Alumni weekend is on Oct 7-9. Please join us on campus! The fabrication laboratory (aka FabLab) will be open on Saturday morning. Come check out our 3D printers and other opportunities for creating prototypes. You can also get a tour of the new STEM complex.

I am also pleased to announce a brand-new endowed professorship – the Karl and Mary Fessenden Professorship in Biomedical Engineering. Endowed professorships, graduate fellowships, and undergraduate fellowships are excellent ways for us to both honor our outstanding faculty and students, but also attract top talent.

Thanks also to several alumni who have made new significant gift commitments that support our students and programs including Gerry Beatty, Victoria Hildebrand, Jim and Carol Wiggans, and Karl and Mary Fessenden. And thanks to all of you who contribute to the annual fund, the Dean’s fund and much more. Your contributions help us provide enhanced opportunities for our students.

Cheers,

Dean, College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences

The agency’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organization. Dr. Scarborough’s research focuses on the application of microbiomes (also known as microbial communities) to protect the natural environment and public health. He is also making headlines with the Environmental Protection Agency, which awarded the University of Vermont a grant to help tackle the climate crisis through food waste diversion. In addition to those awards, Matt also received a grant from the NSF for collaborative research on microbial chain-elongation mediated dehalogenation and carbon transformation and one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding production of propane from agricultural wastes. Read more and join us in congratulating Matt!

Fall risk detection is just one of many potential applications of the new Sensor Network's efforts. As one of the health technology innovators involved in the network, UVM is at the forefront of revolutionizing patient care and positive outcomes. UVM’s work is spearheaded by Ryan McGinnis, director of UVM’s M-Sense Research Group, which develops innovative health technologies with partners in engineering, medicine, mental health and movement science.

Researchers at UVM, Dr. Rebecca Diehl (Department of Geography) and Dr. Kristen Underwood (Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering), have generated a continuous map of topographically defined floodplains for Vermont’s Lake Champlain basin rivers that drain more than two square miles. Created to show a simplified representation of what different severity flood zones might look like across the landscape for conservation and land-use planners, each color on the maps represents how water that spreads out from riverbanks might look for eight storm sizes, from 2-year to 500-year flood probabilities.

A new paper by Juniper Lovato, Jeremiah Onoalpo, Laurent Hebert Dufresne, and others discusses the limits of individual consent for social data—which may implicate groups who didn’t consent. The computer science conference has a cross-disciplinary focus that brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems. In their work, our CS team explored distributed consent models and question the role of consent in context.

Precision agriculture uses advanced sensors and large data sets to deliver nutrients and water to soil and plants when and were they need it or to optimize the care and feeding of dairy cows (both critical to VT) These approaches both improve farm output and improve the sustainability of farms. Donna Rizzo and Sardor Musayev (post doc) are partnering to use their skills in food systems and artificial intelligence to contribute innovative approaches to this growing field. 

We congratulated our very own Jeff Frolik (Electrical and Biomedical Engineering) for his Fulbright in our most recent newsletter. Read more about his work, along with the other five members of the faculty at UVM who won the awards this year, a remarkable (and perhaps unprecedented) level of success for the University.

UVM's Fellowships, Opportunities, & Undergraduate Research (FOUR) office supports the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program to provide research opportunities to UVM students. Ten undergraduate students worked alongside UVM researchers this summer to study pressing issues in food systems. One of them, Gabby White, is a senior Biomedical Engineering major working in the lab of Rachael Floreani, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Gabby's project will utilize different biomaterials to create engineered scaffolding for lab cultivated meat.

Summer Vocation

Olivia Szumski '24 usually spends summers in the water, teaching swimming lessons in her hometown of Ludlow, Mass. This summer, however, she waded, happily, in waist-high water as part of the Lake Champlain Sea Grant Scholars Program at UVM. Read more about Olivia’s summer work and other students across campus.

Why do Vermonters Drive Electric?

Civil Engineering major Aubrey Ferris ’22 studies what factors determine why people across the state purchase electric cars. Ferris researched the characteristics that affect electric vehicle adoption rates and presented her findings during UVM's Student Research Conference. Across the Fence interviewed Ferris about the findings and her perspective on how transformative her research work at UVM has been. Watch the video.

Senior Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) Students Show Their Work

Check out this video of the culmination of students’ work on their Senior Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) 2022 projects, undertaken as a part of a capstone course.

Class of 22 Employment Spotlight: Lasana Drame

Lasana Drame, electrical engineering major with pure mathematics minor, was part of the Muslim Student Association, the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), the Black Student Union, and the African Student Association. Read more about how he landed a job as an Electrical Engineering Associate with the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.