-students who are making important contributions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":224525,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1866],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[37],"class_list":["post-13446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engr"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-28 05:26:45","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224787,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13446\/revisions\/224787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/224525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13446"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=13446"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}