NAE Members please authenticate using your NAE member credentials. If you wish to change your credentials, please go to the NAE website and reset your username and password.
Thu, March 15, 2018
Two Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Grants of $30,000 each have been awarded to attendees of the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) 2017 US Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) Symposium.
Katherine Davis (Texas A&M University) and Marcus Holzinger (Georgia Institute of Technology) have received a Grainger Grant to develop an “online resilience support system for cyber-physical situational awareness.” The grant will support the team’s fusing of expertise and methods from power system and aerospace applications. The goal is to come up with improved technological solutions for assessing environmental elements, understanding their meaning, and predicting their future status, then identifying and taking actions to improve security and resilience. This is critical to seamless decision-making within systems that integrate computational algorithms with physical components. Davis and Holzinger will investigate use of a hypothesis driven decision-making process (often used in space situational awareness) within the cyber-physical situational awareness framework of power transmission systems.
The second Grainger Grant has been awarded to Mariana Bertoni (Arizona State University) and Jenny Sabin (Cornell University and Sabin Lab) for a project entitled “Sustainable Architecture and Aesthetics: Emergent Design for High Performance Solar Panels.” Through their combined expertise, Bertoni and Sabin plan to innovate the design and engineering of building integrated photovoltaic cells used in the generation of solar power. They will work on advancements in computation and 3D printing in order to create highly-customized filters and panel assemblies that enhance both performance of light absorption for energy generation and architectural beauty. The work is partly aimed at exciting the general public about the importance of using sustainable building practices in homes, offices, and public domains.
“Whenever we hold a Frontiers of Engineering program, the interactions of talented minds of the engineers spark original ideas” said NAE President C. D. Mote, Jr. “These are two beautiful examples of how this works. Talents come together and spark innovations to advance our society that they would not come up with individually. This demonstrates why programs like this are so important.”
Frontiers of Engineering is an NAE program that brings together outstanding early-career engineers from industry, academia, and government to discuss pioneering technical work and leading-edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors. The goal is to facilitate interactions and exchange of techniques and approaches across fields and facilitate networking among the next generation of engineering leaders. The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Grants provide seed funding for US FOE participants who are at US-based institutions to enable further pursuit of important new interdisciplinary research and projects stimulated by the US FOE symposia.
The Grainger Foundation, an independent, private foundation based in Lake Forest, Illinois, was established in 1949 by William W. Grainger, founder of W.W. Grainger Inc.
Founded in 1964, the US National Academy of Engineering is a private, independent, nonprofit institution that provides engineering leadership in service to the nation. Its mission is to advance the well-being of the nation by promoting a vibrant engineering profession and by marshalling the expertise and insights of eminent engineers to provide independent advice to the federal government on matters involving engineering and technology.