Engineering Commons^™

Engineers, Development, And Engineering Education: From National To Sustainable Community Development, J. Lucena, J. Schneider

Jen Schneider

In October 2007, Norman Borlaug wrote in Science magazine that ‘more than 200 science journals throughout the world will simultaneously publish papers on global poverty and human development – a collaborative effort to increase awareness, interest, and research about these important issues of our time’. Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and father of the green revolution, was demonstrating that the scientific community is at last taking questions seriously of sustainability and development. Borlaug's own contentious role in the history of ‘development,’ however, points to the complexity of the term and the contested role scientists and engineers have played in that …

Where Is ‘Community’?: Engineering Education And Sustainable Community Development, J. Schneider, J. A. Leydens, J. Lucena

Jen Schneider

Sustainable development initiatives are proliferating in the US and Europe as engineering educators seek to provide students with knowledge and skills to design technologies that are environmentally sustainable. Many such initiatives involve students from the ‘North,’ or ‘developed’ world building projects for villages or communities in the ‘South.’ Sustainable development projects in engineering education are being lauded for meeting multiple educational outcomes and providing students with important international training. This paper argues that such programmes need to educate students to think critically about their role as development professionals, to understand and value the role of community in development projects, and …

Microfluidic Devices For Terahertz Spectroscopy Of Biomolecules, P. A. George, W. Hui, F. Rana, Benjamin G. Hawkins, A. E. Smith, B. J. Kirby

Faculty Publications

We demonstrate microfluidic devices for terahertz spectroscopy of biomolecules in aqueous solutions. The devices are fabricated out of a plastic material that is both mechanically rigid and optically transparent with near-zero dispersion in the terahertz frequency range. Using a low-power terahertz time-domain spectrometer, we experimentally measure the absorption spectra of the vibrational modes of bovine serum albumin from 0.5–2.5 THz and find good agreement with previously reported data obtained using large-volume solutions and a high-power free-electron laser. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of performing high sensitivity terahertz spectroscopy of biomolecules in aqueous solutions with detectable molecular quantities as small as …

Microfluidic Devices For Terahertz Spectroscopy Of Biomolecules, P. A. George, W. Hui, F. Rana, Benjamin G. Hawkins, A. E. Smith, B. J. Kirby

Benjamin G. Hawkins

We demonstrate microfluidic devices for terahertz spectroscopy of biomolecules in aqueous solutions. The devices are fabricated out of a plastic material that is both mechanically rigid and optically transparent with near-zero dispersion in the terahertz frequency range. Using a low-power terahertz time-domain spectrometer, we experimentally measure the absorption spectra of the vibrational modes of bovine serum albumin from 0.5–2.5 THz and find good agreement with previously reported data obtained using large-volume solutions and a high-power free-electron laser. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of performing high sensitivity terahertz spectroscopy of biomolecules in aqueous solutions with detectable molecular quantities as small as …

Organosulfonic Acid Functionalised Silica Mesostructured Cellular Foams - Efficient Acidic Catalysts For Reactions Of Esterification, J. Mrowiec-Bialon, K. Maresz, Janusz J. Malinowski, Andrzej B. Jarzębski

Janusz J. Malinowski