High school students attended Penn State Behrend’s annual Women in Engineering Day.
Girls explore engineering at outreach program
Nearly 150 high school students attended Penn State Behrend’s annual Women in Engineering Day in November. The youth outreach program uses hands-on workshops to encourage girls to explore engineering fields and careers.
A study space of their own
Residents of the Engineering House special living option in Niagara Hall suggested turning unused space in the basement of the residence hall into a study-lounge. Several units of the college, including the School of Engineering, Residence Life, Housing and Food Services, and Information Technology Services, pooled resources to adapt the space. Students in the Engineering House helped design the space using Computer-Aided Drafting and are currently developing usage guidelines for the space.
Behrend engineering programs ranked in top 40 by U.S. News
Rankings by U.S. News & World Report released this past fall place the School of Engineering at Penn State Behrend among the top forty undergraduate engineering programs in the nation in the category of schools whose highest engineering degree offered is a bachelor’s or master’s. The school is at No. 35 on the list. The Best Engineering Schools rankings are based on surveys of engineering deans and senior faculty of engineering programs accredited by ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology).
Dr. Ihab Ragai, associate professor of engineering.
Behrend’s Ragai named ASME fellow
Dr. Ihab Ragai, assistant professor of engineering, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Just 2 percent of the society’s 140,000 professional members earn the distinction.
Ragai, a member of ASME since 1998, was recognized for his contributions to the field of advanced manufacturing. Throughout his career, in both industry and academic settings, he has studied the influence of materials and manufacturing processes on product design for automotive and aerospace applications.
At Behrend, Ragai teaches courses related to machine design, new product development, and design for manufacturing. His research has focused on advanced manufacturing processes, smart manufacturing, machine condition monitoring, and machine structural optimization. In addition, he has served as a visiting professor of mechanical design at Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences in Germany.
As an ASME fellow, Ragai is at the highest elected level of membership in the society, which promotes the art, science, and practice of multidisciplinary engineering and applied sciences in more than 150 countries. His formal induction as an ASME fellow will be at the 2019 Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference, which will be hosted by Penn State Behrend at Erie’s Bayfront Convention Center in June.
Joel Carr ’07
Innovative Alumnus Honored
Joel Carr ’07 was recently honored by Pittsburgh Business Times with a 2018 Innovator Award for his work as a polypropylene plastics product technology leader at Braskem America’s research and development facility in Pittsburgh.
Carr and his team of eight researchers were challenged to develop new plastic compositions that would allow automakers to design cars that are lighter and more fuel-efficient without sacrificing aesthetics, strength of materials, and ease and cost of manufacturing.
The team ended up finding the “holy grail” of automotive thermoplastic components by combining the desired attributes of different polymers to form new polypropylene compositions that met the auto industry’s specifications. The researchers have applied for several patents for improved polypropylenes.
Carr, 33, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sheila, and daughter, Ruth.
Conference
Penn State Behrend will host the largest international advanced manufacturing conference in the world, NAMRC 47 I MSEC2019, at Erie’s Bayfront Convention Center on June 10-14. More than 800 researchers and manufacturers from around the globe will gather to share the latest innovations and developments in manufacturing systems and processes, cyber-physical systems, and materials processing.