School of Engineering News - School of Engineering

The UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint department in the School of Medicine and School of Engineering, ranked fifth in the nation in the amount of funding it received from the National Institutes of Health in 2018, marking the third-straight year the department has ranked in the NIH’s top 5.

Imogene Baswell Society Endows Scholarship to Support Female Engineering Students

Imogene Baswell was truly a 20th century pioneer.

School of Engineering's Founding Dean Leaves Behind a Legacy of Service

On January 17, 2019, the UAB School of Engineering lost a beloved and historic figure when Joseph Appleton, Ph.D., the school’s first dean, passed away at age 91.

Construction Engineering Management (CEM) welcomed 40 new graduate students this spring. Attendees came from as far as California, Connecticut, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming for the two day event. CEM admits during the spring and fall terms and currently has 148 registered graduate students.

ISS Payloads The SpaceX CRS-16 launched its resupply mission to the International Space Station on Dec. 4 and carried four Polars and the Rapid Freezer developed by UAB engineers from the Engineering and Innovative Technology Development (EITD) research group. This flight, combined with additional assets currently on-orbit, provided a record for UAB developed payloads on-orbit.

Bond-Haggard Endowed Scholarship Opens a World of Potential

After a successful career in both industry and academia, Warren Haggard, Ph.D., has seen a lot of changes in biomedical engineering. Now retired, he says the thing that excites him most about the future of the field is the same thing that excited him as a student—the possibilities.

Read more: Destination Innovation

Beginning in 2019, UAB will offer a Master of Science in Engineering Management, a joint master’s degree program offered by the UAB School of Engineering and the Collat School of Business. The program will train engineers in the skills they need to move into positions of leadership within a variety of career fields.

Construction Engineering Management (CEM) welcomed 59 new graduate students this fall, the largest cohort to date. Attendees came from as far as California, Colorado, New Jersey and New York for the two day event. CEM admits during the spring and fall terms and currently has 143 active graduate candidates.

A team of biomedical engineering students recently took second place at the World Congress on Biomechanics in Dublin, Ireland for their work on a mechanical umbrella for power wheelchairs.

The International Space Station orbiting earth (image courtesy of NASA). A multi-year contract between NASA and the UAB Engineering Innovation and Technology Development (EITD) research group was recently doubled, giving the group a $50-million cap on work to provide and maintain cold-stowage units for the International Space Station (ISS).

Umbrella Design for a Power Wheelchair Will Be Presented at World Congress of Biomechanics in Ireland

Birmingham native and rising sophomore Mariam Massoud has been selected for the prestigious Fulbright US-UK Summer Institute Scholarship.

Tissue engineering is a transformative branch of regenerative medicine —a cutting-edge field that has the potential to revolutionize the future of healthcare.

For the second year in a row, the UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering, a joint department in the School of Medicine and School of Engineering, ranked fourth in the nation in the amount of funding it received from the National Institutes of Health.

Lee Moradi, Ph.D., is no stranger to dreaming big.

When he came to UAB in 1996, he came with an idea: to build an engineering organization that was among the best in the United States. In the past 22 years, that dream of Moradi’s came true with the creation and success of Engineering and Innovative Technology Development.

This spring, several School of Engineering faculty members received professional honors. Recipients included Timothy Wick, Ph.D., and Joel Berry, Ph.D., who each received awards from the UAB Office of the Provost, as well as Amber Genau, who received the TMS Young Leaders International Scholar Award.

The SAFER Barrier has been saving lives for more than a decade at NASCAR and IndyCar circuits across the United States, as well as in the European circuit. On April 11, SAE International honored the team that created the Steel Foam Energy Reduction Barriers with the 2017 SAE John Melvin Motorsports Safety Award, which includes Dean Sicking, Ph.D.

In March, more than 200 cardiovascular scientists, biomedical engineers and physicians from around the world attended the Fourth Annual NIH Progenitor Cell Translational Consortium (PCTC) 2018 Cardiovascular Bioengineering (CVBE) Symposium at UAB. The event was held over two days at the UAB Hill Student Center.

BME minor Alex Plazas, a sophomore in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, is one of four UAB students named University Innovation Fellows by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

Vladimir Vantsevich, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was recently appointed chair of the Technical Committee for Transportation Machinery in the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science (IFToMM).

Virginia Sisiopiku, Ph.D., was selected by the Engineering Council of Birmingham (ECOB) as the 2017 Educator of the Year. The award was presented at the 59^th Annual Awards Banquet on February 20, 2018. Sisiopiku is the first UAB engineering faculty member to receive the ECOB Educator of the Year Award.

Many aspiring scientists wonder how they’ll find the right lab to launch their research career. Retta El-Sayed was pulled right in by a giant magnet.

The Construction Engineering Management (CEM) track of study welcomed 39 new students to the graduate track of study. However, due to a blast of Canadian air that blanketed much of the east coast with ice, snow, and artic temperatures, only about 24 students were able to attend the January 5 and 6 boot camp. Students came from as far as Oregon, California, and Washington State for the two day event.

Large, human cardiac-muscle patches created in the lab have been tested, for the first time, on large animals in a heart attack model. This clinically relevant approach showed that the patches significantly improved recovery from heart attack injury.

Karim I. Budhwani will be honored in two commencement ceremonies this spring—once as a graduate from UAB’s Materials Engineering Ph.D. program, and then again on May 6 as the speaker at Coe College in Iowa.

A pair of Materials Science and Engineering students recently won first place in the Failure Analysis Competition at the 42nd Annual International Conference and Expo on Advanced Ceramics and Composites (ICACC) in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Aidan King, a senior materials engineering student, is the featured student in AFS Student Chapter Digest, a quarterly newsletter for AFS student members that was launched earlier this month.

Emily Shedlarski, a 2014 graduate from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is featured in the "Industry Voices" feature of the October 2017 issue of Modern Casting.

Earlier this summer, more than 20 high school students got a taste of college and a strong dose of engineering knowledge during the 2017 UAB Materials Camp.

A recent brief in the Wall Street Journal points to a troubling trend in engineering. Even as the computer science and engineering fields are growing, the article states, “men continue to flock to those lucrative positions in significantly larger numbers than women.”

Overexpression of Cell-Cycle Activator Gene Enhances Repair of Dead Heart Muscle

Researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering report a significant advance in efforts to repair a damaged heart after a heart attack, using grafted heart-muscle cells to create a repair patch. The key was overexpressing a gene that activates the cell-cycle of the grafted muscle cells, so they grow and divide more than control grafted cells.

The UAB Engineering and Innovative Technology Development (EITD) research group was recently announced as a partner in a $500-million contract issued from NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) Program Office.

SOE Professor Says Drones Have Potential to Find Flaws in Aging Bridges

Nasim Uddin, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, is using a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore ways to make America's bridges safer.