Engineering

Fall 2002

It takes a village to raise an engineer

In two months spent as a participant in the Boeing A. D. Welliver Faculty Summer Fellowship, I observed that there is more to the development of an engineer than just formulas and lectures.

In spite of the recent downturn in the economy, the demand for engineers in the workforce has remained fairly strong. Yet the enrollment in the nation’s engineering programs has been flat and retention of students low, with less than half of entering engineering students receiving engineering degrees. Prospective engineers are attracted because of their curiosity about the way things work and their problem-solving creativity, but they often drop out of engineering programs … » More …

Spring 2002

Maloney honored for contributions to wood materials engineering

Growing up in the mill town of Raymond, Washington, alumnus Thomas M. Maloney may have been destined to wind up in the wood products industry. In fact, he spent his entire professional career at Washington State University working with wood.

Now professor emeritus, Maloney was director of the Wood Materials Engineering Laboratory in the College of Engineering and Architecture from 1972 until 1996. Last summer, he received the Distinguished Service Award from the International Society of Wood Science and Technology for his “extraordinary career contributions to the wood science and technology profession.”

Earning a degree in industrial arts at Washington State in 1956, Maloney led … » More …

Spring 2002

Better chow

As anyone who has stir-fried vegetables knows, quickly cooking foods at high temperatures makes for crisper, fresher-tasting foods than using slow-cooking methods.

So it is that over the past six years, associate professor of biological systems engineering Juming Tang and his associates have been working on new technologies to produce high-quality, ready-to-eat military rations (MREs) and “humanitarian daily rations” like those recently air-dropped in Afghanistan.

With conventional methods, lengthy processing times are necessary to kill harmful bacteria that can thrive even in hermetically sealed packages. Depending on package size and type of food, traditional processing can take anywhere from one to two hours. By the … » More …