The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Kentucky invites applications from outstanding candidates for multiple tenure track faculty positions at all levels.

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“I really wanted to study computer engineering, so I thought I would need to go somewhere else,” she says.

Fortunately, UK began offering degrees in computer engineering two years before Christina arrived on campus. Since then, she has wrung nearly every drop of educational and extracurricular experience available through the UK College of Engineering.

It began with Christina’s first internship. At Lexmark, located near the Lexington campus, Christina got involved with data mining and website management. She was able to give up-to-date information to her department and liked the experience.

“It was a wonderful first engineering job,” she says. “It taught me a lot about the industry, the working environment, how to run meetings and what it’s like to be depended on. I was fortunate to be hired my first semester of college and work there until my senior year.”

Back on the Lexington campus, Christina began to assume leadership roles in student organizations. She held three different leadership positions during her four years in Phi Sigma Rho—the College’s engineering sorority. In 2010-2011, she served as Vice-Chair of the student chapter of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); this academic year, she became IEEE Chair. Amid these responsibilities, Christina founded WECE—Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering, which encouraged female students to support one another and strategize for a high retention rate among women in the ECE program. These were only a few of the organizations Christina joined.

“I have never become a member of a student organization simply because it looks good on resume,” Christina insists. “I join when I care about the cause and believe I can help it or learn from it.”

When not contributing to a student organization, engrossed in her studies or interning, Christina maximized other opportunities available to engineering students. Through the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, Christina conducted research only available to graduate students in most institutions; and in the summer of 2011, she took the Power and Energy Institute of Kentucky’s (PEIK) course on renewable energy—in Spain!

“The study abroad class was very impressive. I was able to go inside a wind turbine as well as a geothermal heat pump building as it was undergoing construction. I also saw a solar garden among other renewables Spain is implementing. What impressed me most was the lifestyle of the Spainiards I met. They are so conservative with their water and energy; it made me want to improve this nation with my research and work,” she says.

After completing her bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, Christina enrolled in a master’s program in electrical engineering, while also obtaining the Power and Energy Institute (PEIK) and Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) certificates. She is interning at Seikowave—a small business within the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments that focuses on 3D imaging solutions. Enrolled as a full-time graduate student, Christiana will graduate in the spring of 2013.

“The engineering program at UK has wonderful professors and staff who really encourage learning,” says Christina. “The program is exactly what I needed and wanted from my undergraduate and graduate programs. Eventually, I would like to become a professor and be a positive influence in the lives of students—collaborating together toward the promise of a better life for future generations.”

“During my time in the electrical engineering program, I learned so much in a variety of areas that whenever I looked over a position’s job requirements, with very few exceptions, I knew I was qualified.”

That is Bonnie Cheng, who recently accepted a position as an electrical engineer at Arup—a consulting firm located in Boston. Success stories like hers are what the College of Engineering is all about.

During her senior year of high school, Bonnie knew she wanted to go into engineering, but wasn’t sure which branch was right for her. As she perused the UK College of Engineering’s website, she began to lean toward electrical engineering.

“When I looked through the website, I was able to see the kinds of projects the students and faculty were working on and that really encouraged me to choose electrical engineering,” she says. “One factor was the community. It seemed so tightly knit together. So with electrical engineering I was able to choose a degree that was large enough to provide different options for study, yet still have close friends.”

Not only was Bonnie able to make friends, she also landed a job at the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CeNSE) the very first weekend of her freshman year. CeNSE, which specializes in device development at the nanoscale level, combines academic research with commercial product development on the Lexington campus under the direction of Dr. Chuck May and supervisor Brian Wajdyk. Bonnie spent three and a half years working at CeNSE while working on her bachelor’s degree.

“Working at CeNSE gave me a unique opportunity to get an inside look at how graduate students work” Bonnie explains, “It was a unique opportunity, especially since they hired me after only one week on campus!”

Although Bonnie’s time at CeNSE gave her a taste of the industry while also earning an income, her favorite aspect of being a UK electrical engineering student was her time in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) student chapter. Serving as vice-chair this year, Bonnie is heavily involved in outreach and recruiting. She also treasures the mentoring support she has received from the electrical engineering faculty.

“All of my professors were extremely helpful inside and outside of the classroom. I never had an experience where I needed help and couldn’t get it. Drs. Regina Hannemann and Jeff Ashley both mentored me and I greatly enjoyed working alongside them in IEEE,” she asserts.

In the classroom, Bonnie focused on a field of study that is both academically challenging and personally rewarding: power and alternative energy.  “I have always been environmentally conscious,” Bonnie states. “As a result, when scheduling my courses, I took several electives in solar power, alternative power, alternative energies, environmental consequences and even overlapping philosophy classes like Environmental Ethics. I believe these issues are crucial for the well-being of our planet and civilization.”

With that kind of passion driving her, Bonnie is sure to be an excellent electrical engineer for Arup!

1. Image Category. SEM, TEM, AFM, or any of the optically related images.

2. Publication category. Submissions can include any published paper. Only one submission per first author.

3. Poster Presentations Category. Any poster presentation based partially on work done at CeNSE was eligible. The winner was chosen based on both aesthetic and scientific appeal.

All submissions should be sent/brought to me at Brian.Wajdyk@uky.edu or room 45 of ASTeCC building. Deadline for submissions is October 21st and winners announced November 4th.

All winners will be chosen by a small anonymous committee headed by Brian Wajdyk with the mandate of impartiality. What can you win? Bragging rights and something to add to your resume. Certificates will be given to all 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in each category. Results will be posted on the CeNSE website and posted on the boards on the 3rd floor of ASTeCC. Imagine. You can win and not even do anymore research! Just submit your previously prepared work.

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On any given day during the school year, you might find electrical and computer engineering professor Dr. Janet Lumpp walking students through instructions for building an electronic circuit board. At her direction, they carefully etch the circuit board, drill the holes and solder the components. When finished, the students have produced a fully-functioning circuit board. Standard electrical engineering stuff, you might think…until you get a closer look and discover that the students are actually 4^th graders!

Dr. Lumpp’s “roadshows” are an integral part of KEEP (Kentucky Electronics Education Project), a venture she founded with her first National Science Foundation award. Through KEEP, Dr. Lumpp visits elementary, middle and high school classrooms, educating students about electricity and electronics through fun, hands-on projects. Moreover, she encourages teachers to give those subjects more attention in their science curricula and supplies them with ideas, tools and lesson plans to that end. “Teachers enjoy it but, of course, doing anything different or unfamiliar in the classroom is a challenge,” she says.

Leading teachers to place more emphasis on the physical sciences, such as physics and chemistry, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education as a whole, is Dr. Lumpp’s passion— a passion largely fueled by dissatisfaction with the existing science standards in physics, and particularly in the area of electricity. “The way electricity is currently taught, students only need to learn four terms: ‘open, closed, series, parallel’. Anything beyond that is deemed too complicated. Then, if you look at biology and life science classes, students learn all of the parts of the cell, interactions between cells and how all of the systems in the human body work. But my whole field is essentially reduced to ‘open, closed, series, parallel,’” she explains.

Dr. Lumpp hopes that the forthcoming Common Core national standards for science will stress the importance of electronics and electricity. “I’m anxiously awaiting the new standards, mainly because I want to see where I can help with implementing STEM education. Electricity is not an obscure concept that no one needs. We all depend on it and use electronic devices that we expect to work reliably,” she argues.” Yet we teach very little about it to younger students.”

Within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Lumpp leads the Microelectronics Assembly Laboratory, assisted by R. J. Robinson and Charles Arvin. The lab is used for a class on microelectronic packaging and is also utilized by ECE senior design project teams. “I think the lab’s future is very strong, in part, because senior design has become a year-long endeavor, as opposed to a one semester project. I will offer my microelectronic packaging class again in the fall, and that will give team several months to build prototypes and improve them,” she says.

Whether it’s a 4^th grader learning how to solder or a high school senior considering a career in engineering, Dr. Lumpp believes that the variety of options within electrical and computer engineering make it an attractive field of study. “With electrical engineering, you’re definitely not putting yourself in a box. There is incredible diversity: programming, biomedical, light, sound, signals, energy efficiency, and so on. Whatever your interest, there’s room for everybody.”

When most people hear the term “3D” they typically think of movies, video games or other forms of media which intend to enhance a viewing experience. For Blazie Professor of Electrical Engineering Dr. Laurence Hassebrook, three-dimensional technology offers possibilities for archeological research previously unavailable to scientists, historians and anthropologists. Over 30 years of research into Structured Light Illumination (SLI) has contributed to breakthroughs in the quality of 3D scans, and led him to test his innovative devices in extreme locations!

Dr. Hassebrook describes SLI as, “like seeing the light pattern from a Venetian blind across a room. The stripes look crooked because your eyes (or for our purposes, the camera) are at a different angle than the sun shining through (or, our projection angle). The crooked or distorted shape yields the depth when we apply geometry to the triangulation between the eye and the projected light pattern. We use much more sophisticated patterns and even sequences of patterns to help decode the depth most accurately.”

Progressive research into SLI techniques has allowed Dr. Hassebrook to gather 3D data in unexpected places. In 2009, he and graduate research assistant Eli Crane constructed a remote “Rotate and Hold and Scan” (RAHAS) device capable scanning artifacts which cannot be removed for laboratory examination. To test the portable scanner, Crane and Dr. Chris Begley of Transylvania University traveled to the rain forests of Honduras, where they scanned petroglyphs carved into rocks over 500 years ago. Because of water erosion, many of the carvings were difficult to distinguish; however, the RAHAS prototype allowed Crane and Begley to obtain detailed 3D data on the petroglyphs for later analysis.

Later that year, Dr. Hassebrook, Dr. Begley and team visited a historic Lexington graveyard with a different prototype to scan headstones largely illegible to the naked eye. Some headstones were over 150 years old and the engraved information had virtually eroded over time. The scanner provided crucial 3-D images, offering Dr. Hassebrook and his team a clear picture of what was written on the headstones. In one case, although the team determined the death date on a particular headstone was 1818, the 3-D image presented by the scanner revealed a thinly engraved line which rendered the actual death date as 1848!

Dr. Hassebrook’s recent travels involved returning to Honduras to scan more petroglyphs, followed by trips to Spain and Sicily to scan artifacts ranging from coins and rings to a Phoenician nautical weapon called a ram. The success of this technology continues to create opportunities for Dr. Hassebrook and his team to amass information on previously unstudied relics.

Although Dr. Hassebrook’s exciting research is branching out into new areas, such as the fashion and clothing industry through a partnership between the University of Kentucky Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments and the Lexington Fashion Collaborative, he still enjoys the interaction with students in the classroom and in the lab. “Everything I do is dependent on other people and their abilities,” he says. “In a sense, teaching is part of that ‘pass it on’ process. But I think the most fun is when I give the students open-ended projects and they come back with approaches and ideas I did not expect or even know about.”

“I came up with this crazy idea one summer before attending UK.  I thought, ‘there always seems to be wind when flying in an airplane; and if someone could just fly a wind turbine up there, they could produce a lot more energy, a lot more often.’ This began my quest to develop high altitude wind energy,” says Matt.

But having an idea isn’t enough to get it off the ground. For that, Matt needed UK’s College of Engineering.

“The UK engineering program has given me the knowledge and skill set required to put my dreams into reality.  I have been able to better define creative ideas, break them down into various components, recognize and overcome associated variables and ultimately build [the technology],” he says.

During the 2009 spring semester, Matt and another student entered Matt’s business concept titled, “2^nd Generation, High Altitude Wind Energy” into the second annual Idea State U competition—one of the top state-funded business plan competitions in the nation with over $100,000 in cash prizes. Their entry received first place in their individual category and earned nearly $2,500 in prize money. The success spurred Matt to continue casting his vision for high altitude wind energy. “There have been many creative inventors who’ve filed patents and some who have successfully created prototypes, but I felt I could be different—maybe even better.  After the ‘Idea State U’ competition, other people began to believe in my vision as well.”

Soon, investors began offering opportunities for Matt to move from business plan to business owner. “I was invited to present at the B2B (Business-to-Business) event at UK in front of a room of investors.  The concept was a hit.  Since then, I have recruited top business consultants for partners, have been awarded a grant for proof of concept, started an energy company and now I am off to revolutionize the way we think about wind energy!”

One “crazy” idea is well on its way to producing alternative energy and using renewable resources across the nation and Matt credits UK’s College of Engineering with helping him achieve what he always believed was possible. “UK has a close engineering community, and the faculty and staff foster the entrepreneur spirit,” he says—a spirit which turns ideas into real-world solutions.

The University of Kentucky College of Engineering has offered unlimited opportunities for John Wright both in, and out, of the classroom. Just one of the many reasons he decided to venture away from his home in Louisville and become a wildcat.

“UK’s Engineering program is excellent.  The instruction extends beyond the classroom through the many active student organizations, internships, and research programs available to UK students.  These opportunities give UK students an edge over many others whose schools have not developed to this level,” he says. It was the experience to be gained from these opportunities that shaped Wright’s learning path from his first walk on to campus to those last few steps he will take on commencement day this upcoming May.

“When I came to UK, I initially declared my major as Electrical Engineering.  I came in with a lot of AP credit hours, so I started taking EE courses my first year,” he says. But just after his first year Wright accepted an internship at GE Transportation.  It was upon returning to UK in the fall that Wright says he took on a part-time job at Lexmark and decided to add computer engineering as a double major.

Wright says, “the summer after my second year, I started doing research with the Hastings Research Group in the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CeNSE). Since I’ve worked there, I have helped develop an intra-ocular pressure sensor.”

After such a great experience with nanoscale technologies it came as no surprise that in his senior year Wright decided to added computer science as his third, and hopefully final, major.

Wright is a firm believer in UK’s hands on approach with “procedures, concepts, and skills from research that classroom education simply cannot teach.” However, that does not mean that while Wright has been hard at work with his three majors, co-ops, and research that he hasn’t found time to be involved in other areas of UK.

“I have also been involved with a number of campus organizations.  I am an officer of the UK Entrepreneurs Club (EClub), president of the Engineering Honor Society, Tau Beta Pi, I was a resident advisor (RA) in the Kirwan III residence hall, and I was a mentor for the Engineering Summer Program (ESP),” he says.

With so much going on it would be easy to become overwhelmed, but Wright has found it all very exciting. “I have had a great time here at UK,” he says. “The instruction has been wonderful, but what has truly helped me succeed is the extracurricular activities with which I’ve been involved.”

Nashville, Tennessee

March 2011

UK’s IEEE student branch recently participated in the annual IEEE Region 3 conference, SoutheastCon.

Seventeen students from Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, from freshman to

student level, participated in the Software, Ethics, Student Paper, Website, and T-shirt competitions.

The hardware competition challenged teams to build an autonomous robot which could seek victims of a

natural disaster and report their location and life status. A total of 35 teams participated in the competition.

The UK IEEE Student Branch team made it into the semifinals, finishing in fourth place.

The Ethics team was assigned an ethically questionable scenario where they were to present and defend thei

stance while applying the IEEE Code of Ethics. The team, consisting of Bonnie Cheng (EE), Cassandra Cox (EE),

and Matthew Jackson (EE), earned second place out of 12 teams.

The T-Shirt competition required schools to design a unique, team shirt for the conference. The T-Shirt, designed

by Bonnie Cheng (EE), won first place.

Congratulation!