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Rensselaer School of Engineering News 2010 2010 RENSSELAER ENGINEERING Going Back to Basics…and Out to the Cutting Edge: Chemical and Biological Engineering 175 Years of Civil Engineering Design Lab Students Push Wind Turbine Technology Forward eng.rpi.edu | 1 2010 RENSSELAER ENGINEERING “ Our engineering graduates are among the most highly recruited in the country and are recognized as being leadership bound. Our faculty and students are working together in our labs and research centers to solve some of the most pressing challenges our nation faces today. Advances in materials, energy, computational modeling, bioengineering, transportation, water, and disaster resiliency are just some of the areas in which our students and faculty are making significant contributions.” David V. Rosowsky, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE Dean of Engineering CONTENTS News Briefs Letter from the Dean :: pg 3 (Cover) Going Back to 175 Years of Civil Design Lab Students Push News Briefs :: pg 22 Basics…and Out to the Engineering :: pg 12 Wind Turbine Technology Cutting Edge: Chemical and Forward :: pg 18 Biological Engineering :: pg 4 School of Engineering Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th Street Troy, NY 12180-3590 USA (518) 276-6203 Opinions expressed in these eng.rpi.edu pages do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or the David V. Rosowsky, policies of the Institute. Ph.D., P.E., F. ASCE Dean of Engineering ©2010 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Letter from the Dean This is a tremendously exciting time for Engineering at Rensselaer. This RENSSELAER ENGINEERING Fall, we welcomed more than 650 first-year engineering students to campus and one of the largest and most highly qualified groups of new graduate students in our School’s history. Selected from increasingly large and talented pools of applicants, the quality of our newest engineering students is proof-positive of the high value placed on an engineering degree from Rensselaer. Fall 2010 also marks an historic occasion at the Institute, the 175th anni- versary of the awarding of the first civil engineering degree in the United States. The history of civil engineering at Rensselaer is simply extraordinary. We can count iconic civil engineers and pioneers such as Washington Roe- bling (Class of 1857, engineer of Brooklyn Bridge), George Ferris (Class of 1881, inventor of the Ferris wheel), Ralph Peck (Class of 1934, considered by many to be the founder of the field of soil mechanics) and Admiral Lewis B. Combs (Class of 1916, co-founder of the U.S. Navy Seabees) among our many outstanding civil engineering graduates—and our future is just as impressive. This year we welcomed three new faculty in the Depart- ment of Civil and Environmental Engineering: incoming Department Head Dr. Chris Letchford, an internationally recognized expert in wind engineer- ing; Dr. Philippe Baveye, a renowned environmental engineer with expertise in hydrologic and soil sciences, appointed to the Kodak Chair in Environ- mental Engineering; and Dr. Cara Wang, an Assistant Professor working in the area of transportation systems. David V. Rosowsky, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE These are exciting times both for the School of Engineering and for the Dean of Engineering Institute, despite the significant fiscal challenges facing higher education today. As has always been the case, Rensselaer stands firmly committed to ensuring an exceptional educational environment, hiring and retaining a world-class faculty, and building an infrastructure befitting a world-class research university. If you have been on campus in the last couple of years, you have witnessed the physical transformation that has taken place at “ This fall we celebrate 175 years Rensselaer—a re-envisioned campus community for the next century. of civil engineering at Rensselaer, The next chapter at Rensselaer promises to be a bright one and the welcome 12 new faculty and News Briefs entire campus leadership is committed to placing Rensselaer among an elite one of the largest and best cadre of national research universities. We are well on our way, but like qualified groups of new all great universities, we must rely on the generous support of our alumni and friends to realize our ambitious goals. No one realizes the value of the students in our history.” Rensselaer engineering degree more than our loyal and dedicated alumni. I call on all of our alumni to seek ways to partner with the School of Engi- neering and help ensure we can provide a world-class education to genera- tions of engineering students to come. Thank you for your continued support for Engineering at Rensselaer. David Rosowsky, Dean of Engineering eng.rpi.edu | 3 Going Back to Basics…and Out to the Cutting Edge Here and there, you’ll find an engineer focusing on one very specific, fundamental phenomenon that could change the face of many fields. It’s especially true in chemical and biological engineering— and even more so at Rensselaer. 4 | Rensselaer Engineering From microbial communities to misfolding prions, thin films to complex fluids, the researchers in Rensselaer’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering routinely zero in on watershed phenomena. This is just Going Back to Basics…and Out to the Cutting Edge as true of the newer professors— even graduate students—as it is of senior faculty. Here is just a sampling of what’s happening now. eng.rpi.edu | 5 Karande, Tessier, and Collins with their respective research teams When Peptides Cross Barriers Keeping Proteins Apart tessier karande Natural peptides have their limitations. The Protein aggregation can cause devastating building blocks of proteins don’t travel diseases: mad cow, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, well across biological borders: the skin, for and Alzheimer’s, among others. If instance, or the blood-brain barrier. researchers knew how aggregation worked, they might be able to cure If they did, vaccines would be much easier the results. to deliver, and the lives of people with schizophrenia much better. That explains Assistant Professor Peter Tessier’s research. Tessier That’s why Assistant Professor Pankaj Karande is making synthetic is investigating the fundamentals of aggregation and misfolding peptides. In one project, he researches pathogenic peptides to solve a whole range of thorny problems in medicine, from that could help transport vaccines across the skin barrier. “The Alzheimer’s to infections that cross species. Ultimately, his work peptides on the outer wall of pathogens have distinct signature in engineering proteins that resist aggregation could generate patterns,” explained the assistant professor, whose work as breakthroughs in treating such diseases. a graduate assistant—developing an insulin skin patch for diabetics—led him to this effort. “We are looking to synthesize a Many of the problems come to us courtesy of prions—highly peptide with an opening for attaching vaccines. Then, if we place infectious protein particles made famous by mad cow disease. this peptide on the skin, it triggers a response in the immune cells While some prions play a positive role, subtle differences in the just beneath the surface.” structure of others enable them to carry virulent infections. By observing natural prions in yeast, Tessier and his lab are close to Other synthetic peptides, meanwhile, could help deliver drugs understanding their most basic mechanics, including how they where few drugs have gone before. “For many neurodegenerative assemble and cross species barriers. diseases, current drugs do not produce good outcomes because they don’t make it into the brain,” Karande said. “Natural amino On another front, Tessier examines the dynamics that make acids cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. With the right amino some aggregations toxic and others harmless. “Sometimes cells acids, these synthetic peptides could pass the barrier and deliver promote aggregation as a storage mechanism for important the drugs—or serve as pharmaceuticals themselves.” hormones, which are released when needed,” he observed. “The challenge is to encourage toxic aggregations to rearrange People with skin cancer have a vested interest in another into non-toxic forms.” aspect of Karande’s research: the design of personalized medicines for melanoma. If his vision comes to pass, doctors In this context, his team has studied the effects of resveratrol, an would take a melanoma biopsy from a patient and send it to a antioxidant in red wine that may have beneficial properties for lab for high-throughput drug screening. From this, the lab would humans but (judging from the current research) only at extremely identify the precise drug formulation for fighting the cancer in high doses. They are close to developing what Tessier calls that particular patient. “exciting alternative molecules that do what resveratrol does but would be far more attractive as therapeutic candidates.” Tessier’s latest project seeks to explain how the behavior of antibodies may be better controlled and used for treating human disease. He will investigate how antibody self-association and behavior can be modulated systematically by exposing loops on the antibody surface to various solvents. 6 | Rensselaer Engineering Recent Awards and Distinctions in Chemical and Biological Engineering Junior faculty: Cynthia Collins • The National Academies Keck Future Initiative Seed Award in Planned Communities, Bacteria-Style Synthetic Biology to develop a novel platform for engineering synthetic interkingdom communication collins No microbe is an island. • Micro-2 experiment led by Collins in orbit on NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis, with the goal of studying bacterial and biofilm “More complex processes need more than one organism to make them work,” said growth in microgravity Assistant Professor Cynthia Collins. “As Pankaj Karande a research community, we’re very good at • 2010 Award from the Goldhirsh Foundation for Cancer culturing microbes individually, but not at Research to study peptide mediated drug transport across engineering them to coexist.” the blood-brain barrier for treatment of tumors • 2010 Award from Alzheimer’s Association to study tight Collins aims to change that with her research into microbial junction binding peptides for drug delivery across the communities.
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