Two alumni from the college are among the 12 being recognized at the UWM Alumni Association 2025 Alumni Awards. The celebration will take place Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, at the Pfister Hotel.
Graduates of the college being honored include:
Exemplary Alumni Service Award
Richard Schreiner ’82 MS Computer Science
Retired, Johnson Controls
Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) Award
Daniel Spiewak ’12 BS Computer Science
Nvidia
Louis Goss (’12 BS Mechanical Engineering), a stock car racer and co-owner of a Late Moderns racing team based in Green Bay, presented a check to Dean Brett Peters for nearly $4,300 that he and business partner Mike Hubbard raised during the past racing season.
The gift honors the legacy of Wisconsin racer and UWM alum Alan Kulwicki (’77 BS Mechanical Engineering) and augments the Alan Kulwicki Memorial Scholarship fund, which supports a UWM undergraduate in that discipline.
Goss was a recipient of the Kulwicki scholarship when he attended UWM and said he wanted to pay it forward. The ceremony included Habib Rahman, professor and chair, mechanical engineering.
Goss plans to post the picture of the presentation on his social media pages, Facebook and X (@lougossracing), along with a QR code so that others can give to the fund online.
Kulwicki applied his UWM degree to his skill in race car driving to achieve success on the track. He was on the cutting edge of an increasing emphasis on technology in the sport. Despite his death in a plane crash in 1993, Kulwicki’s legacy lives on. He was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2019.
The Milwaukee Business Journal interviewed Andy Graettinger, associate dean for research, about the workforce challenges facing the manufacturing sector as large numbers of traditional manufacturing workers retire. The story also quoted Aderiano de Silva, an adjunct instructor in industrial & manufacturing engineering who also works as a principal engineer at Rockwell Automation.
The story is accessible behind a paywall for subscribers only [https://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/subscribers/ and click on the digital edition on the left]. The highlights are below.
Habib Tabatabai, professor, civil & environmental engineering, was quoted in two national magazines about what ultimately caused the collapse of the famed Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico.
The giant telescope collapsed in December of 2020, after the platform suspended by cables above the telescope fell into the 1,000-foot-wide dish.
Tabatabai was a member of the committee appointed by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to examine previous investigations and issue a final report. That committee uncovered a question not previously addressed. “When we looked at the patterns of cable pullouts,” Tabatabai told Sky & Telescope, “there were several factors that said, ‘something else must be at work here.’”
The committee made its presentation to the U.S. Congress on Nov. 13.
Read about it in Astronomy and Sky & Telescope.
Faculty in the college have received new funding from the Water Equipment and Policy Center (WEP) for 2025. The center awarded a total of $333,000 to five UWM research projects, in addition to three projects from Marquette University.
WEP is a university-industry research collaboration, developing industry solutions through research at both UWM and Marquette. Backed by the National Science Foundation, WEP focuses on creating new sensors and devices, novel materials, and innovative systems to help the world manage its stressed water resources.
Ten faculty members in the college are involved with the center. WEP’s industry advisory board selected these UWM projects:
The famed Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed on Dec. 1, 2020, when the 900-ton equipment platform suspended above the 1,000-foot diameter telescope dish crashed through the dish.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine formed a committee to review the collapse and three earlier investigative reports and to issue a final verdict on the contributing factors and probable causes of the failure.
Habib Tabatabai, professor of civil engineering and an expert on structural cables and cable-supported bridges, served as a member of the committee, which published its final report on Oct. 24 and presented it to the U.S. Congress on Nov. 13.
This committee attempted to answer a question not addressed in the other inquiries: Why did multiple cable failures occur at Arecibo when no records exist of this specific type of failure (cables pulling out from their sockets) occurring anywhere else in the long history of these structural cables?
A suspended platform
The telescope’s platform was suspended with steel cables from three towers located around the dish. All cables terminated in “spelter” sockets at their ends. The spelter sockets were filled with molten zinc during manufacturing to surround the individual wires and secure the cables at their ends.
The visual inspections of cables in 2018 and 2019 had indicated that some of the cables had pulled out of their end sockets to varying degrees following the 2017 Hurricane Maria. The earlier investigative reports and the National Academies’ also reported that “creep” of zinc in the cable sockets was a major contributor to the cable pullout and subsequent collapse.
“Creep” is the long-term deformation of materials under sustained stress.
But what exactly caused the excessive creep of zinc?
“Zinc-filled spelter sockets have been used for decades in a variety of industries,” Tabatabai said. “This type of failure of zinc-filled spelter sockets has not been reported anywhere else despite its widespread use.”
Previous investigations also noted that the patterns of cable pull-outs were not uniform. They varied at different locations.
A pivotal moment in the telescope’s history
In 1997, new (auxiliary) cables were added to the structure to accommodate the installation of new components, including a high-energy radar transmitter.
The first cable to fail in 2020, however, was one of the newer cables, followed by failures of older, original cables.
The committee carefully examined the observed failure patterns and concluded that the most plausible explanation is that “low-current, long-term electroplasticity” contributed to the excessive creep of zinc within the sockets.
An important feature of the Arecibo Telescope was that it emitted powerful electromagnetic waves, which generate electrical currents in metals, such as steel cables.
Studying low-current electroplasticity
Electroplasticity can result in a softening effect when very high electrical currents flow through a metal, like zinc, over a short period of time. Tabatabai said it is conceivable that exposing the zinc to low-level electrical currents over a long period of time (decades) could also result in a softening effect.
However, this has not been experimentally evaluated in the past.
Because of his experience working on the Arecibo report, Tabatabai plans to test the concept of low-current electroplasticity of pure zinc in the UWM Structural Engineering Laboratory.
“Typically, electroplasticity has been associated with very high currents over a short period of time,” he added. “We are going to examine the effects of low currents over a much longer period of time.”
Two engineering alums have received Bridge Grant funding from the UWM Research Foundation to support the early stages of their startups and attract further investment.
The Bridge Grant Program invests in new companies of UWM faculty, staff and students who have licensed intellectual property through the Research Foundation. The foundation has awarded a total of $450,000 in Bridge Grants to 12 startups since 2021.
The first 10 startups to receive the funding have collectively attracted an additional $15.5 million in grants and investments to date.
The funding is made possible by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and donors who matched the funds, including Bader Philanthropies, Clarios, Dennis and Sue Webb, and members of the UWMRF board of directors. The two latest winners are:
Fluid Flow Experiences LLC
Founder Tom Hansen (’91 BS computer science, ’21 PhD freshwater sciences) is a programmer/analyst and researcher at the UWM School of Freshwater Sciences, who has developed a deeply interactive and scientifically accurate fluid flow simulation.
Called the Immersive Fluid Flow Experience, his display consists of a computer-simulated fluid flow model projected on a large wall or screen. As people move in front of the colored screen, they cast shadows on the projection.
A webcam detects the shadows and adds visual fluid responses around them, creating a complex and colorful series of spinning vortexes and eddy currents on the projected screen. The product is currently on the market for museum installations.
Hansen will use the grant to conduct further customer discovery and create marketing materials to explore both temporary and permanent installations.
PerryMedical LLC
William Perry (’23 BS biomedical engineering) is the primary inventor of a new design for a bariatric lift aid. Perry began creating the device as part of a senior capstone team. The product helps EMTs, nurses, and home caregivers move obese patients out of their beds.
One quarter of EMTs suffer a serious back injury within the first five years of their careers. Moving bariatric patients fuels many EMT injuries even though the volume of these calls is low.
With the bridge grant, the team will work on creating and testing a prototype and obtaining early feedback from a local ambulance company.
For Arnav Saxena, the decision to pursue computer science as a career began when he decided to organize his music collection.
“One day, I decided to clean it up by writing a small script to sort, tag and organize everything,” he said. “Seeing it transform into something organized and searchable was magic.”
Saxena, who plans to start in the accelerated master’s program next semester, is in the middle of an internship at the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, a collaboration that brings researchers and students at UWM and at Marquette together with NMDSI with the aim of establishing Wisconsin as a recognized national hub for data science and technology.
He recently was featured on the NMDSI webpage in a Q&A that details what a day in the life of a data engineering intern is like there. He shares insights he has gained which has helped him see how the degree can be applied to many problems.
This is his second internship with NMDSI, where he is working part-time this school year.
When he is not working or in class, Saxena is developing an app to help UWM students working find resources to support mental well-being and social networking.
Congratulations to the winners of the private donor-supported graduate student fellowships for this academic year. Twelve awards were given with two awards being split.
Nemati Fellowship (Biomedical and Health Informatics):
Phillip Judy Fellowship (Biomedical Engineering):
FEF Fellowship (Materials Science & Engineering, foundry)
Webb Fellowship
Beimborn Graduate Fellowship in Transportation (Civil Engineering, transportation)
Not awarded this year
Congratulations to civil engineering student Halie Markovic, who has received the Molitoris Leadership Scholarship from the WTS-Wisconsin Chapter.
WTS an organization of transportation professionals — women and men — committed to transforming the transportation industry through the advancement of women.
The Molitoris Leadership Scholarship recognizes the achievements that demonstrate leadership in the industry, ensuring that those essential skills and the perspectives of women are included in planning the transportation systems of the future. The award is $5,000.
Markovic is currently vice president of the college’s Institute of Transportation Engineers student organization and has interned at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation since May of 2023. She also is involved with the American Society of Civil Engineers, Construction Leadership Council, and Alpha Omicron Pi.