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Solid State
Twelve years ago, engineering at Yale was on the critical list. At the alumni assembly, delegates learned how it was nursed back to health.
Summer 2003
By Bruce Fellman
“If this were your stock portfolio, you wouldn’t feel too happy,” engineering dean Paul Fleury told 300 alumni and guests at the April assembly of the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA). Up on the screen at Davies Auditorium was a graph of the number of Yale engineers who had graduated every year since the program was founded in 1852. It showed that, while the bulls had at times held sway, the last half century had definitely been dominated by the bears. “The history of engineering at Yale has been, let’s say, non-monotonic,” noted Fleury, adding quickly, for the benefit of his lay audience, “It’s gone up and down.”
Several times in the past 50 years, engineering has almost been engineered out of existence. As recently as the early 1990s, then-president Benno C. Schmidt Jr. drafted a restructuring plan that put the discipline on the endangered species list. But engineering has a strong record at the university; Yale inventions range from the vacuum tube to the electron cyclotron maser to the light-emitting diode, and Yale engineering honors include a presidential medal and a Nobel Prize. And in 1993, when Richard Levin became president, engineering acquired an ally. Levin is an economist who had studied the role of technology in boosting prosperity, and he had watched his own alma mater, Stanford—an engineering-intensive university—help create the high-tech miracle of Silicon Valley.
Levin decided to revive engineering. Three years ago, he committed $1 billion to improve the university’s infrastructure in science, medicine, and technology. Engineering was one of the beneficiaries. In Fleury’s view, it couldn’t come soon enough. “It’s not that we have a bad reputation,” he says. “It’s that, in many areas, we have no reputation.” Yale’s strategy, Fleury, Levin, and Provost Susan Hockfield told the AYA assembly delegates, is for engineering to remain relatively small—there are only 50 faculty whose primary appointment is in engineering—but focused on core areas of excellence. Among these are nanotechnology, combustion research, biomedical imaging, and environmental engineering.
During the two-day assembly, alumni met some of the 250 undergraduates and 130 graduate students in the program. They also toured several labs, where they met faculty and saw technologies under development, including synthetic materials that encourage tissue growth and lasers that can detect bioaerosols such as anthrax. As Hockfield put it: “Engineering is incredibly cool stuff.”
Below, a sampler of what delegates saw and heard in the labs:
From Fuel Cells to Fromage
The career trajectory of chemical engineering used to be predictable: Graduates ended up working on new materials and sources of energy. Today, said chairman John Walz, the discipline has broadened considerably into the area of biotechnology. The role of design has also become increasingly critical; some recent chemical engineering student projects include designing fuel cell-powered automobiles and creating membrane separation systems used for making cheese. Still, combustion chemistry will never be eclipsed. “Combustion is the basis of industrial society and the source of all of our air pollution problems,” said research scientist Charles McEnally, who explained the fine art of dissecting a flame with lasers and mass spectrometers. “When it comes to a pollutant like soot, in particular, our models don’t quite work. We’re trying to fill in the blanks.”
The Hunt for the Ultimate Computer
Electrical engineering professors Robert Schoelkopf and Michel Devoret work in the realms of the ultrasmall and the ultracold. Schoelkopf studies the behavior of single-electron transistors at temperatures just a fraction above absolute zero (about 459 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). To shield the sensitive circuits from the extraneous radiation that now bombards us—radio and cellphone transmissions, for example—he has designed a lab whose interior walls are completely sheathed in copper. Devoret is leading a team trying to turn the tiny circuits into that holy grail of nanotechnology: the quantum computer. If it can be made to work, the computer will be faster and more powerful than any in existence. Schoelkopf said that although their discoveries are already being used in, for instance, microwave radiation detectors for NASA, the circuits aren’t yet ready to be used in a computer. Since running them currently requires copper-clad walls and room-sized refrigeration units, he noted, “anything we have would make a pretty lousy laptop right now.”
Waterworks
Environmental engineers at Yale are developing bioengineered bacteria that digest pollutants, new ways to clean up drinking water and waste water, and new industrial processes that produce minimal pollution. The goals, said Menachem Elimelech, the Llewellyn West Jones Jr. Professor of Environmental Engineering, are not only “to protect the environment from our misdeeds” but also “to protect humans from the adverse effects the environment can occasionally deliver.” Graduate student Nathalie Tufenkji discussed her research on making use of riverbanks with clean sediments to filter out contaminants and pathogens, such as the notorious intestinal parasite cryptosporidium, before they reach groundwater. Graduate student Sharon Walker talked about nanofiltration work done in Professor Elimelech’s lab, in which ultrafine mesh filters are used to eliminate pollutants that can disrupt the endocrine system in humans and animals by mimicking their hormones.
Brainier Bots
At the Carl A. Morse teaching laboratory, Roman Kuc, professor of electrical engineering, showed off his students' efforts to design and build increasingly sophisticated robot vehicles. “We already have robots that can perform repetitive tasks like painting and welding,” said Kuc. “The challenge is to create something that can work in an unstructured and unpredictable environment.” The students start out making robots that can navigate a tabletop or a room—although, as assembly delegates saw, their early efforts aren’t always successful. The shoe box-sized combinations of sensors, microprocessors, actuators, drives, and wheels sometimes fell off the table, and sometimes drove straight toward the delegates' chairs and under a row of hastily raised feet. “The students learn from their mistakes,” said Kuc. As they gain expertise, he explained, teams of budding engineers work on larger and more sophisticated mobile robots. The hope is that students might eventually use such technologies as sonar and global positioning systems to develop motorized wheelchairs that can navigate city streets.
Picture This
In the basement of the new medical school research building on Congress Avenue, an interdisciplinary consortium of biomedical engineers, life scientists, and physicists is watching the brain at work. Yale researchers are refining the technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging: an advanced form of MRI in which biochemical activity in a patient’s brain is recorded, second by second, as he or she lies inside a large tube-shaped magnet. The method is non-invasive and, except for the occasional bout of claustrophobia, “completely safe,” said Todd Constable, director of Yale’s MRI research center. “We’ve used it to take images of our own brains.” The center is putting together models of how the brain develops and how memory works, as well as analyzing what goes awry in dyslexia, schizophrenia, autism, and other disorders. In addition, last year Yale received a $7.1 million grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to develop an MRI technique for precisely targeting areas of the brain that must be removed in conditions like severe epilepsy.
“What’s going on in engineering is outstanding and exciting,” said Bill Davies '50, a retired pharmaceutical executive and an AYA delegate from Greenwich, Connecticut. “I was frankly surprised at the extent of it.”
But comments like these may inadvertently confirm that Yale still has a recognition problem. To help counter it, Dean Fleury asked the delegates to spread the word. “I hope that as a result of this assembly you’ve learned that we are here, we are good, and we are essential to Yale’s success,” he said. “Tell your friends.”  |
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