General News

Dr. Bob Hocken, one of the founding fathers of engineering and scientific research at UNC Charlotte, a distinguished professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science, the director of the Center for Precision Metrology, and an award-winning teacher, retired in May 2014.

The story of Charles Rose’s journey from his childhood home in the Bahamas to graduating as an engineer from UNC Charlotte is one of perseverance, faith and family. And it has a happy ending.

Dr. Na (Luna) Lu, an assistant professor in the Engineering Technology and Construction Management Department, has won a $400,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award to further her research of developing cost-effective thermoelectric materials for high-temperature power generation through waste-heat harvesting.

At one time or another they were all engineering students at UNC Charlotte. Now, eight 49er graduates are key members of the engineering team that is building the first new commercial nuclear reactors in the United States in the past 30 years.

As a sophomore mechanical engineering student, Eric Cutler is learning how forces act upon a body and about the resulting motions in response to these forces. For Cutler these laws of physics certainly aren’t limitations, though, since he has spent most of his life defying gravity.

Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (SEEM) is offering new graduate certificate programs with flexible delivery options in the areas of Energy Analytics, Lean Six Sigma, Logistics and Supply Chains, and Systems Analytics.

Providing faculty and student researchers with advanced materials analyses resources, UNC Charlotte’s Materials Characterization Lab (MCL) offers sampling services, training, shared instrument usage and expertise at a convenient location and affordable cost.

Chains of events can lead many directions. For one Lee College of Engineering student graduating this May, his chain of events went from bad decisions, to substance abuse, to living in a shipping container, to accepting the help of others, to again believing in himself and to ultimately defying the odds.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation has awarded seven new research grants totaling almost $1.4 million to faculty researchers in The William States Lee College of Engineering. The engineering departments that will be involved in the research are Engineering Technology and Construction Management (ETCM), and Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE).

The National Science Foundation has awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship to INES Ph.D. student Molly Welsh to support her research in promoting nitrogen removal in agricultural stream ecosystems and identifying microbial controls on nutrient cycling.