Kettering University News

Co-op: the perfect stimulus plan

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The difference is palatable: during the Great Depression, there were no safeguards in place to insure the viability of the stock exchange and banking system, which led to an inevitable crash. Additionally, the current recession is significantly worse than those of the 1970s and 1980s based on the number of job losses the country has experienced since 2007. More importantly, companies continue to outsource labor to organizations overseas and in many cases, these international firms obtain research and development functions as well. As a result, U.S. based companies have scaled back R & D, which is a significant driver of economic development.

Today, it’s imperative that companies take a strategic approach to staffing, focusing on specific talents and experiences to move organizations forward in this challenging global economy. That’s why cooperative education can offer economic advantages as a personalized stimulus plan for almost any company.

Co-Op: A Lifeline to Recovery
Today, more than 80 of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 employ co-op students. This type of opportunity allows organizations to “test run” young people with new, creative ideas who can transition from college to career with limited development costs associated with training new employees. These students have worked with the company’s state-of-the-art technology as part of their academic program and have learned the skills necessary to navigate the muddy waters of the corporate infrastructure, particularly during lean economic periods. Kettering University (www.kettering.edu) students, for instance, earn more than two years of professional engineering and management experience at companies and organizations such as the FBI, CIA, NASA, Sandia National Laboratories, IBM, GM, Ford and Harley Davidson before their senior years and often receive job offers before they graduate.

“We use our co-op brand to set ourselves apart from other top-ranked schools. Especially in this economy, we take advantage of co-branding Kettering with 600 corporate partners,” explained Barb Sosin, Kettering’s director of Admissions. Currently, Kettering students earn $40,000 to $65,000 over the course of their co-op program, which prompted the University to dub its current marketing campaign, “Co-op is my stimulus package.”

For industry executives like Chris Nielsen ’87, vice president of Purchasing for Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America and a Kettering Board of Trustee, co-op offers important advantages for both companies and students. “Co-op provides students the opportunity to practice the application of theory while building their academic foundation. This simultaneous learning gives them the inspiration to further strengthen academic foundations to tackle the complex challenges they know they will ultimately face,” he said.

Nielsen attributes his current success to the exposure he received to different aspects of engineering in his co-op assignments, which ranged from design to manufacturing. “I was able to find my passion for ‘making things,’” he said, adding that finding his passion “was a key element of my success.”

What make Co-op Students and Grads Different?
Kettering 2006 grad Sam Perlmutter certainly knows the answer. Perlmutter of Pittsburg, Penn., is a Neuroscience Ph.D. candidate in the Dept. of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, where he conducts research on the neurophysiology of trunk impairment in post-stroke individuals.

Much of his work involves in-depth application of engineering principles. A year ago, he approached Kettering about developing a small co-op program for undergraduate research at Northwestern and now has two Kettering students engaged in his department’s work.

One student—Junior Briana Reprogle of Noblesville, Ind., who majors in Applied Physics and Mechanical Engineering at Kettering University—is developing algorithms to analyze kinetics and kinematics of children riding tricycles to gain an understanding into how kids develop the skills necessary to properly stabilize and pedal efficiently. “This will help provide insight into enhancements for the trike that can help assimilate this learning process,” Perlmutter said.

Under the supervision of Perlmutter’s advisor, Mohsen Makhsous, Ph.D., Reprogle is also involved in a study that simulates pressure ulcers on both normal and spinal cord injury animal models.

“Since pressure ulcers are one of the main causes of death in people who suffer a spinal cord injury, our main objective is to prevent the occurrence of pressure ulcers both internally and externally. Briana is working on a study that uses an ultrasound probe and force sensor to help clinicians predict the occurrence of ulcers before they evolve to the skin surface. Once you see them on the skin, it’s too late,” Perlmutter said.

Kettering Junior Mike Bajema, an Electrical Engineering major from Zeeland, Mich., fabricates and designs electromechanical components for all of the department labs and continues working extensively with Perlmutter and other researchers.

“This term Mike is observing experiments in a lab related to movement generation in individuals with Parkinson’s disease,” Perlmutter said. “The research involves impairments in the basal ganglia and requires a good understanding of neuronal biophysics for calculating conduction times of the nervous system as well as extremely advanced signal processing, which is the backbone of Electrical Engineering,” he added.

Overall, Perlmutter is very pleased with Reprogle’s and Bajema’s work. “When we established our co-op program, we knew that the students who would join us must be the very brightest we could find and have a passion for this sort of work. They are very competent and dedicated, and have shown much more than we expected. When you have that kind of passion and dedication, it doesn’t feel like work,” he said.

Bajema and Reprogle agree.
“It’s been just a great experience,” Bajema said, adding that he’s engaged in “a lot of projects and now I’m considering graduate studies because of this experience.”

“I always had a feeling that I wanted to study for my Ph.D. one day and now I’m even more interested in the biomedical field because of this co-op,” Reprogle said. “The diversity of projects is huge and the experience I’ve received in experimental design is excellent,” she added.

To learn more about how cooperative education can be your company’s stimulus package, visit http://www.co-op.edu/.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to The Guide to the Best Co-Op Colleges and Employers by the National Commission for Cooperative Education, 2009-2010, where this article first appeared.

Written by Gary J. Erwin
810.762.9538
gerwin@kettering.edu

New "green" acrylics

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Kettering University was the site of a new product introduction when BASF North American premiers its new ‘Green’ Automotive Material Technology Nov. 18.

Approximately 60 individuals representing automotive industries and educational institutions, including Toyota, Magna, General Motors, Johnson Controls, A.Schulman Faurecia, Tesla Motors, International Automotive Components, the MSU Composite Vehicle Center and Kettering University,were in attendance.

Kettering was selected for the new product introduction based on long-standing relationships within the industry with Kettering Chemistry Professor Reg Bell.

BASF introduced the eco-friendly Acrodur®: Acrylic thermosets, which opens new avenues to innovative composite materials. The Acrodur® presentation will discuss a new enabling technology platform engineered toward Cross-Linked Acrylic Thermosets, featuring:

* non-flammable zero-emission systems that contain no volatile or hazardous components at any stage of their life cycle;

* easy to use in molding processes and ideally suited for today’s ‘greener’ light-weight automotive composites; and

* potential for natural fiber, as well as other fiber composites in automotive applications.

Dr. Gero Nordmann, market development manager for BASF, and Dr. Donald Rosato, president of PlastiSource, Inc., said they were pleased to come to Flint to introduce eco-friendly Acrodur®. Acrylic thermosets are thermally cross-linkable and free of formaldehyde and other emissions, and offer new routes to innovative composite materials.

An example of a suitable application for acrylic resin dispersions is the binding of natural fibers such as wood, flax, hemp or sisal. Typically, the application is used in the production of shaped panels for automobile interiors. Now, raw materials can be resinated in different ways. It will provide a great variety of other natural and man-made fibers of the nonwoven industry or even granulated materials, which can be bonded with the new binder system.

Written by Patricia Mroczek
810-762-9533
pmroczek@kettering.edu

Mathletes wanted

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

One of Michigan’s best math students will win a full-tuition, four-and-a-half-year scholarship to the nationally ranked engineering, mathematics, science and business university in Flint during the Kettering University Mathematics Olympiad Saturday, Nov. 21. Other prizes, including a $1,000 gift certificate from Best Buy, will also be awarded during the event at Kettering.

Dr. Joe Salacuse, professor of Mathematics, said Kettering’s Mathematics Olympiad is a competition designed to identify and encourage students with interests and abilities in mathematics. “This will be the ninth Olympiad at Kettering,” he said.

“Our goal is to develop the Olympiad into one of the most prestigious mathematical competitions in the region. The examination is designed for students in grades 9 through 12. However, any student working toward a high school degree who is currently enrolled in a public school, private school or a home-school program can sit for the examination.”

The competition consists of four to six challenging problems that are selected by Dr. Ada Cheng, Dr. Daniela Szatmari-Voicu, Dr. Ruben Hayrapetyan and Dr. Salacuse, and has a time limit of four hours.

The problems range from "mind-benders" that require little mathematical skills to problems that require the knowledge of geometry, trigonometry and beginning calculus. No calculators are permitted for this competition.

The top seven contestants of the Olympiad will win gift certificates from Best Buy. In addition, the top two will win academic scholarships to Kettering University. The scholarships will be awarded to the first and second place competitors upon admission to Kettering University. Scholarships recipients are not eligible for any other scholarships awarded by Kettering University

For details, including a schedule of events and past examinations with solutions, visit the Olympiad website at http://paws.kettering.edu/~acheng/Olympiad/olympiad.html.

Written by Patricia Mroczek
810.762.9533
pmroczek@kettering.edu

The ingredients of leadership

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The landscape of corporate leadership in U.S. industry is littered with the corpses of companies dismantled and dissected by greed, ego and, well, just plain stupidity. The names of Enron and Tyco have now broached the realm of cliché—the mere mention of these former industry giants suggests all that is wrong with corporate America and the individuals entrusted to lead these hulking ships safely from port to port.

But hidden in the haziness of unethical leadership exists a few individuals who have guided their organizations to unprecedented growth and opportunity while maintaining a high moral balance between life and work. Dr. David Strubler and Dr. Andy Borchers of Kettering University’s Business Dept., along with colleague Dr. Ben Redekop of Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA, highlight several organizational leaders in a series of interviews, one of which recently appeared in the highly regarded “Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship” (http://www.huizenga.nova.edu/jame/).

Specifically, their first article, titled “From Corporate to Entrepreneurial Executive: A Conversation with Dave Emmett,” focuses on Kettering/GMI alumnus Dave Emmett, who graduated from the institution in 1967. As a cooperative education student, Emmet began working at General Motors (GM) in 1961 and after graduation rose through the ranks to become plant manager in the Hydramatic Division.

But as the authors note, Emmett made a dramatic career change at the age of 39 and became an entrepreneur. Emmett established several enterprises, one of which is Superior Controls, a $20 million a year global provider of industrial automation and control solutions, factory information, asset management and conveyance systems, as well as specialized capital equipment (http://www.superiorcontrols.net/about.html). Additionally, Emmett created RJ Helicopters and Plymouth Orchards and Cider Mill. These organizations, which are all based in Michigan, represent what Strubler termed Emmett’s “diverse interests.”

What struck Strubler, Borchers and Redekop about Emmett’s successful leadership of his companies is the way Emmett integrated a contingency approach to leading business teams with a high degree of principled ethics. Emmett believed whole heartedly in the power of teamwork and in the idea that one can inspire people to become caring individuals by modeling the proper behavior.

“He really had the guts to go out and take some significant risks, but in doing this, he wanted to engage employees in an ethical manner and motivate them properly,” Strubler said. “He always had an entrepreneurial sort of spirit and exceptional focus on the importance of teamwork,” he added.

According to a transcript of this interview, Emmett believed that a quality leader is “a person who stimulates others to follow—but a successful leader is a person who does a few more things than that. He obviously creates a clear and inspiring vision of the future. His skill at crystallizing that vision and adapting it so that the people he is working with understand clearly and get excited by and inspired by (it)—that vision is the asset of a great leader.”

Perhaps one of Emmett’s most lasting interests was his work with the nonprofit organization Children International (http://www.children.org/), an organization that strives to help children around the world overcome the burdens of poverty to become healthy, educated, self-sustaining and contributing members of society. Borchers noted that Emmett’s desire to help this organization is yet another demonstration of his “commitment to serving humanity through philanthropic efforts. It clearly shows another important dimension to his life. Dave shows that one can ‘do well’ and ‘do good’ at the same time."

Strubler said that this series of interviews is in part a response to the increasing number of problems developing in leadership among U.S. companies for the past several years. He and his colleagues wanted to engage in research that examines the issue of unethical leadership and try to identify those traits of ethical leadership that lead to corporate and professional success. By doing this, they hope to help their students understand the importance of their actions in the corporate environment.

“Between Andy Borchers, Ben Redekop and myself, we’ve interviewed about six leaders,” he said. “Dave Emmett was an original. He was a visionary who truly cared for people and children, and had a strong desire to help them succeed,” he added.

Unfortunately, Emmett lost a battle to cancer a few years ago, but his legacy of ethical leadership continues today. By staying focused on the importance of developing employees and teamwork through an ethical approach that places a high value on all staff members, Superior Controls achieved productivity gains of more than 250 percent. As a result, the company continues to be successful.

To learn more about this series of leadership interviews, contact Dr. David Strubler at (810) 762-7479, or via email at dstruble@kettering.edu

Written by Gary Erwin
810.762.9538
gerwin@kettering.edu

The longest mission

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

When Bruce L. Lowe joined the Air Force during World War II, he didn't know the interruption to his education at then GMI, now Kettering University, would be a 10-month hiatus in a prisoner of war camp. Here is his story, one of several on alumni WWII veterans published this year.

June 26, 1944—The training was complete. Everything they’d learned was now essential to survival in the bombing campaign against Germany. But this was their first mission, one that Bruce L. Lowe ‘48 of Flint had never anticipating lasting almost a year.

Lowe—a B-24 co-pilot assigned to the Fifteenth Air Force Division, 459th Bomb Group based in Cerginola, Italy—took off with his crew on his first mission that June 26 with 36 other bombers to attack the oil refineries in Vienna that supplied Hitler’s army. But as soon as the bomber became air born, one engine started acting up. Shortly thereafter, a second engine on the left wing developed a run-away prop, which meant the pilot and Lowe had to shut it down and feather both props.

Unfortunately, they were unable to maintain flight and received orders from their base to abandon the bomber. Twenty minutes before reaching the target, the crew bailed out over enemy territory at more than 16,000 feet at 9:30 am. Lowe landed in a field in western Hungary and no one was within the vicinity. Around the time that he landed, a dog fight between an American P-38 and German ME-109 took place. The ME was shot down, which distracted the local towns people from searching for Lowe and his crew.

“I ducked and could envision the horrible sight of one of the .50 caliber shells hitting me,” Lowe said. “About 100 yards from me, the ME’s nose was buried in the ground, which was a lucky break because I was able to hide out in the wheat field,” he added.

Lowe would learn later that of the 36 bombers that approached the target that day, 10 were lost.

During that first night, he hid and tried to determine his next move. But the next morning the townsmen were up early searching for his crew and they caught Lowe at 6:30 am. After taking him to a small town and feeding him coffee and bread, they handcuffed the tall American and marched him to the Hungarian Army Headquarters in another town.

After a month in a Budapest jail, he was placed on a train with other prisoners and transported to Stalag Luft III 100 miles southeast of Berlin in Sagan, Germany. There were more than 10,000 officers in the camp and four months earlier, 76 POWs attempted a massive escape through a 287-foot tunnel they dug out over a seven-month period. This became the subject of the movie The Great Escape; Hitler was enraged at this mass escape attempt that when the German Army captured 50 of these prisoners, he immediately ordered their execution.

Lowe’s time in Stalag Luft III comprised working to eat, staying warm and planning for evacuation. He also kept a chronology of important dates and events written on wrapper papers from the inside of Lucky Strike cigarette packages. To protect his chronology, Lowe fashioned an outer cover from a flattened Spam can.

Like other prisoners, life in camp was difficult for Lowe, but he found ways to survive. He ate off Spam cans that had been cleaned out and flattened as plates. He and other prisoners used powdered milk cans to dig out tree stumps, which they used for fire kindling. And upon his first day of arrival in camp, officers told him to be ready to leave immediately on foot, since Hitler often used the prisoners as pawns to prevent the Allies from certain attacks when prisoners were in transit.

In January of 1945 as the Russians advanced toward Sagan, the German Army feared that the highly trained airmen would be freed and thus forced the 10,000 prisoners in Stalag Luft III to march some 62 miles in five days to Spremberg. The prisoners were then put aboard a train and transferred to Stalag Luft XIII in Moosburg in mid April, 1945, which was just outside of Nuremberg

Life at this camp was even worse: the food was inedible and more than 30,000 POWs crowded the grounds. Outside the prison fence, bombs dropped from Allie planes. Eventually, the prisoners were forced to march again to another prison—Stalag Luft VII-A, some 100 miles from Nuremburg, a small camp designed to house only 10,000 prisoners.

But when Lowe and his group arrived, the prison swelled to more than 130,000 prisoners from all over the world, most of which slept on the ground or in make-shift tents. Soon, word spread that liberation was approaching—Patton’s troops were on their way to Munich, which was close to the camp.

The morning of April 29, 1945, the German Army continued to fight in an attempt to defend Moosburg against Patton’s approaching troops. Bullets whizzed through the camp and the prisoners hugged the ground. Suddenly, the camp grew quiet. The German soldiers disappeared. Minutes later General Patton came through the camp gates in a jeep and his 14th Armored Division liberated the prisoners.

Within a month, Lowe was home in Flint, greeted at the train station by his mother and fiancée, Betty Jane. His first and only mission during WWII lasted 10 months.

“I was SO happy to be home,” Lowe said.

Bruce and Betty Jane married. He returned to GMI and graduated in 1948, then went on to a successful GM career at Buick, retiring in 1980. Today, he and Betty Jane are 86. They have three married children and live in Jacksonville, Fla., near their grandchildren.

Written by Gary J. Erwin
810.762.9538
gerwin@kettering.edu

Grateful acknowledgement is made to Peggy L. Shippen, daughter of Bruce Lowe, and to Bruce Lowe for material provided for this story.

McCartin to receive Chauvenet

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

A self-proclaimed man-e-ac for the mathematical constant e, Dr. Brian McCartin, professor of Applied Mathematics at Kettering University, is living the dream of many a mathematician – he has been slated to receive the prestigious 2010 Chauvenet Prize for Mathematical Expository Writing, given by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).

“This is the sort of thing one dreams about but does not dare confess to dreaming about,” said McCartin of the award, which he described as the mathematical equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize, for those unfamiliar with the heady world of advanced mathematics.

“Even my best friends can’t believe I’m on the list (of Chauvenet winners),” he said of the honor. “I was thunderstruck when I was notified I had received this award.”

He was chosen as the 2010 recipient of the Chauvenet Prize for his article “e: The Master of All” published in the Mathematical Intelligencer Spring 2006 edition, a publication of Springer Science and Business Media, Inc.

e is a mathematical constant that “burst into existence in the early 17^th Century in the context of commercial transactions involving compound interest,” according to McCartin’s article. “For people proficient at math, e is the king,” said McCartin, describing the gist of his article as an in-depth explanation of how e “beats the crap out of Π!”

e = 2.718281828459045 . . . was first discovered as the solution to the problem: How much is $1 worth if it is invested for 10 years at 10% interest? Since its discovery, it has been used in a variety of applications that include the scheduling of radiation therapy treatments, the definition of equiangular spirals like the one used to begin the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz movie, and computing the probability of the “drunken secretary problem.” The latter involves a scenario in which, after a few too many spiked eggnogs at the company Christmas party, a tipsy secretary is confronted with n different letters and corresponding envelopes. The probability that she will produce a “derangement whereby no letter is placed in the correct envelope” can be calculated with e, according to McCartin.

After many years of reading what he calls “outstanding mathematical exposition,” McCartin said the idea for “e: The Master of All” came to him after reading Eli Maor’s 1994 book “e: The Story of a Number.” “Long a man-e-ac, I devoured this book but found that many of my favorite triv-e-a were missing!” he joked.

He began systematically collecting these miscellan-e-a, sending the completed manuscript to the Mathematical Intelligencer in 2005. After publication in the Intelligencer, the article was translated into Mandarin by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007 for use in math education in China and is required reading for math teachers there.

To qualify for the Chauvenet Prize, an expository article must have been published for at least two years. The prize consists of a $1,000 monetary award and a certificate, and is normally awarded at the Annual Meeting of the Association, which this year will be held in San Francisco in January. Due to health restrictions that prevent him from travelling, McCartin will receive the Prize at the Regional meeting of the MAA in Ypsilanti, Mich.

First awarded in 1925, the Prize is named for William Chauvenet, a professor of mathematics at the United States Naval Academy. It was established through a gift in 1925 from J.L. Coolidge, then MAA president. Winners of the Chauvenet Prize are among the most distinguished of mathematical expositors.

McCartin has earned degrees in both Applied Mathematics from the University of Rhode Island and Music Theory from the Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford. He holds a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He was a senior research mathematician for United Technologies Research Center and chair of Computer Science at RPI/Hartford before joining Kettering University.

No stranger to professional recognition, McCartin received Kettering’s Outstanding Researcher Award in 2000, and the Outstanding Teaching award in 2001 and again in 2006. The Michigan Section of the MAA recognized him with their Award for Distinguished University Teaching in 2004, and in 2008 he was Plenary Lecturer at the First American Conference on Applied Mathematics held at Harvard University.

McCartin serves on the Editorial Board of the international journal Applied Mathematical Sciences and is a Fellow of the Electromagnetics Academy. He published his first book “Rayleigh-Schrödinger Perturbation Theory: Pseudoinverse Approach” (Hikari Ltd.) in 2009.

Interesting triv-e-a about McCartin: He is a devoted Yankees fan, and his wife, Barbara McCartin, creates all the line illustrations for his writings. For exponentially more triv-e-a about him, visit his web page at www.kettering.edu/~bmccarti

Written by Dawn Hibbard

810.762.9865

dhibbard@kettering.edu