Spring 2005 -- Vol. 58, No. 2

Among nation’s best
Five graduate programs in Clemson’s College of Engineering and Science have scored in the top 50 in the nation. Each program was ranked against similar programs at all national doctoral-granting universities, both public and private.

In the top 50: environmental engineering and science (20), industrial engineering (33), biomedical/bioengineering (46), civil engineering (48) and materials science (50).

Also ranked: mechanical engineering (60), chemical engineering (61), computer engineering (65) and electrical engineering (73).

Palmetto Pact
A new Clemson scholarship and grant initiative — the Palmetto Pact — aims to increase the pipeline of graduates who are qualified for a knowledge-based economy, encourage community service and enhance access to Clemson. The program significantly increases scholarship and grant opportunities available to S.C. residents, starting with those who enroll as freshmen in the fall of 2005.

Most Clemson freshmen already have a scholarship or grant funded through the state’s Education Lottery program, the federal Pell Grant program or a privately funded scholarship program. Under the Palmetto Pact, Clemson essentially plans to ensure that no in-state freshman pays full tuition.

Accepted students are automatically considered for Palmetto Pact scholarships.

Alternative fuels
Chemical engineering professor Mark C. Thies has received an $856,000 award from the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop more efficient processes for the centralized production of hydrogen by splitting water.

The award was one of only three made nationwide under DOE’s Nuclear Hydrogen Initiative. In addition to Thies, the project team includes fellow Clemson professor David Bruce, John O’Connell from the University of Virginia and Max Gorensek from Savannah River National Lab.

The Clemson team will interact not only with U.S. engineers and scientists but also with those in France, Italy and Japan, all of whom have teams working on related processes.

Better fuel
Professor James G. Goodwin Jr., chair of the Clemson’s chemical and biomolecular engineering department, has also received a DOE grant for energy research through DOE’s State Technologies Advancement Collaborative.

Goodwin’s work focuses on the performance of iron-based bimetallic catalysts that are crucial to synthesis of clean fuels, additives and lubricants derived from coal and biomass gasification.

Clemson will lead a partnership that includes Louisiana State University, the S.C. State Energy Office, the Louisiana State Energy Office, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Institute, Rentech and Sud-Chemie Inc. This grant reflects $875,499 in DOE-STAC funds and $294,354 in cost sharing by the industrial and governmental participants.

Hydraulics lab draws a million plus
Nail together some two-by-fours, add a maze of PVC, Plexiglas, red dye and 10,000 gallons of water, and you’ve got a living room-sized hydraulics model that costs as much as an SUV — fully loaded.

Power plant builders from around the world rely on these models, built in the Clemson Hydraulics Laboratory, to model their water pumps. It’s one of only a few nongovernmental hydraulics labs with large-scale modeling capability of this type in the country and the only one in the Southeast that is active in sump pump modeling.

Since the hydraulics lab opened in 2000, civil engineering professor David Werth has received more than 40 projects worth nearly $1.5 million. He typically manages six to eight graduate students and four or five projects at a time. Model requests have come from Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean.

IBM chooses Clemson
IBM is providing Clemson students with $5 million in key technology tools through IBM’s Academic Initiative to help better prepare students for the information technology jobs of tomorrow. 

IBM has chosen Clemson as the first South Carolina school to participate in the program, which it is making available to select schools around the country. The program will allow Clemson students to access key IBM software with a retail value of more than $5 million, building on a recent history of IBM and Clemson working together on academic research projects.

Microsoft award
Microsoft Corp. has reconized Clemson’s College of Business and Behavioral Science with its Excellence in Education Award for innovative classroom use of Microsoft Business Solutions.

Management professor Larry LaForge and accounting professor Richard Dull use enterprise software provided by Microsoft Business Solutions to integrate topics across the business curriculum. The award-winning project involves an ongoing enterprise simulation managed by students. The virtual enterprise brings textbook topics to life in a dynamic and realistic business environment, providing students with active-learning experiences that cut across a number of different business courses.

Matters of the heart
If you live long enough, your arteries will calcify and harden, requiring more work to circulate blood. Decrease in blood flow leads to risk of thrombosis, heart disease and stroke. Bioengineering professor Naren Vyavahare is reaching for the switch to turn off calcification and stop America’s No. 1 killer.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a four-year, $1 million grant to Vyavahare, one of the few researchers studying the mechanisms for calcification and failure of the valves implanted in more than 250,000 patients yearly.

Vyavahare was recently invited by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to serve as a permanent member of the Bioengineering, Technology and Surgical Sciences Study Section at the NIH Center for Scientific Review.

“This appointment and the grant extension show that Naren is on the right track,” says Martine LaBerge, head of Clemson’s bioengineering department. “A major breakthrough could be on the horizon, improving South Carolinians’ and millions of other lives.”

Finding a cure for Parkinson’s
The Michael J. Fox Foundation has announced that Clemson professor Xuejun Wen is one of four recipients of funding to find a cure for Parkinson’s, a disease that affects an estimated 1 million people in the United States. Wen, a professor of bioengineering, cell biology and anatomy at Clemson, works at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) through the CU-MUSC Bioengineering Program.

Clemson, MUSC and the University of South Carolina have a biomedical engineering partnership that could make South Carolina a leader in regenerative medicine and bioengineering technology. The collaborating universities secured a commitment of $6 million from 2004 state education lottery proceeds, which will be matched by an additional $6 million raised privately by the universities. The goal is to establish the S.C. Center for Regenerative Medicine.

The bioengineering department at Clemson University has been a national leader in the field of biomaterials science and engineering for more than 40 years. In addition, Clemson is recognized internationally as the birthplace of the Society for Biomaterials.

Cool under fire
Clemson researchers are working on technology that could cloak soldiers and military vehicles by changing heat management systems.

Infrared or heat-seeking goggles make heat from bodies and power sources visible during darkness. Many weapon systems also target heat generated by vehicles. Mechanical engineering professor Jay Ochterbeck has a proposed cooling model that would change heat management systems from single cooling units to a lightweight technology embedded throughout vehicles.

A distributed cooling system would monitor the heat produced, allow for alternating operating temperatures and enable the vehicles to camouflage themselves and their occupants from heat-seeking devices.

The same technology will help keep tomorrow’s smart cars, with added electronics, on the road and out of shops. Ochterbeck’s vehicle thermal management research is sponsored by two contracts totaling $490,000 from ThermoAnalytics Inc. in Houghton, Mich., and the U.S. Army Tank Command in Warren, Mich.

Possible cancer vaccine
The National Cancer Institute has awarded more than $450,000 to Clemson biological sciences professor Yanzhang Wei. The funding will be used to test an innovative drug treatment for late-stage kidney cancer.

The immunotherapy developed by Wei uses specially treated cells from the patient’s own body to target and destroy cancer cells. Early testing shows the treatment is more effective than current immune-system-based therapies.

The new therapy could hold promise as a vaccine to prevent cancer or as a therapeutic drug to help treat or destroy existing cancers. Early tests target renal cancer and melanoma; however, the treatment could also prove effective in treating solid tumors, such as those in breast or brain cancer.

Wei is assistant director of the Greenville Hospital System Oncology Research Institute, the only basic science research institute in the region specializing in cancer research. The hospital has already begun a phase one clinical trial, with a phase two follow-up proposed to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

‘Healthy’ design
Faculty and students in the architecture + health program in Clemson’s School of Architecture earned first place in the Healthcare Environment Award Competition sponsored by Contract magazine, The Center for Health Design, American Institute of Architecture Students and Medquest Communications.

This collaborative project, among students in architecture, art and industrial design at Clemson, Carleton University and the University of Tokyo, involved the design and construction of a full-scale inpatient care room for a hospital.

Clemson faculty involved in the project include David Allison, Dina Battisto and Yukari Oka from architecture, David Detrich from art and Barbara Logan from nursing. Clemson graduate students in the project include Ellen Cathey of South Carolina, Cullen Keen of Maryland, Ruka Kosuge of Japan, Scott Radcliff of Ohio and Lora Schwartz of North Carolina. Art students Chad Plunket of New Zealand and Katie Brock of South Carolina also contributed to the project. All graduated from Clemson in August 2004.

Excellence in writing
Clemson’s Advanced Writing Program earned a Writing Program Certificate of Excellence from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

The program is directed by professor Summer Smith Taylor and supported by the English department and the Pearce Center for Professional Communication.

"This award puts us in the top-20 writing category along with such schools as the University of Missouri and the University of Washington,” says Kathleen Yancey, director of the Pearce Center and CCCC chair.

In 2001, TIME magazine named Clemson the No. 1 Public College of the Year largely because of the University’s emphasis on Communication Across the Curriculum. It has also been recognized as tops in writing across the disciplines for the last three years by U.S.News and World Report.

WISE national winner
Clemson’s WISE program — Women in Science and Engineering — is a national winner. The program received the 2005 Women in Engineering Initiative Award from the Women in Engineering Programs and Advocates Network (WEPAN).

WEPAN is a national nonprofit organization representing more than 600 members in 200 engineering schools, Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations.

WISE is an outgrowth of Clemson’s award-winning Programs for Educational Enrichment and Retention. PRISM magazine, a national engineering education publication, cites Clemson as fourth in the nation in percentage of engineering PhDs granted to women. WISE reaches out to future female engineers and scientists as early as elementary school and offers support throughout their college experience. For more on WISE, visit their Web site.

High retention/graduation rates
Clemson’s high retention and graduation rates have captured the attention of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities — so much so that Clemson is part of a graduation rates outcome study to review factors that contribute to success at top colleges and universities.

Of the freshmen who entered Clemson in 1998, 72.4 percent graduated within six years. Of the first-time freshmen in 2003, 88 percent returned the second year.

To increase retention and graduation rates, Clemson established the Academic Success Center, increased academic advisers in the colleges, and hired faculty to teach and maintain the general engineering department.

SAE joins Clemson-ICAR campus
The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International will become a campus partner of Clemson’s International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville. The announcement came in April during the SAE World Congress in Detroit.

“With its 89,000-strong membership, SAE is the flagship professional organization for the automotive industry,” says Clemson-ICAR executive director Bob Geolas. “Its presence on our campus and the partnership we are forging by this proximity send a distinct message to the industry that Clemson-ICAR is serious in its aspirations to be the premier automotive and motorsports research and educational facility in the world.”

J.E. “Ted” Robertson, SAE president for 2005, says, “Clemson-ICAR and the S.C. Upstate region are critical and exciting players in the automotive industry.

“The investment of BMW and other automotive leaders in the region, and specifically in Clemson-ICAR, tells us we are joining another winning team. SAE is committed to servicing the industry. The association with Clemson in our professional development and education programs will bring additional value.”

Clemson-ICAR is located on a 250-acre campus in Greenville in the heart of the I-85 corridor, approximately halfway between Atlanta and Charlotte. Its initial corporate partners include BMW, Michelin, IBM and Microsoft. BMW’s Information Technology Research Center, the first facility on the site, will open this summer. The University’s Carroll A. Campbell Jr. Graduate Engineering Center is scheduled to open in the fall of 2006, offering M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in automotive engineering with an emphasis on systems integration. For more information, visit the Web site.