Departmental News

As part of Discovery Place’s “Year of the Engineer,” students from the Lee College of Engineering took over the Charlotte educational museum on Saturday Feb. 10th to teach kids the problem-solving principles of engineering. A photo gallery of the Feb. 10 UNC Charlotte takeover is here.

The Terracon Foundation recently awarded a university grant of $10,000 to the Department of Engineering Technology and Construction Management (ETCM) at UNC Charlotte. The funds will be used to support scholarships for female and underrepresented minority students in the Construction and Facilities Management master’s degree program.

As a voice for the public and for engineering students, Linda Thurman of the Lee College of Engineering has been a valuable member of the North Carolina Board of Examiners for Engineers and Land Surveyors (NCBELS) since 2010. The energy and professionalism Thurman brings to the board will have an even greater impact in 2018, as she serves as the first-ever public member to chair NCBELS.

A UNC Charlotte commencement tradition is to discover which of the graduates has been working the longest to earn their 49er degree. At the December 2017 commencement, as graduates sat group by group when the number of years were called out, the “Last Man Standing” was Fire Safety Engineering Technology student Ron Mauney, who first started his UNC Charlotte journey 42 years earlier in 1975.

Ph.D. student Wahida Nasrin and Professor Jiang (Linda) Xie, both of UNC Charlotte Electrical and Computer Engineering, won a Best Paper Award from the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2017), which was held in Singapore December 4-8. Their winning paper was titled “An Efficient Target Cell Selection Scheme for Next-generation Open-access Femtocell Networks.”

Students from UNC Charlotte’s Lee College of Engineering won the top three spots at the 2017 npower Forecasting Challenge, a competition that included 26 international teams and an additional 19 teams from the United Kingdom. Twelve other UNC Charlotte students placed in the top 25.

The William States Lee College of Engineering held its fall semester Senior Design Expo on Dec. 8, 2017.

Power electronics is undergoing a promising transition, with wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductor power devices enabling high-frequency power electronics systems. These systems have unprecedented performance compared to conventional silicon-based power electronics in terms of power density, efficiency and control bandwidth. In order to monitor and control the wide-bandgap devices, Dr. Babak Parkhideh and his research team in the Electrical and Computer Engineering are developing ultrafast sensors optimized for high-voltage power electronics systems operating beyond 1 MHz.

In a November issue of the journal Theriogenology and in the November Smithsonian Insider, a team of researchers from UNC Charlotte and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) announced the first successful drying and rehydration of domestic cat spermatozoa using a rapid microwave dehydration method.

The Lee College of Engineering awarded its top honors for teaching, the Undergraduate and Graduate Excellence in Teaching Awards, on Nov. 28.