March 2022 Statler Circuit: Department Digest and Awards

The Statler Circuit is a monthly digest of news from Statler College departments and organizations that showcases the continued successes and accomplishments of our faculty, staff and students.

CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

Kakan Dey, assistant professor in the Wadsworth Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been appointed to the Transportation Research Board Standing Committee on Vehicle-Highway Automation (ACP30) as one of the main committee members. The ACP30 Committee provides leadership in the research and policy development for emerging autonomous vehicle technology. The Transportation Research Board is one of seven program units of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which provides independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation and conducts other activities to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions. In this new role, Dey will collaborate with national and international leaders in the autonomous vehicle domain.

MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

Robert Tempke, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has recently had a manuscript, “Autonomous design of new chemical reactions using a variational autoencoder,” published in Communication Chemistry, a part of Nature publishing group. Tempke developed an artificial intelligence model based on a variational autoencoder to synthetically generate continuous datasets of chemical reactions, avoiding bias by sampling the solution space. This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy ORISE Fellowship Program, and the utilization of the HPC system Thorny Flat at West Virginia University, which was constructed by a NSF Major Research Instrumentation award.

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