Two McCormick Professors Selected For Frontiers Of Engineering Symposium

August 21, 2008

Two McCormick School of Engineering professors - Mitra Hartmann, assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering, and Jose Andrade, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering - have been selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering’s 14th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium.

The 2½-day event will bring together engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. The participants - from industry, academia, and government - were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations and chosen from more than 230 applicants.

"America's competitiveness will largely depend upon the next generation of innovators," said NAE President Charles M. Vest. "The U.S. Frontiers of Engineering program brings some of the country's rising-star engineers, from a diverse range of disciplines, together for an exchange of ideas that will surely help contribute to keeping us at the forefront of technological advancement and may even spark a breakthrough that changes the way we live."

The symposium will be hosted Sept. 18-20 by Sandia National Laboratories at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and will examine emerging nanoelectric devices, cognitive engineering, drug delivery systems, and understanding and countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Hartmann researches how biomechanics enables efficient movement and active sensing and how the construction of hardware and computer models of animal movement and sensing can provide insights into the underlying organization of the nervous system. Her laboratory uses the rat whisker system as a model to study sensory acquisition and the sensory modulation of rhythmic movement.

Andrade’s research involves the understanding, modeling, simulation, and quantitative prediction of complex mechanical systems, with special application to geomechanics. He is interested in modeling instabilities in multi-phase porous media under static and dynamic loading by developing robust constitutive models and efficient techniques in computational inelasticity and finite element procedures.