News In Engineering

Many Hands

It’s expertise 100 years in the making.

From the early days of Ohio State’s College of Engineering, education and industry partnerships guided student instruction and faculty research. Today, the situation is no different, except that nearly a century of experience has provided lessons that the college has applied to define success in such collaborations.

In fact, Ohio State is ranked second in the nation among all universities and colleges in industry-financed research expenditures, with nearly half of that research conducted in the College of Engineering.

Full Circle

When Bruce Lavash and Shellie Porter graduated from the College of Engineering, they found their first jobs by visiting the college’s Engineering Career Services office.

Now, having established successful careers at Procter & Gamble, they’re back on campus, looking for employees of their own.

Lavash, ’77 and ’78 M.S. ME, and Porter, ’00 CHE, volunteer as members of the recruiting team at P&G, which has hired nearly 40 Ohio State engineering graduates through the Career Services office since 2004.

To Mars Via the ’Shoe

Future space missions to Mars could give us much better pictures of the red planet due to professor Rongxing (Ron) Li’s work on a new camera system that increases the speed and quality of panoramic imaging.

Li, professor of civil and environmental engineering and geodetic science, and his research team have been working on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission and recently joined the European Space Agency mission ExoMars, which will launch a Mars mission with a rover of its own in 2013. Li will work on the science team for the PanCam instrument, which will let the ExoMars rover take 3-D panoramas of the red planet.

Li’s new camera system, Mars Panoramic Scanner, can scan the horizon and form a full 360-degree panorama in 220 seconds. In addition to helping the rovers find their way on the surface of the planet, accurate 3-D photogrammetric measurements using two stereo panoramas can be performed to locate obstacles and to assist scientists in analyzing the planet’s geological surface.