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Campus
News: Week of Feb. 5, 2001
President
Jackson Named Black Engineer of the Year
 President
Shirley Ann Jackson will be named Black Engineer of the Year at
the 15th Annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference,
to be held Feb. 8-10 in Baltimore. Jackson is the first woman
to win the top award.
"Dr.
Jackson is a distinguished theoretical physicist with a long string
of 'firsts' to her credit," said Tyrone D. Taborn, chairman
and CEO of Career Communications Group, publishers of US
Black Engineer & Information Technology magazine,
which announced the selection. "She is the first woman to
win the prestigious Black Engineer of the Year Award; the first
African American on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the
first African American to head that agency; and the first African-American
woman to earn a Ph.D. at MIT in any discipline, among other achievements.
"It
is our hope that Dr. Jackson's achievements will shine a spotlight
on this problem and also serve as a beacon to guide other
talented women into the field."
— Tyrone
D. Taborn—
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"The
gender gap in technical fields is abysmal," Taborn says.
"Women have never received more than 18 percent of the engineering
bachelor's degrees awarded in the U.S. in any year. And the ethnic
divide in engineering is worse: only 3,000 to 4,000 African Americans
annually out of 64,000-plus graduates.
"It
is our hope that Dr. Jackson's achievements will shine a spotlight
on this problem and also serve as a beacon to guide other talented
women into the field."
Jackson
tops the list of more than two dozen African Americans receiving
recognition at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference.
The awards will be presented during special ceremonies on Saturday,
Feb. 10, at the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre, beginning at 8 p.m.
Among
the awardees at the conference is Horace K. Moo-Young '92, assistant
professor of civil and environmental engineering at Lehigh University.
Young is being honored with the Promotion of Higher Education
award.
The
Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference is sponsored by USBE
& Information Technology magazine, the Council of Engineering
Deans of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and
Lockheed Martin Corporation. More than 7,000 are expected to attend
the conference this year.
Glicksman
Receives Humboldt Research Award
 Martin
E. Glicksman '57, John Tod Horton Professor of Materials Engineering,
was selected as a recipient of a coveted Humboldt Senior Research
Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany.
As
part of his prize, Glicksman will conduct research in Germany
for two six-month periods in 2002 and 2003. He will meet the
German president in a ceremony this July.
Glicksman
was recognized for his lifelong research in materials processing,
including metals solidification, crystal growth of electronic
materials, microgravity science, and control of microstructures.
Glicksman developed Rensselaer's Isothermal Dendritic Growth
Experiment (IDGE), featuring a series of microgravity crystal
growth experiments successfully flown on space shuttle missions
in 1994, 1996, and 1997. Applications of the IDGE results will
help to improve productivity in the metals industry.
Glicksman
received his bachelor's in metallurgical engineering in 1957
and his doctorate in 1961 in physical metallurgy, both from
Rensselaer. He joined the Rensselaer faculty in 1975 as chair
of the materials science and engineering department, and was
named the John Tod Horton '52 Professor of Materials Engineering
in 1986.
Glicksman
is a fellow of the Metallurgical Society, the American Society
for Materials, and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, and is a member of the American Physical Society
and the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics.
He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1996.
He
has received numerous awards throughout his career, including
NASA's Award for Technical Excellence and the National Space
Processing Award of AIAA for his work on IDGE.
"Virtual Customer Communities" Aid Companies in
New Developments
Customers
can be a company's best partner when it comes to new product
development, says Satish Nambisan, assistant professor of management
in the Lally School. Nambisan studied two software companies
that have had success using virtual customer communities (VCC)
to test new products.
"These
virtual communities can increase customer loyalty, strengthen
product ties, lower development costs, and quicken the product
development cycle."
— Satish
Nambisan—
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VCCs,
which had their genesis within the high-tech industry, are groups
of trusted consumers that companies bring together online to
enhance user support, develop new products, and trouble shoot.
Nambisan says VCCs can be useful for other industries, but only
if managed properly.
"Companies
that were most successful using VCCs pinpointed the specific
customer roles that would be most beneficial to them and then
offered customers incentives to contribute," says Nambisan.
"These virtual communities can increase customer loyalty,
strengthen product ties, lower development costs, and quicken
the product development cycle."
Netscape,
for example, benefited greatly from using its virtual customer
community in the testing of new versions of its browser. Microsoft
has made significant gains using VCCs to improve product support,
and Fiat draws on its customer community to identify and prioritize
design features in its new models.
In
a recent survey of software companies, Nambisan found those
that effectively harnessed VCCs churned out a greater number
of new versions of their product per year. Given the rapid pace
of the software industry where the success of a product is dependent
on a company's ability to innovate in a changing technology
market, VCCs are clearly giving companies an edge, he says.
Nambisan's
findings will be published in Frontiers of Entrepreneurship
Research, a publication of Babson College. His research
is supported by a grant from the Center for Innovation Management
Studies, a NSF-supported research center.
Lighting
the Way for the Elderly
A
grant from the AARP Andrus Foundation will help researchers
from Rensselaer's Lighting Research Center (LRC) provide the
public with informationon proper lighting for older adults.
Currently
no guidelines exist on how to improve lighting for seniors as
their eyes lose the ability to handle glare and low brightness,
and fail to distinguish colors, said Mariana Figueiro, program
director at the LRC.
The
AARP grant will allow Figueiro and Peter Boyce, professor of
architecture, to translate the results of the LRC's work into
separate brochures for general audiences, including older adults
and their families, home designers, architects, builders, caregivers
and, the medical community. The brochures will be available
this summer.
A
grant from the AARP Andrus Foundation will help researchers
from Rensselaer's Lighting Research Center (LRC) provide
the public with information on proper lighting for older
adults.
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Some
of the principles of lighting for the elderly have already been
published through the LRC's Demonstration and Evaluation of
Lighting Technologies and Applications (DELTA) Program. The
project has evaluated lighting in South Mall Towers, a senior
residential facility in Albany, and McClean Village Apartments,
an independent living facility for seniors in Simsbury, Conn.
"This
project will make people aware that they can improve their daily
lives through lighting and teach them how to do it," explained
Figueiro.
The LRC is also expanding its research to explore the impact
of lighting on human circadian rhythms. This could provide help
for people suffering from disturbed sleep and wake patterns,
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), and post-partum depression.
Climate-Change
Science Should Affect Economic Planning, Researchers Caution
Climate-change
economics, the study of how changes in climate affect economic
activity, lags dangerously behind climate-change science, according
to a Rensselaer ecological economist and a recent graduate.
Current
economic models are assuming climate change will be smooth,
gradual, and easy to adapt to, but paleoclimatic evidence
suggests past climate change has been sudden and abrupt.
— Evelyn Wright—
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While
climate scientists cannot currently predict the level of warming
that might trigger rapid, global-scale climate change, climate
economists should take the full range of our complex climate
system into account, says Jon Erickson, a reviewer for the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) group on mitigation and an assistant
professor of economics.
"The
economic models advising the policy community are gravely misleading,"
say Erickson and Evelyn Wright '00, a graduate of Rensselaer's
ecological economics doctoral program who currently works at
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Neoclassical
economic analyses, on which current climate-change economic
models rely, are based on highly simplified scenarios and inadequate
assumptions about the sources of climate-change damages, say
Erickson and Wright. Economic modelers have either dismissed
high impact warming trends or concluded that humans will adapt.
A
recent report issued by the IPCC, stated average global temperatures
could rise by as much as 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, the
most rapid change in 10,000 years.
"Current
economic models are assuming climate change will be smooth,
gradual, and easy to adapt to, but paleoclimatic evidence suggests
past climate change has been sudden and abrupt," says Wright.
Greenland
ice core records indicate the bulk of the warming that ended
the final cold snap of the last Ice Age occurred in just a few
decades. Climate in much of the Northern Hemisphere changed
in perhaps as little as 20 years. Such rapid transitions are
to be expected in a complex climate system, but have not been
incorporated into most influential economic studies.
Erickson
says many neoclassical economists embrace the dangerous theory
that technological innovation will alleviate environmental constraints.
"Technology
can't save us in this case," says Erickson. "There's
no technological substitute for climate."
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