The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama System, is hosting the fourth annual UAH Engineering Showcase during Engineers Week 2025, Feb. 16 – 22. Founded by the National Society of Professional Engineers in 1951, E-Week is dedicated to ensuring a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing understanding of, and interest in, engineering and technology careers.
UAH hosts numerous events during the week, including a LEGO design and build competition, art night and the annual “Take a Prof to Lunch” series. The Engineering Showcase is a major highlight of E-Week, and the 2025 event is expected to be bigger than ever.
"Our 2024 Showcase event featured 235 undergraduate students representing 42 projects/teams,” says Dr. Shankar Mahalingam, dean of the College of Engineering. “In 2025, we expect to feature over 250 students, 34 senior design projects, 13 engineering student organizations and 12 undergraduate research teams.
“Our students did an outstanding job in communicating with great enthusiasm a) what their organizations have accomplished with plans for competing regionally or nationally later this year, b) where they are in their senior capstone design process and c) what were the major findings of their undergraduate research. I would like to extend a special word of appreciation to our dedicated faculty for enabling our students to achieve the very best, and to The Pei Ling Chan Charitable Trust for sponsoring this event.”
Activities this week are highlighted by the Engineering Showcase on Tuesday, Feb. 18 at the Student Services Building on the UAH campus from 5:00-7:00 p.m. Undergraduate students will be featured presenting their cutting-edge projects and research, as well as interactive demonstrations.
"We anticipate welcoming over 100 guests representing numerous area companies, governmental organizations and/or UAH alumni and inviting them to engage with our outstanding engineering students,” Mahalingam noted. “Huntsville and Madison County have an amazing culture of community support, which is an incredible benefit for our students, faculty and staff in the College of Engineering."
The efforts below present a recap of the highlights from the past year that best display how the College of Engineering and UAH research centers are working to positively impact the Huntsville community, the state of Alabama and beyond.
INNOVATION AND DISCOVERY
Vishwa Vijay Kumar, a Ph.D. student of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, was lead author of a study in the International Journal of Production Research investigating the ways social media platforms could be leveraged with artificial intelligence (AI) to provide communication connecting victims of disaster to outside aid and support. Kumar teamed with fellow UAH researchers, Dr. Avimanyu Sahoo and Dr. Sampson Gholston, to develop algorithms to parse information from 3.9 million tweets to identify imperative information using AI and machine learning relevant to pandemic supply chain disruptions.
Michael Mercier / UAH
Dr. Isaac Torres-Díaz won a $588,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to support research into magnetic nanoparticles, which can be manipulated using magnetic fields. These particles consist of a magnetic material, often iron, nickel and cobalt, combined with a chemical component, for a wide range of applications, such as sensors and nanobots, that can be inserted into the blood to execute non-invasive treatments at cellular scales or support hyperthermia therapy in the treatment of cancer.
The UAH TERMINUS Spaceflight Research Group (TSRG) student team launched its biggest payload ever into the upper atmosphere from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va. The launch was part of NASA’s RockSat Program, an initiative that aims to connect higher education students from across the U.S. with opportunities to fly their experiments into space on NASA sounding rockets. The 2024 event marked the second launch in three years for the student group, and was the smallest satellite tether release ever attempted in space. TSRG is a subset of the UAH Space Hardware Club which boasts nearly 300 members.
Dr. Nicholas Loyd in the UAH department of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (ISEEM) continued to support an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration with Mazda Toyota Manufacturing to drive workforce development, employee retention and performance. The original connection grew out of relationships established by UAH ISEEM faculty two years before the automotive assembly facility even began operations in Sept. 2021. That support has included seven projects involving various UAH research staff and faculty to offer 57 internships for 30 UAH students representing seven different majors. The partnership has also resulted in research collaborations involving ISEEM and psychology students and faculty.
Dr. George Nelson won a Department of Defense (DOD) Defense Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR) award for $600,000 to study how high-energy density lithium-ion batteries degrade over a range of temperatures. The goal is to investigate ways to meet the demands to improve the size, weight and power capabilities of these batteries. The work is particularly relevant for unmanned underwater vehicles. Nelson will be leading the three-year study in collaboration with Purdue University as part of the DEPSCoR Research Collaborations program.
Michael Mercier / UAH
Ledia Shehu, a doctoral student, received a NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant for a project seeking to develop a multiscale model for 3D-printed concrete using lunar materials by simulating lunar conditions. Using lunar materials to create printable and buildable concrete will significantly reduce costs and provide a more practical approach to building on the moon.
Dr. Avimanyu Sahoo was awarded a National Science Foundation grant totaling $299,969 to characterize the vulnerability of learning-based intelligent cyber-physical systems (CPS). CPS represents a symbiotic integration of physical systems, sensors, actuators and learning-based intelligent controllers through communication networks such as smart grids, robotic swarms and autonomous vehicles. Learning-based intelligent controllers are used to advance decision making, upgrading the capabilities of CPS, helping systems adapt to real-world environments and achieve optimal function by mimicking how human learning systems process decision-making and reward signals.
Aleksandar Milenkovic, Biswajit Ray, Umeshwarnath Surendranathan, Preeti Kumari, Md Raquibuzzaman, Gang Wang, Moonhyung Jang, Jacob Lee, Jimmie Mitchell, Yu Lei, Gabe Xu, Ryan Gott, Guangsheng Zhang and Cuong Nguyen were awarded patents in the fields of Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Chemical and Materials Engineering.
ENGINEERING STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS
For the second year in a row, UAH engineering students captured first place in the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge (HERC) competition. With the latest victory, UAH has won first place five times in the 30-year history of the event, taking top honors in 1996, 2012, 2018, 2023 and now 2024. More than 600 students with 72 teams participated, representing 42 colleges and universities, as well as 30 high schools from 24 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, as well as 13 other nations. In addition, the UAH team took the top prize in the Project Review Award category.
After winning the 2024 Human Rover Explorer Challenge (HERC), UAH rover team THESEUS student engineering members traveled to the Dominican Republic (DR) to give presentations to attendees and DR officials at the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, or INTEC University. The events detailed the UAH rover design and construction and meeting Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) requirements, as well STEM outreach and the UAH mechanical and aerospace (MAE) engineering machine shop.
The Alabama Space Grant Consortium (ASGC) announced recipients of its scholarships and fellowships for 2024-2025. Each scholarship recipient is awarded $1,500, and each fellowship winner receives $37,000. The undergraduate scholars included Abigail Rose Bilyeu, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Adam Michael Burden, Industrial and Systems Engineering, Gabriel David Campos, Aerospace Engineering, and Joseph Carter Thaggard, Aerospace Engineering. The ASGC Graduate Fellows from the College of Engineering included: Benjamin Alexander Campbell, Aerospace Systems Engineering, and Casey Elizabeth Eaton, Systems Engineering.
Michael Mercier / UAH
UAH engineering students designed and built a canoe voted “most innovative” in the 37th annual American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Concrete Canoe Competition. The final phase of the event was staged as part of the 2024 ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. To advance to the finals, the UAH team placed first last March over 13 universities in the ASCE Gulf Coast Student Symposium held in New Orleans.
Three UAH Space Hardware Club (SHC) teams placed first, third and fourth nationally in the 2024 International CanSat competition. UAH student teams Shockwave, Snapdragon and Moonracer placed first, third and fourth nationally, while also notching second, seventh and 10th, respectively, in the final international rankings. Among the 27 team members, 85% were first-year freshmen. The competition was held over four days in Staunton, Va. The annual event is open to teams from universities and colleges and is organized by the American Astronautical Society.
UAH student team ASTRA placed eight internationally in the 2024 University Rover Challenge (URC) in Moab, Utah. A total of 102 teams began the year competing for an invitation to the URC finals, with a record 38 teams from 10 countries advancing to the last stage of the competition, held in one of the most extreme and Mars-like environments on Earth. The team, a subset of the UAH Space Hardware Club, also placed fifth among all U.S. teams. The URC is administered by the Mars Society from the Mars Desert Research Station in Hanksville, Utah, each year.
Alumna Shela Joyce and student Rachel Carter Snoddy were recognized by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) with Distinguished New Engineer Awards. Joyce graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 2020; she is a quality assurance and control manager at IPEX. Snoddy, a software engineer at Boeing, is pursuing an MBA at UAH. The Distinguished New Engineer Award recognizes SWE members who have been professional SWE members for less than 10 years and who have demonstrated professional excellence in engineering, engineering management, engineering education, engineering technology or science related to engineering.
UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE ACCOLADES
UAH research undergraduates participated in the 10th Annual Research Horizons Poster Session last March, including students representing projects by Cameron Bentley, Ryan O'Neill, Sean Hunter and Ian Rowatt whose projects in Industrial and Systems Engineering and Engineering Management and Aerospace Engineering placed first and third overall.
Michael Mercier / UAH
Ruby Sharrard and Olivia Allen, two aerospace engineering seniors, were selected to present their propulsion research at the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics fall forum in Alexandria, Va. The national event offers a platform for students nationwide to present their work to prominent government, industry and academia representatives. Both undergraduates are research aides with the UAH Propulsion Research Center. Sharrard researched how injector orifice geometries affect variable coefficients, while Allen worked at the PRC studying regression rate augmentation of propellants in solid fuel ramjets.
Undergraduates Claude Blue, Noa Milivojevic, Dmitri Tsahelnik and Ella Hazle, members of the UAH Electric Propulsion Club (EPC), traveled to Milan, Italy, to present STARGATE, an experimental gridded ion thruster developed by the group, at the 75th International Astronautical Congress. Electric propulsion systems offer a wide range of capabilities for the application of small satellite propulsion systems in low Earth and geostationary orbits. The event boasted over 11,000 attendees representing over 120 countries, and the group’s technology is in the process of being patented with the UAH Office of Technology Commercialization.
Thomas Teper, a 2024 graduate in aerospace engineering, spent much of the year in Germany as a recipient of a Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals (CBYX) internship. This exchange program is funded by the U.S. Department of State and the German Bundestag. Each year, 75 American and 75 German young professionals participate in the cultural immersion program. One of his favorite research projects at UAH was the Charger Rocket Works Team, where his senior design group competed in the Student Launch Initiative for NASA.
Ian Wagner, a doctoral candidate of mechanical and aerospace engineering, received the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) award. The honor resulted from Wagner’s research project to study plasma-jet driven magneto-inertial fusion, to be conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The project seeks to advance plasma-jet magneto inertial fusion, or PJMIF, a key component to achieving breakeven fusion, which could one day lead to abundant clean energy.
Casey Eaton, a UAH alumna, won the Dr. Barry Boehm Award for Doctoral Student Research Excellence in Washington D.C. from the Systems Engineering Research Center. Her work focused on applying technical measures to the development of a NASA Human Landing System (HLS), such as those proposed by the Space X Starship, Blue Origin Blue Moon and Dynetics Autonomous Logistics Platform for All-Moon Cargo Access (ALPACA) lander projects. Eaton is a Ph.D. student of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (ISEEM).
SERVICE AND OUTREACH
Senior engineering design students Elijah Gay, Riley Carroll, Garrett Conner, Chad Lowe and Ethan Thoenes worked with the UAH Systems Management and Production (SMAP) Center to create projects intended to encourage STEM outreach, as well as advancing tracking technology aimed to enhance the traceability of assets, such as autonomous rovers and satellites. Projects by the group this past year included crafting Doppler radar guns simple enough to be produced by middle and high school students, along with demonstrating a novel way to track an object using a special signal that doesn’t require computers.
Students from the UAH Rotorcraft Systems Engineering and Simulation Center and the College of Engineering demonstrated what their aircraft can do on Drone Fly Day as part of an outreach program aimed at recruiting engineering students called PILOT, or Performance and Integration in the Logistical Operation of uncrewed Transport. The project is a new collaboration between Sparkman and UAH and was attended by approximately 1,500 students from Sparkman High and Sparkman and Monrovia middle schools.
Dr. Matt Turner, Hannah Edmonson, Myles Scarano and Abigail Williamson, a team of research engineers from the UAH Research Institute, travelled to Guam to support a Missile Defense Agency (MDA) STEM outreach initiative called “Operation STEM - Guam 2024.” UAH partnered with MDA, the armed forces and the Guam Department of Education to participate in almost two weeks of science, technology, engineering and math activities, providing hands-on demonstrations for over 2,500 K-12 students.
CELEBRATING MILESTONES AND ACHIEVEMENT
The Rotorcraft Systems Engineering & Simulation Center celebrated ‘Milestone 500,’ an event recognizing the 500-plus students who have graduated from a partnership program with Boeing. For the past 14 years, UAH and the Boeing Huntsville Design Center have provided opportunities for students to gain experience in real-world engineering at one of the world’s largest aerospace companies through a program called the uSource Product Definition Team.
With the number of electric vehicles in the U.S. projected to soar to 26.4 million by 2030, Dr. Avimanyu Sahoo, an expert in intelligent control systems, was awarded a National Science Foundation Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Fellowship totaling $279,105 to develop control methods that will improve the function of lithium-ion batteries by advancing their onboard electronic battery management systems. The ultimate goal is to create a more reliable and efficient battery, while minimizing the risk of overheating and addressing “range anxiety” drivers might experience due to long distances between charging stations.
ALUMNI CAREER ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Patricia “Patti” Martin, a UAH alumna, was selected to the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame. Martin graduated from The University of Alabama in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. In 1998, she earned a master’s degree in industrial and systems engineering from UAH. Martin is known for her leadership and expertise in the fields of systems and specialty engineering, as well as rapid response prototyping, and has spent her career serving the United States whether as a civilian engineer in the U.S. Army or in private industry supporting defense and aerospace missions.
Andrew Couch, a UAH alumnus, received the 2024 Knight-Hennessy Scholars fellowship award at Stanford University, one of 90 scholars selected from 8,272 applicants for the seventh Knight-Hennessy Scholars cohort. While at UAH, Couch conducted engineering research in simulation, optimization and engineering design.
Steven Norwood, a graduate of the UAH College of Engineering and the Chemical Engineering department, won the 2024 Alumni of Achievement Award for the College. Norwood is the plant manager for Indorama Ventures Xylenes & PTA, a chemical manufacturing company in Decatur, Ala.