Engineering research featured in the UWM Research Foundation 2023 Annual Report

three men, standing and looking at the camera.

The research and intellectual property of several faculty members from the College were among those highlighted in the UWM Research Foundation 2023 Annual Report, which came out Feb. 29. These projects represent faculty who received funding or filed new patents from the foundation in the last year.

Two Catalyst Grants were awarded to engineering researchers. Supported by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and Clarios, the grants seed-fund promising research in areas where UWM has the greatest potential to impact the regional economy through commercialization. Winning projects have led to 62 issued patents and 30 license/option agreements in the last 15 years.

  • Brian Armstrong and Deyang Qu (mechanical engineering) and William Dussault (electrical engineering)
    The team is developing a novel system to monitor the internal health of batteries, making them safer. The approach allows continuous operation of the batteries, while bypassing faulty components. Their first targets are lithium-ion and lithium-metal batteries.
  • Yin Wang (civil & environmental engineering) and Xiaoli Ma (materials science & engineering)
    The researchers have teamed up with Shangping Xu in geosciences to create a two-step process that extracts lithium from currently untapped sources. This technology could help the United States become a bigger player in meeting the exploding global demand for lithium.

The Bridge Grant Program is for UWM faculty, staff and students with licensed intellectual property from the Research Foundation. This program leverages a $200,000 matching grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation with individual donors Clarios and Bader Philanthropies to invest in new startups. Recent recipients include three startups associated with the College.

  • Concretology LLC
    Konstantin Sobolev (civil & environmental engineering) formed Concretology to commercialize a long-lasting spray-on water repellent coating that can be used on concrete, ceramic, metal and wood surfaces. The coating can confer corrosion protection, hinder transport of chemicals through porous materials, prevent icing and provide antimicrobial properties.
  • Intelligent Composites LLC
    Pradeep Rohatgi (materials science & engineering) and Intelligent Composites are developing metal matrix composites that make aluminum stronger and stiffer than traditional aluminum alloys.
  • NanoAffix Science LLC
    Founded by former UWM professor Junhong Chen, this startup is developing a handheld device to test for lead and harmful compounds in drinking water.

New patents applications were filed by three engineering faculty members featured in the foundation’s annual report:

  • Chanyeop Park (electrical engineering)
    Park has created a patent-pending material that reduces aging and improves performance of electronic devices involved in energy infrastructure.
  • Nikolai Kouklin (materials science & engineering) and Konstantin Sobolev (civil & environmental engineering)  
    The pair have devised a novel process to fabricate a water-based semiconductor that could advance the science of lasers, light waves and medical diagnostics by making their electronic components smaller, faster and more reliable.

Congratulations to winners of the UWM Graduate School Fellowships for 2024

6 head shots, only one woman

Six graduate students in the College were offered Graduate School fellowships for the 2024-25 academic year.

The fellowships are offered through a highly selective process. The Distinguished Graduate Student Fellowship provides a stipend of $15,500 in addition to full tuition coverage, low-cost health benefits, and a $1,000 travel award. The same benefits apply to the Distinguished Dissertation Graduate School Fellowships except the stipend is $17,000. The AOP Fellowship stipend is $18,000 for recipients in a doctoral-level program.

Well done!

Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship
Mahbubur Rahman (mechanical engineering)
Advisor: Mohammad (Habib) Rahman

Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship
Md Tanzil Shahria, (computer science)
Advisor: Mohammad (Habib) Rahman

Distinguished Graduate Student Fellowship
Nayan Banik (computer science)
Advisor: Mohammad (Habib) Rahman

Distinguished Graduate Student Fellowship
Rafiqul Hasan (mechanical engineering)
Advisor: Krishna Pillai

Distinguished Graduate Student Fellowship
Abrari Vajari (civil and environmental engineering)
Advisor: Xiao Qin

Advanced Opportunity Program Fellowship Renewal
Grace Fasipe (biomedical engineering)
Advisor: Jacob Rammer

UWM Length of Service ceremony honors 29 in the College March 12

UWM’s Length of Service Ceremony will be held on Tuesday, March 12, in the UWM Union Wisconsin Room. The lively ceremony honors employees reaching work milestones in 2024, including Chancellor Mark Mone who is marking his 35th year at UWM. Three in the college match or come close to that: Daniel Beller, teaching faculty, 35 years; Todd Johnson, assistant dean of Student Services, 30 years; Chiu Tai Law, associate professor, electrical engineering and computer science, 30 years; and John Reisel, Secretary of the University, 30 years.

Come out and support your colleagues. Registration is requested for both awardees and spectators.

Other awardees from the college include:

  • Steven Richard Anderson, 5 years
  • Michelle M Boehm, 5 years
  • Mahsa Dabagh, 5 years
  • Andrew J Graettinger, 5 years
  • Priyatha Premnath, 5 years
  • Jacob R Rammer, 5 years
  • Christine M Beimborn, 10 years
  • Robert M Cuzner, 10 years
  • Junjie Niu, 10 years
  • Nathan P Salowitz, 10 years
  • Lingfeng Wang, 10 years
  • Yin Wang, 10 years
  • Ilya V Avdeev, 15 years
  • Benjamin C Church, 15 years
  • Roshan M Dsouza, 15 years
  • Rani F El Hajjar, 15 years
  • Yi Hu, 15 years
  • Iftekharuddin Khan, 15 years
  • Michael J Nosonovsky, 15 years
  • Adam William Nowaczyk, 15 years
  • Michael J Brown, 20 years
  • Prasenjit Guptasarma, 25 years
  • Amol D Mali, 25 years
  • Krishna M Pillai, 25 years
  • Habib Tabatabai, 25 years

UWM foundry lab members stand out at AFS conference

Congratulations to doctoral student Swaroop Kumar Behera who received the George J. Barker Memorial Scholarship at the annual American Foundry Society, Wisconsin Chapter Regional Conference, on Feb 8. in Milwaukee. The scholarship, awarded annually, supports graduate-level education beneficial to the cast metal industry, particularly within the membership areas for the American Foundry Society chapters in Wisconsin.

Behera teaches the Engineering Materials lab, which is a prerequisite for all engineering students, and has managed the UWM Foundry since Fall of 2021. His dissertation is focused on exploring the effect of micro-structure on wetting and corrosion behaviors of various alloy systems.

UWM students from the Foundry Lab also showcased their work in the Casting Competition at the conference. The students made piston heads using a new high-temperature aluminum alloy and an investment casting method. They also volunteered at the “Foundry in a Box” demonstration hosted by the AFS WI Chapter and REGS Sheeler at the conference, helping numerous conference participants, both students and industry personnel, make personalized tin castings.

Amano, Al Hamad and Shaker talk wind energy with Spectrum News

three men in wind tunnel lab

Ryo Amano, professor, mechanical engineering, and his lab members, Saif Al Hamad and Omar Shaker, recently showed a reporter how they use the wind tunnel at the USR building to conduct research into wind energy efficiency.

Wind energy is one of the cleanest energies, making it a key part of U.S. efforts to reduce carbon emissions, said Amano, director of the UWM Industrial Assessment Center, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The wind tunnel, built in 2009, is the largest one in Wisconsin, allowing researchers to investigate ways to harness as much power as possible from wind turbines. Watch

Campus safety training available for instructional staff

A campus safety presentation aimed at training instructors to address students in crisis and handle classroom disruptions that could lead to a violent incident is again offered this semester. Training will also discuss online and virtual disruptions to include threats.

This presentation will help ensure that instructors are prepared to respond to situations that could cause the UWM community to feel unsafe.

About 1,200 faculty and instructional staff already have received this valuable information, co-developed by the Dean of Students Office and the UWM Police Department. If you have not attended a training session (or if you missed the session), please make it a priority this semester.

There are seven sessions offered in-person and virtually from this month through May 2024. The training lasts about 90 minutes. View the dates/times and register here. For other questions, please email safety-training@uwm.edu.

Researcher talks about Large Language Models Feb. 22 at 11 a.m.

Biomedical natural language processing (NLP) aims to make it easier to extract important information from unstructured texts like electronic health records, biomedical journal articles and regulatory documents, and to use this information to improve our lives.

Tim Miller will describe recent work from his Machine Learning for Medical Language Lab at 11 a.m. today in EMS E20. His talk will connect the field of biomedical NLP with the emergence of a powerful class of models known as large language models (LLMs).

He will address questions like: How important is dataset creation? Will NLP experts and subject matter experts need each other anymore? Will LLMs still suffer from out-of-domain performance loss as supervised models?

Miller is an associate professor in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, the Department of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science. His research focuses on domain adaptation/generalizability of ML-based NLP methods, and learning patient representations.

UWM alum and Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella marks ten years since taking the lead at the world’s largest company

Satya Nadella earned his masters in computer science from UWM College of Engineering & Applied Science. He is in this photo with Dean Brett Peters

It’s been a great decade for Satya Nadella (’90 MS Computer Science), who took over as CEO of Microsoft Corp. on Feb. 4, 2014. Since then, he’s led the company to its present pinnacle of success, with the company now valued at $3 trillion.

A few of his recent accolades in the last year include:

  • Microsoft made TIME’s list of most influential companies of the year, highlighting the company’s heavy investments in AI. (Nadella was listed on the TIME 100 list of most influence people in 2018.) 
  • CNN Business chose Nadella as its CEO of the Year, beating out other high-profile businesspeople. The reason, according to the CNN judging panel, was that Nadella was the first to commercialize and add AI tools like ChatGPT into its product line, influencing the commercial direction of AI.
  • The Georgia Institute of Technology presented Nadella with an honorary doctoral degree.

The company’s rise has coincided with its support for STEM education and automation research at UWM with the College of Engineering & Applied Science as the main recipient.

“Microsoft’s support of UWM has revolved around some of the same priorities that fueled the company’s business in the last decade,” said Brett Peters, dean of UWM’s College of Engineering & Applied Science. “For instance, Microsoft donated credits of its leading Cloud processing software service, Azure, to UWM’s Connected Systems Institute. And Satya and his wife Anu have expanded that to also focus on workforce development and diversity, with their generous support of our local students.”

Support for UWM research

Microsoft has been a key partner in UWM’s Connected Systems Institute (CSI), a statewide research hub that brings together academia, industry and government to solve real-world problems using the industrial internet of things.

In 2019, Microsoft gave UWM more than $1.5 million in cash, Microsoft Azure cloud computing credits and Surface Hub devices to advance CSI.

Microsoft followed that up recently, in January 2024, with a second donation of $1.2 million to CSI. The gift will be used to educate Wisconsin’s talent pipeline for Industry 4.0 manufacturing, which allows small and medium manufacturers to integrate new technologies, such as the internet of things, AI and smart robotics, into their production processes. 

“CSI, with the help of Microsoft, has moved rapidly into the AI space with the hopes of providing tangible technology solutions to manufacturers,” said Microsoft Chief AI Officer Balamurugan Balakreshnan. “For example, CSI recently completed research on an AI vision system and deployed at CSI an AI chatbot that assists manufacturers on the shop floor in accessing information quickly.”

Shamar Webster (’23 MS Computer Science) worked with Balakreshnan in creating the factory chatbox last fall in his final semester before graduation.

Scholarships for students from underserved communities

In 2021, Nadella and wife Anu Nadella also donated $2 million to support scholarships for undergraduate students from marginalized and underserved communities, preparing them with the skills to pursue careers in computer science, data science and information technology. The gift also funds expanded student services, such as advising, mentoring and tutoring, as well as emergency grant support to help these students remain successful in pursuing their degrees.

Finally, the gift supports pre-college programming to encourage students from marginalized and underserved communities to enroll in these STEM fields. 

The College of Engineering & Applied Science welcomed the first and second cohorts of scholarship winners with full-ride scholarships in Fall 2022 and 2023, respectively.

In 2018, Nadella made a $250,000 contribution to an endowed scholarship fund set up in emeritus professor K. Vairavan’s name. Many computer science, electrical and computer engineering students have benefited annually from this fund.

Nadella grew up in the southern India and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Mangalore University. He moved to the U.S. to study at UWM. In 2013, he received the UWM Chancellor’s Innovation Award for his leadership of Microsoft’s Server & Tools Division, a year before being named as CEO of Microsoft. In 2021, “Chairman” was added to his title.

Niu honored by STEM Forward on Feb. 13

Congratulations to Junjie Niu, Richard & Joanne Grigg fellow and associate professor, materials science and engineering, who was feted on Feb. 13 at an awards banquet hosted by STEM Forward. The Milwaukee-based non-profit organization that inspires youth to pursue STEM careers had named Niu its Engineer of the Year. Niu was recognized for his contributions to the profession and his service as a role model.

Attending the banquet to honor Niu were Dean Brett Peters; Andy Graettinger; associate dean for research; Prasenjit Guptasarma, associate dean for academic affairs; Phyllis King, UWM associate vice chancellor for academic affairs; Jessica Silvaggi, president of the UWM Research Foundation; Rebecca Tallon, engineering director of water treatment technology at A.O. Smith; and Ryan Jipp, vice president of battery systems at Milwaukee Tool.

Niu (left) with Rich Merkel, executive director of STEM Forward

Milwaukee Engineer Valentines who tied the knot

man proposing to woman

Students come to college for their degree but leave with more than that. With so many people to meet in college, it’s not surprising that many lifelong relationships are formed. And, for some, that included finding “the one.” In honor of Valentine’s Day, we present four stories of couples who found true love at the College of Engineering & Applied Science and started their lives together.

Lianna Hawi and Silas Petrie

Lianna Hawi met Silas Petrie in the fall of 2014 and the couple went on their first date to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Four years later, the museum was the site where Silas proposed.

Both majored in mechanical engineering, with Lianna finishing her degree in December of 2017 and Silas in May of 2018. The wedding was in August 2019. Today, they live in South Milwaukee and navigate busy careers: Silas is a patent engineer at Michael Best & Friedrich LLP and Lianna is a project manager at Rockwell Automation.

Ryan and Dora Stelse

Dora (Richardson) and Ryan Stelse

The Stelses found true love in a familiar spot in the EMS building.

“Our love story began in April 2019 when we met in the computer lab,” said Dora (’20 BS, Industrial Engineering). From that moment, she and future hubby Ryan (’20 BS, Mechanical Engineering) spent countless hours working on homework side by side in the third-floor computer lab.

In January of 2021, the pair wore their UWM gear for their engagement photo shoot. Fast forward to now, the couple is expecting a baby boy in May.

David and Megan Leckman

David and Megan (Dittman) Leckman

The Leckmans met in the fall of 2003 when David was in the mechanical engineering graduate program and Megan was finishing her undergraduate degree in art. David’s research office was just down the hall from the college’s advising office, where Megan was a student worker, and she caught his eye.

They got married in November 2005 and today have three amazing kids and live in Naperville, Illinois. “We’ve built a wonderful life together and it all started in the College of Engineering & Applied Science,” said Megan.

Kristy and Andy Graettinger in the ’90s

Andy and Kristy (Maas) Graettinger

They met in an engineering study group in the Spring of 1991. Kristy was impressed with how Andy could explain the engineering topics. Andy was impressed at how Kristy consistently scored better than him on exams. 

Following graduation in 1994, they were married in 1995 and both went on to receive graduate degrees at Northwestern University. After seven years as a practicing engineer, Kristy changed careers and is now a physician at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Andy returned to his alma mater and is the Associate Dean for Research in the college.

Did you meet your partner at the College of Engineering & Applied Science? Share your story with us at ceas-marketing@uwm.edu!