Lee College of Engineering

John Daniels, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and chair of the National Ash Management Advisory Board, will present “How UNC Charlotte is Advancing the Research, Practice and Policy of Coal Ash Management” at 12:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 14, in EPIC, G256.

Congresswoman Alma Adams (NC-12) encouraged students to be committed not only to themselves but also to their communities during her keynote at “Revolutionizing the Dream,” celebrating the life, work and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Tuesday, Jan. 17.

With a wall of fans six-stories high creating winds in a huge, one-of-a-kind laboratory, researchers from UNC Charlotte’s Fire Safety Engineering Technology program and the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) are burning building materials and wildland vegetation to study wind-driven wildfire embers. These large-scale tests are part of three-year study to understand, and in the long run mitigate, the risks involved when embers from wildfires spread.

In urban environments such as Charlotte, multiple options are needed to move people and goods. To do so with maximum efficiency that relieves congestion and improves the quality of life for city dwellers will require innovative research, which is the aim of the Center for Advanced Multimodal Mobility Solutions and Education (CAMMSE) at UNC Charlotte.

A six-member team of Lee College of Engineering students recently took first place in the fall semester Senior Design Expo for its completed work on the “Ingersoll Rand Pneumatic Pump Energy Harvesting Unit.” During the expo, 30 teams presented their finished two-semester projects, and 50 teams presented their first-semester design concept posters.

UNC General Administration has awarded grants totaling $1.7 million to support faculty research in areas of strategic importance to the state.

The largest of these UNC Research Opportunities Initiative grants will support the project “Advancing the Science and Practice of Metal-based Additive Manufacturing,” led by Christopher Evans, professor of mechanical engineering and engineering science and director of the Center for Precision Metrology. This project received $1,628,880 in funding.

With hundreds of billions of neurons and thousands of trillions of synaptic connections between them, the human brain is considered the most complex system on earth. This complexity makes studying the brain an almost overwhelming challenge with nearly infinite research options.

Sheng-Guo Wang, a professor of electrical engineering technology in the Lee College of Engineering, has received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and conduct research at Hong Kong Polytechnic University for the 2016-17 academic year.

Hong Kong Polytechnic University is a leading international research institution, most recently ranked 12th globally in structural engineering by QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University Rankings; QS is a British company that specializes in education and study abroad.

UNC Charlotte’s Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC) recently was featured on the website Transmission and Distribution World.

In an article on the website, EPIC was called one of the “biggest university/industry partnerships in the country.”

EPIC director Johan Enslin invited Transmission and Distribution World Strategic Director Rich Bush, a mechanical engineer, to visit the facility. He was “mesmerized with the million pound, 32-foot high wall where EPIC researchers can evaluate transmission foundations and tower sections.”

Lebra Nance focuses on students and views her role as one to assist them to achieve their goals of earning a degree and becoming engineers.

As a student services specialist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science in the William States Lee College of Engineering, Nance is a point of contact for current and prospective undergraduates.