CEE Facilities, Staff, Postdocs - 2018

Simran Rastogi ’18 and Equipment Technician Tim Brock, in the CEE Shop.CEE Machine Shop: Making a Difference

Our students, faculty, and staff benefit greatly through your involvement and support. We have a current initiative to build an endowment fund to support the CEE Shop operations.

From the time CEE moved into Hollister in 1959, the school has had a machine shop. Through the years, our faculty and students have been trained by top skilled professionals. A few that you might remember are David Francis “Red” Powers, Paul Jones, Ed Phalan, John Yost, Glenn Darling, Lee Virtue and currently, Tim Brock, Paul Charles and John “Jack” Powers.

The shop continues to serve as a cornerstone for CEE lab courses, student projects and faculty research. It is heavily utilized to support student research and our valued student project teams, such as ASCE Steel Bridge and Concrete Canoe, AguaClara, Engineers for a Sustainable World, and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Seismic Design.

This fund will be used to cover annual expendables, repairs and upgrades of equipment. There is a need to purchase a variety of modern equipment, including 3D printers, laser cutters, and a computer numerical control milling machine. Modernizing the Shop will dramatically increase the capability and functionality of building and testing of apparatus in our undergraduate lab courses.   

You may recall your exciting days training and experimenting with tools in the shop. Remember the fun you had with the drill presses, lathes, drills, wielding equipment, table saw and band saw? Your support of this endowment will insure current and future students have the same learning experience and enjoyment.

To make a contribution, go to the bottom of the CEE homepage at cee.cornell.edu and click on the button “Support CEE.” Feel free to contact Tony Simione at ams637@cornell.edu with any questions. Thank you in advance for considering giving a gift.

Staff & Postdoc News

Paul Charles

Each year, the Cornell Engineering Alumni Association presents recognition awards to students, faculty, staff and researchers for various accomplishments. At their annual dinner held in April 2017, Paul Charles was recipient of The Cornell Society of Engineers Achievement Award, recognizing his mentoring of students on their team and research design projects. Charles is CEE’s technician/facilities coordinator for Hollister Hall; he has been with the school for 16 years. As Charles works with the students, he is able to take their vision, share his technical knowledge and create an instructive atmosphere to enhance their education and build their ultimate design. “I enjoy working with the students in the shop and providing them with guidance on their designs to come up with the best, most efficient layout possible for what they are trying to make,” said Charles. “It is a very gratifying work experience.”

Julianne Quinn

Juilanne Quinn ’17, a postdoctoral associate in Professor Patrick Reed’s group, has been named the first place recipient of the Universities Council on Water Resources (UCOWR) 2018 Ph.D. Dissertation Award in the category of Natural Science and Engineering. Each year, UCOWR recognizes two outstanding Ph.D. dissertations on water issues, one in Water Policy and SocioEconomics, and the other in Natural Science and Engineering. Quinn’s research focuses on better characterizing risks in water resources systems to inform the design of robust multi-objective control policies.