Global construction giant Obrascon Huarte Lain (OHL) has signed an agreement with FIU for the university’s first international internship program, to be based at the company’s headquarters in Madrid.

The announcement comes just a year after the company made a donation to the OHL School of Construction, making it the first named school in the history of the FIU College of Engineering and Computing.

“This is an extraordinary opportunity for the OHL School of Construction and for FIU,’’ said Amir Mirmiran, dean of the College of Engineering and Computing. “FIU is already recognized as a center of excellence in construction management. This partnership will further enable FIU to prepare future generations of highly skilled and experienced construction management professionals.”

FIU and OHL officials meet in Madrid. From left to right: Susan Jay, senior director of development for the College of Engineering and Computing; Juan-Miguel Villar Mir, chairman of the OHL Group; Irma Becerra-Fernandez, vice president of the Office of Engagement; Irtishad Ahmad, director of the OHL School of Construction; Amir Mirmiran, dean of the College of Engineering and Computing; and Juan Lorenzo Martin Fernandez, director of human resources for the OHL Group.

The partnership also highlights FIU’s commitment to preparing its students to excel in a global economy, said Irma Becerra-Fernandez, vice president for the Office of Engagement, who co-signed the partnership agreement with OHL and the School of Construction.

“We are looking at the first two student interns as ambassadors for FIU,’’ said Becerra-Fernandez, who traveled with Mirmiran, Irtishad Ahmad, director of the OHL School of Construction, and Susan Jay, the director of development for the College of Engineering and Computing, to Madrid to meet with OHL officials.

“This is not only our first international internship program, it is also an innovative partnership by which we can expand our students’ horizons, as well as the university’s profile on an international level,’’ Becerra-Fernandez said. “This international internship is defining a new model that will benefit our students, our university and OHL.’’

For 10 weeks beginning in June, OHL will employ two FIU students, Alejandro Falgons and Felipe Martinez, both juniors in construction management. They will work primarily at the company’s headquarters in Madrid but could also receive assignments to OHL projects throughout the world.

With nearly $7 billion in annual sales and more than 19,000 employees, OHL is one of the world’s largest construction companies with projects in more than 28 countries. The firm specializes in major infrastructure projects, including those funded by public-private partnerships, an emerging financing mechanism for projects in the United States.

“These students will get to work on some of the most innovative and exciting construction management projects happening in the world today,’’ said Ahmad. “They will get to experience real-life challenges and situations on the highest level.’’

The firm’s portfolio includes both vertical and horizontal construction, from hospitals and office buildings to railways, bridges, ports and roads. OHL manages significant corporate holdings in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Miami, OHL built the Orange Line of the Metrorail, the first railway construction project by a Spanish company in the United States.

On the FIU campus, OHL subsidiary Arellano Construction is overseeing the $26.8 million construction of the Management and New Growth Opportunities (MANGO) Building, scheduled to open in November.

“This internship program is a natural evolution of the excellent partnership we have with FIU,’’ said Francisco Marin, president and CEO of OHL. “The OHL School of Construction is one of the top programs of its kind in the U.S. and abroad. We are committed to supporting its efforts to educate the next generation of leaders in construction who understand and can best formulate innovative solutions to global issues.”

Established in 1973, the construction management program at FIU is a leading local and national supplier of construction management executives, having educated more than 1,500 professionals who are employed by all major construction companies in the region.

Becerra-Fernandez said the internship program with OHL is expected to expand and could eventually include classes for the interns at the Universidad Polytecnica de Madrid (UPM), the top technical university in Spain.

“We are starting with construction management but this could grow to include architecture and many other disciplines,’’ she said. “There are all kinds of possibilities.’’

For Martinez, who will be starting his first internship with OHL, those possibilities include one day owning an international construction company of his own.

A former architecture student who has traveled the world to study beautiful buildings, Martinez said he is looking forward to learning from some of the top construction managers in the world.

“This internship will allow me to apply the knowledge attained in my academic career into real-life situations,’’ he said. “At the same time, it will allow me to grow as a professional in ways that books cannot teach.’’

source: http://news.fiu.edu/2013/05/fiu-launches-first-international-internship-program-in-madrid/60572

Chair of FIU Civil & Environmental Engineering Atorod Azizinamini talks with CBSMiami about Key Biscayne bridge.

http://miami.cbslocal.com/video/8824643-bridge-on-the-brink-the-bear-cut-bridge-to-key-biscayne/

In a study published in the April 16 issue of Nature Communications, researchers from FIU’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine describe a revolutionary technique they have developed that can deliver and fully release the anti-HIV drug AZTTP into the brain.

FIU professor Madhavan Nair works with magnets to draw therapy to a specific site.

Madhavan Nair, professor and chair, and Sakhrat Khizroev, professor of electrical and computer engineering and professor and vice chair of the HWCOM’s Department of Immunology, used magneto-electric nanoparticles (MENs) to cross the blood-brain barrier and send a significantly increased level of AZTTP—up to 97 percent more —to HIV-infected cells.

For years, the blood-brain barrier has stumped scientists and doctors who work with neurological diseases. A natural filter that allows very few substances to pass through to the brain, the blood-brain barrier keeps most medicines from reaching the brain. Currently, more than 99 percent of the antiretroviral therapies used to treat HIV, such as AZTTP, are deposited in the liver, lungs and other organs before they reach the brain.

In laboratory models, a new technique developed by researchers at FIU uses magneto-electric nanoparticles to deliver a significantly higher level of the anti-HIV drug AZTTP to the brain.

“This allows a virus, such as AIDS, to lurk unchecked,” said Nair, an HIV/immunology researcher.

The patent-pending technique developed by FIU binds the drug to a MEN inserted into a monocyte/macrophage cell, which is then injected into the body and drawn to the brain. Once it has reached the brain, a low energy electrical current triggers a release of the drug, which is then guided to its target with magnetoelectricity. In lab experiments, nearly all of the therapy reached its intended target. It will soon enter the next phase of testing.

Potentially, this method of delivery could help other patients who suffer from neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, meningitis and chronic pain. It could also be applicable to diseases such as cancer.

“We see this as a multifunctional therapy,” said Khizroev, who is an electrical engineer and physicist by training.

Multi-disciplinary efforts that combine principles of those fields with immunology enabled the project to move forward.

“The success of our nanotechnology is derived from the fact that nature likes simplicity,” Khizroev said.

source: http://news.fiu.edu/2013/04/new-technique-to-deliver-life-saving-drugs-to-the-brain/58592

“The Discovery Lab provides a platform to develop many new ideas,” said FIU School of Computing and Information Sciences Director Sitharama S. Iyengar. “The lab is comparable in its mission to labs at top universities. We are educating entrepreneurs, sustaining research and, developing products that can be commercialized. We are training the next generation of students with the 21st Century skills they need to succeed.”

The students are one of 23 teams in the competition – which is the result of a memorandum of understanding between the governments of the United States and the People’s Republic of China, which states that the two nations “have a common goal in fostering sustainable economic and social development while encouraging the use of renewable energy sources and recognize that solar energy development and use is an important part of their collaboration.”

Rendering of the house being developed by students from Tsinghua University and FIU for the Solar Decathlon China 2013 competition.

Representatives from the two universities first met in September of 2011 when Professor Irtishad Ahmad, director of FIU’s OHL School of Construction, and Yimin Zhu, associate professor and the school’s graduate program director, traveled to China to discuss details of collaboration with the team at Tsinghua University.

For the last several months, a group of about 20 students and faculty from FIU’s College of Engineering and Computing and School of Architecture have been communicating with a team of more than 50 students at Tsinghua University via Skype, phone and email and sharing documents on Dropbox to work on the design of a house approximately 800 square feet in size. Construction on the first house – a second will be built prior to the competition – began in December, with plans to unveil it at Tsinghua University’s anniversary this spring.

“It’s a very good experience for the students,” said Cheng-Xian “Charlie” Lin, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, who has been working with students on the photovoltaic solar panel system for the house. “We are working closely with the team in China, which really helps us to get on the same page. We can meet face to face to discuss more effectively in detail the progress. We share a lot of information and work with the students almost every day.”

During the nine days of the competition, the energy consumed by each house is generated by solar energy solutions. The competition will assess the team’s ability to conserve energy, control their physical environment and ability to be fully energy sufficient. Modeled after the Olympic decathlon competition, each home will be evaluated on their performance in 10 contests.

The choice of Datong as the site for the competition is an interesting one as the city has long been known for coal mining and has developed a reputation for being one of China’s most polluted cities. The city is seeking to clean up its environment and loosen its dependence on coal, however, and has begun developing substitute industries such as machinery manufacturing, tourism and logistics services.

“The city is the center of coal production, definitely not clean energy production in China,” said Marilys Nepomechie, professor of architecture at FIU, who served as faculty advisor two years ago and is also working with the architecture team for SD China 2013. “The Chinese are really interested in taking the country in a new direction, changing the image of their cities. They are using the Solar Decathlon as an opportunity to begin that conversation with the world.”

FIU faculty and students have traveled to China to meet with students at Tsinghua University in workshops to prepare for the Solar Decathlon China 2013 competition.

Many members of the FIU team bring their experience to the table from participating in the Solar Decathlon 2011 in Washington, D.C. They have shared lessons learned from that experience with team members in China in an effort to be prepared for the myriad of issues they can face when the competition begins and the newly constructed house is open to judges and the public.

“We learned a lot in 2011,”said Nepomechie, who traveled to China last June with Zhu and Thomas Spiegelhalter, assistant professor of architecture and co-director of the Environmental technology Lab, for the first workshop with the Tsinghua team. “But actually the industry moves really quickly. There are new materials, new equipment, new systems, which are more efficient than they were even a year ago. So, we are keeping up with that and making good choices.”

German Gomez, an engineering student who also was on the team in 2011, said the experience from the previous competition has helped them be better prepared for the challenges that await the project in China.

“Being that this is the second time we have done this has been great because you don’t have the anxiety you had the first time when you don’t know what you’re doing,” he explained. “This time we know a little more about what we’re doing, and when we spoke with the Chinese students it’s still very abstract to them.”

Zhihui Zhang, a professor of construction management at Tsinghua University, visited FIU in January to meet with members of the team. He said FIU’s experience in the Solar Decathlon makes it a valuable partner in this competition.

“This is the first time Tsinghua University has participated in the Solar Decathlon,” he said through an interpreter. “Our faculty and students are learning a lot from FIU’s experience. Two other schools from China have participated in the competition before and we want to be sure we do not get left behind because Tsinghua is one of the top engineering schools in China.”

SD China will be hosted by the National Energy Administration of China and the U.S. Department of Energy, co-hosted by the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, supported by All-China Students Federation Secretariat, and organized by Peking University.

The design for the house the students are building for SD China 2013 has elements of traditional Chinese architecture while also incorporating the latest in sustainable technology.

“It’s got feet in different worlds,” Nepomechie said. “And I think it does it really elegantly.”

For more information about the Solar Decathlon China 2013, contact Zhu at (305) 348 3517 or zhuy@fiu.edu.

By James Hellegaard

Engineering Professor Arindam Chowdhury took top honors at the 2012 Faculty Convocation when he received the President’s Council Worlds Ahead Faculty Award. Under Chowdhury’s direction, FIU researchers made international news last fall when they unveiled the country’s most powerful hurricane simulator, the Wall of Wind (WOW), capable of generating a Category 5 hurricane for purposes of testing building materials.

1. Wow. No pun intended, you had quite a fall semester. What was it like to get all that media attention for your life’s work?

It shows that whatever I’ve been doing for the last six years was important for the community. We have accomplished a lot with our research, so I’m very glad to see that our work as a team has been recognized.

2. We hear a lot about computer engineers and electrical engineers. Is wind engineering a new specialty?

Wind engineering is certainly not a new specialty, but it is not done at very many places in the U.S. I think wind engineering is the only discipline that can really make a difference in terms of making
hurricane-resilient communities.

3. Are you afraid of hurricanes?

I’m not afraid of hurricanes, but I’m concerned about hurricanes. I didn’t know what a hurricane was like until I came here from Iowa, which was seven days after Hurricane Wilma struck South Florida in
2005. I was very scared to see what had happened even with a very low strength hurricane. All the lights were gone and it was dark. The traffic lights were not there and it looked like a ghost city.

4. What’s the biggest misconception people have about the damage hurricanes can do?

People think that at a low wind speed there won’t be much damage, but that’s not the case. Even at lower wind speeds you can have a lot of water intrusion, which is one of the biggest causes of losses during a hurricane. We also have misconceptions about mitigation. People still think if you put tape on the glass that’s going to save it, but that’s not going to do anything.

5. The big hurricane event of 2012 was Hurricane Sandy. Any lessons we can learn from what happened?

Absolutely. We have to understand that a hurricane is a multistressor event. There are a lot of forces that can act on a structure. You have the wind, the wind-driven rain, the storm surge, the wave and, of course, flooding. What Sandy showed us is that even a hurricane that does not have very strong wind can cause a lot of trauma and inconvenience to people and cause a lot of economic loss because of the flooding.   ♦

Photo by Doug Garland ’10

source: http://news.fiu.edu/2013/03/5-questions-for-the-wind-engineer/53047

Some 1,700 area students attended this year’s annual FIU Engineering Expo, sponsored by Miami-based AAR Landing Gear Services. Students from all over South Florida flocked to The Engineering Center of FIU’s College of Engineering and Computing for demonstrations and hands-on displays of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) concepts and principles.

FIU professor Sakhrat Khizroev, a world-renowned inventor in the area of nanotechnology, is one of 98 innovators recently named a Charter Fellow by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

The holder of 30 U.S. patents, Khizroev, a professor of immunology and electrical engineering, was recognized for inventing a dynasty of pioneering nanotechnologies that significantly impacted modern information processing.

Election to NAI Fellow status is a high professional distinction accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.

Khizroev focuses his research on applications of nanomagnetics/spintronics, which studies the interplay of magnetism and transport phenomena. His research in information processing and medicine has resulted in the development of several groundbreaking nanotechnologies, including: perpendicular magnetic recording, the main state-of-the-art technology in the multibillion data-storage industry; nanolasers, optical transducers capable of focusing light into a spot size of 5 nanometers (billionths of a meter); and magneto-electric nanoparticles for targeted delivery and on-demand release of drugs used to fight, diagnose, prevent and cure cancer, HIV/AIDS, Central Nervous System disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, and others.

In Nov. 2011, Khizroev returned to FIU, his first academic home, as a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the College of Engineering & Computing, and a professor of Immunology at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine.  He was one of the two co-founding directors (along with Professor Madhavan Nair) of the new university-wide Center for Personalized NanoMedicine, a research center at the Institute of NeuroImmune Pharmacology, which involves researchers at different colleges within FIU and across the globe. He also serves as vice chair at the Department of Immunology.

From 2006 to 2011, Khizroev was a tenured faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of California, Riverside, where he, along with a team of students and post-doctoral fellows, worked hand-in-hand with many Silicon Valley companies. In 2007, Khizroev oversaw the joint UCR / University of Houston / Western Digital demonstration of nanolasers – a new generation of optical devices. This technology overcame the stumbling blocks that for decades prevented optical diagnostics at a single-molecule level.

Khizroev started his academic career in 2003 as an associate professor in the FIU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he was tenured in 2005. Khizroev contributed to the development of the Focused Ion Beam laboratory within the Motorola Nanotechnology Facility, making FIU the first university across the globe where the popular nanotechnology tool was used for an unconventional application, as a powerful nanodevice prototyping machine. Three-dimensional (3-D) magnetic memory is one of the pioneering and patented technologies that came from the Khizroev group at FIU and was later advanced at UCR.

This technology takes advantage of a 3-D space (compared to the conventional 2-D surfaces and interfaces in the conventional Silicon technologies) and paves a way to an entirely new level of information processing with the potential to realize energy-efficient quantum processing.

Prior to his academic career, Khizroev spent almost four years as a research staff member with Seagate Research and one year as a pre-doctoral intern with IBM Almaden Research Center. Khizroev led the 1998 joint demonstration by researchers of IBM and Carnegie Mellon University to prove the feasibility of perpendicular magnetic recording – the main nanotechnology used today in the multibillion-dollar information storage industry. At IBM, he authored or co-authored three patent inventions in the field of nanomagnetic devices.

Khizroev received a bachelor’s in quantum electronics and applied physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a master’s in physics from the University of Miami, and a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992, 1994, and 1999, respectively.

The 98 innovators named to NAI Charter Fellow status represent 54 prestigious research universities and non-profit research institutes. Together, the new Fellows hold more than 3,200 U.S. patents. Included in the Charter class are eight Nobel Laureates, two Fellows of the Royal Society, 12 presidents of research universities and non-profit research institutes, 50 members of the National Academies (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine), 11 inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, three recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, four recipients of the National Medal of Science, and 29 AAAS Fellows, among other major awards and distinctions.

The NAI Charter Fellows will be inducted as Fellows by the U.S. Commissioner for Patents, Margaret A. Focarino, from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), during the 2nd Annual Conference of the National Academy of Inventors, on Feb. 22 in Tampa.

The NAI Charter Fellows will be recognized with a full-page announcement in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Jan. 18, 2013, in the Jan. 2013 issue of Inventors Digest, and in a future issue of Technology and Innovation – Proceedings of the National Academy of Inventors.

The academic inventors and innovators elected to the rank of NAI Charter Fellow are named inventors on U.S. patents and were nominated for outstanding contributions to innovation in areas such as patents and licensing, innovative discovery and technology, significant impact on society, and support and enhancement of innovation.

The 2012 NAI Charter Fellows are listed online at http://www.academyofinventors.org/charter-fellows.asp.

source: http://news.fiu.edu/2013/02/fius-khizroev-named-a-charter-fellow-by-national-academy-of-inventors/50582

Ranu Jung, professor and chair of FIU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been named a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

The AIMBE citation recognized Jung “for her outstanding contributions to developing novel physiology-based orthopedic devices, and for fostering academic and industrial interactions to advance neuro-engineering.”

Jung is one of 70 individuals selected to be a member of the 2013 AIMBE College of Fellows, a group that represents the top 2 percent of the most accomplished medical and biological engineers. She will be recognized at the AIMBE annual conference in Washington, D.C., Feb. 17-19.

“I am honored to be elected to the College of Fellows of AIMBE,” Jung said. “It has been a thrill to work in this exciting field of neural engineering as new technologies emerge into clinical practice, and I have been fortunate to work with great mentors, colleagues and students. I always remember that when I asked my doctoral advisor when my doctorate would be completed, he explained, ‘When you have created something beautiful.’ I always keep that thought with me, and I feel honored to be in this great community of people creating knowledge and beautiful things.”

Jung, who holds the Wallace H. Coulter Eminent Scholars Chair of Biomedical Engineering, is the director of the Adaptive Neural Systems Laboratory at FIU, where engineers and scientists are designing and developing technology to offset the effects of limb amputation, orthopedic injury and disease, and other neurodegenerative diseases. By applying a multifaceted approach, the laboratory investigates the effects of trauma and disorders of the nervous system to replace damaged or lost functionality or to repair the system using advanced adaptive devices and therapeutic techniques.

Jung is a leader in the rapidly expanding fields of neural engineering and computational neuroscience. With a two-decade record of competitive federal funding, she has been a leader in establishing academic-clinical-industrial partnerships in neural engineering and computational neuroscience research. Jung has been an entrepreneur and co-founded Advensys LLC, a small business R&D company.

Jung is the past-president of the International Organization for Computational Neurosciences Inc. She is actively engaged in the development of neurotechnology that is inspired by biology, is adaptive and could be used to promote adaptation in the nervous system to overcome neurological disability or trauma. Of special interest to her are biomimetic and biohybrid living-hardware systems for sensorimotor control, and in 2011 published an edited book, “Biohybrid Systems: Nerves, Interfaces and Machines” (Wiley-VCH).

Jung’s recent honors include the Florida Board of Governors’ New Florida Scholars Boost Award and the Florida International University 2012 Top Scholar Award. She has served on several scientific advisory and expert review panels for the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and several international institutions.

Jung’s current research program, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is focused on the development, design and delivery of novel neural interfaces to prostheses for upper limb amputees.

source: http://news.fiu.edu/2013/02/professor-ranu-jung-named-american-institute-for-medical-and-biological-engineering-fellow/52065