Welcome back to Shoop’s Stoop! The start of a new academic year marks a renewal, a continuation of a journey of learning, exploration, and growth. Our return to in-person learning is filled with anticipation as our returning students look forward to reengaging with the Cooper community that they so missed over the last 18-months and our first-year students are truly excited to begin their journey. I can tell you that the campus felt electrified during the first-year welcome and orientation week! With this newsletter I want to share some of the things that happened over the summer in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering since our last update in June. 

First, you will notice a new graphic for Shoop’s Stoop. We had the great fortune to have Dayi Novas, a 2020 graduate of the School of Art, as the Art Director for the virtual 2021 School of Engineering End-of -Year Show and she agreed to use her creative talents to develop it. 

In our June newsletter, I mentioned a number of students who were going to take advantage of our expanded summer study abroad program in the summer of 2021. Students engaged in research at the University of Burgos in Spain and at Reykjavik University in Iceland and others participated in a humanitarian engineering effort in Guatemala in partnership with the Barbara Ford Peace Building Center. I encourage you to read the article in this newsletter that provides more detail about these cultural immersion experiences. The summer study abroad program is supported by the Victor and Eleanor DiFranco Endowed Fund and the E. Durbin and J. Morris Innovation Fund. 

During the summer, six of our tenured and tenure-track faculty members spent part of their summer engaged in efforts to support our comprehensive curriculum review. They collaboratively undertook activities focused predominantly on the common curricular experiences of all engineering students. This effort began with benchmarking of best practices of subjects including modern professional skills, the first-year experience, mentorship, support for a diverse student body, diversity, equity and inclusion, the common curriculum, programming, ethics, and others. The resulting 148-page report was distributed to the full-time faculty and will be used to inform the completion of the comprehensive curriculum review during this academic year. 

Our incoming first-year class is very strong. We admitted 147 students into the Class of 2025, again exceeding our target of 135. There are 32 students majoring in Civil, 33 in Chemical, 34 in Electrical, 32 in Mechanical, and 16 in General Engineering. Women comprise 40% of this class and 15% identify as underrepresented minorities. 21% of this class self-identified as the first in their family to attend college and the class has citizens of 13 different countries. About 79% of our students live in New York or New Jersey. Qualitatively, this is a class composed of many talented and accomplished musicians and artists. This cohort includes singers, pianists, violinists, jazz musicians, dancers, and more. More than one student has performed at Carnegie Hall. From studying music theory to starting literary magazines, students shared their passions around the intersection of art, music, and engineering. This class has already engaged in research. Students have pursued research in bioengineering, machine learning, sustainable energy, and climate change with a few examples including developing a low-cost solar-powered refrigeration container for communities without electricity, conducting carbon reduction research, studying the effects of prenatal drug exposure in adolescents, developing a “smart cane” utilizing 3D depth imaging, and designing a pair of glasses that deploy eye drops in your eye if the user cannot do it themselves. And finally, this class made a profound impact in their communities and share a commitment to social justice, from organizing a book drive for schools in Bhutan and in Haiti, to installing water pumps along the border in Cambodia, to spending hours tutoring their peers, or participating in activism around climate change, race, and equity. We are truly excited to add this class to our Cooper Community! 

We had several upper-class EE students take some great initiative just prior to the beginning of the academic year to build community and technical skills. Members of the leadership of the IEEE Student Branch created and conducted an IEEE Open Projects Space workshop the week before the First-Year Welcome & Orientation Week. The workshop introduced first-year students and sophomores to the EE lab and to basic EE test, measurement, and troubleshooting skills by building some simple Arduino-based electronics projects. It also helped fill in some equipment familiarization gaps left by last year’s online modality and provided a jump-start for the first-year students. It provided some early community building among students attending and students running the program. This workshop also provided a pilot for a subsequent year-long experience based on the UCLA IEEE Open Project Space Program. 

I shared previously that last year we introduced for the first time the Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) course structure in order to improve the project-based experience of our students. VIP courses engage students in a project-based experience over multiple semesters to apply disciplinary knowledge and gain important professional skills. Last year we introduced three VIP courses: one on the topic of Smart Cities, another focused on Solar Decathlon, and the third was Cooper Union Motorsports. This year, in addition to these three VIP courses we are adding a fourth: Frontiers of Bioengineering. 

On September 13, the 2022 U.S. News & World Report rankings were released. The school has moved-up in overall ranking to #9 in Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs where a doctorate is not offered. In the Regional Colleges North category, Cooper continues to be #1 Best Value, tied for #1 Most Innovative Schools, tied #3 for Undergraduate Teaching, and #4 for Ethnic Diversity. 

Finally, I encourage you to take some time to read the articles included in this newsletter. There is a lot going on in the School of Engineering. In addition to the article about our summer study abroad program, there are articles about faculty research, alumni and student fellowships and scholarships, and a few of our student competitions.  

Thank you again for sharing your valuable time with me on Shoop’s Stoop! It’s an exciting time to be part of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering. I look forward to sharing additional updates in future editions. 

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Barry L. Shoop, Ph.D., P.E.  |  Dean of Engineering  |  Albert Nerken School of Engineering

Welcome back to Shoop’s Stoop! We successfully completed yet another academic year and I want to share some of the exciting things that happened in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering since our last update in March.

This year we had a total of 87 undergraduate and 37 graduate students graduate from the School of Engineering. For our undergraduates this included 19 Chemical Engineers, 14 Civil Engineers, 28 Electrical Engineers, 23 Mechanical Engineers and 3 General Engineers. On Wednesday, May 26, we conducted an in-person Commencement in The Great Hall that included 60 members of the Class of 2020 and 78 members of the Class of 2021. 

This summer several of our students were able to take advantage of our expanded summer study abroad program. Our summer study abroad program is an opportunity for students to conduct research in a university lab or work on engineering-focused humanitarian projects at one of our international partner institutions while experiencing a cultural immersion. This year Daniel Tsarev, an electrical engineer, will travel to the University of Burgos in Spain and will focus on creating a digital twin of a current flow battery and exploring methods for creating digital twins for flow batteries. Eddie Zlotskiy, a civil engineer, will conduct research with faculty at the Reykjavik University in Iceland. His research will focus on determining how the physical characteristics of microplastics affect atmospheric transport through emissions, air and the water cycle. Finally, Joya Debi, electrical engineer, Seena Seon, chemical engineer, and Brandon Bunt, general engineer, will accompany Associate Dean Lisa Shay on a humanitarian effort in Guatemala in partnership with the Barbara Ford Peace Building Center. This team will research and recommend options for disposing of the organic waste produced at the Barbara Ford Center and explore the feasibility of making a solar-powered drip irrigation system that could be used in off-grid locations. The summer study abroad program is supported by the Victor and Eleanor DiFranco Endowed Fund and the E. Durbin and J. Morris Innovation Fund.

As I shared in the March newsletter, the composition of the engineering faculty continues to change as we hired one additional new full-time, tenure-track faculty member who will join us in the fall semester of 2021. Alice Pisani will join the Department of Physics coming to us with an undergraduate degree from the University “Sapienza” in Rome, Italy, and Ph.D. from the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP) and Université Pierre et Marie Curie in France. Most recently she was at Princeton University where she was an Associate Research Scholar and Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows. Alice will be the first Cooper faculty member to hold a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor of Physics at Cooper Union and as an Associate Research Scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics of the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute.

I am pleased to announce the appointments of two of our faculty members as distinguished professors. Eric Lima, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, was appointed as the inaugural Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering and Mili Shah, Associate Professor of Mathematics, was appointed the C.V. Starr Distinguished Professor of Engineering. The Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering will teach classes, conduct leading-edge research involving undergraduate and graduate students, and coordinate and synchronize the various bioengineering efforts across the School of Engineering. The Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering is a three-year appointment supported by the new $1.6M bioengineering foundation grant. The individual selected as the C.V. Starr Distinguished Professor of Engineering will lead research activities and forge connections to high-technology businesses with needs in engineering research services. The C.V. Starr Distinguished Professor of Engineering is a two-year appointment supported by The Starr Foundation. Please read the spotlight articles in this newsletter about both amazing faculty members.

In addition to accomplishing our teaching mission, faculty in the School of Engineering continued to innovate and evolve our curriculum and student offerings. Computer Science (CS) has been a topic of interest and discussion since before my arrival in January 2019. During the summer of 2020, a CS Implementation Planning Committee that included Professors Fred Fontaine, Sam Keene, Carl Sable, Mili Shah and myself began a detailed planning phase for a new CS Program for Cooper Union. Topics of investigation included the organizational structure, degree type, whether to seek ABET accreditation, preliminary thinking about the curriculum and course offerings, what is uniquely Cooper about the new major, delivery modality, the possibility of faculty joint appointments and a faculty capacity analysis. This semester a complete computer science curriculum was developed and presented to the Curriculum Committee and approved at the March 25 meeting. The CS Program was then presented and approved by the full faculty at the April 13 meeting. The CS Program will be vibrant, strong, and uniquely Cooper. It will be closely aligned with the mission and reputation of the school and will interface closely with the other programs at The Cooper Union and provide benefit to the institution, as a whole. The CS Program will include a Bachelor of Science (BS) CS degree program and a Master of Science (MS) CS degree program. While the organizational structure and curriculum for this CS Program have been developed and approve by the faculty, we will pursue actual implementation only after we secure external funding that will sustain this new program. We are now in the process of pursuing funding opportunities to bring this exciting CS Program to Cooper Union.

Similarly, in the area of curriculum innovation, bioengineering continues to be a disciplinary area of interest for both faculty and students. You will recall that in the January newsletter I reported that the Albert Nerken School of Engineering received a three-year, nearly $1.6M grant to unify and raise awareness of bioengineering and biomedical education, research, and project activities at Cooper Union. I am pleased to report that this semester, faculty completed the development of a new Bioengineering Minor which was approved by the Curriculum Committee at the March 25 meeting and by the full faculty at the April 13 meeting. In addition to their majors, students now have the opportunity to pursue academic excellence through three minors within the School of Engineering including a Mathematics Minor, a Computer Science Minor and now the new Bioengineering Minor. 

In 2020, the Albert Nerken School of Engineering assembled an Engineering Advisory Council (EAC) comprised of experts from industry, academia, and government for the School of Engineering as a whole and the four ABET accredited engineering majors: Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. A listing of our EAC members can be found on our website, at /engineering/about/engineering-advisory-council. The purpose of the EAC is to provide direct input to the School of Engineering and individual departments regarding current and future needs for our graduates. The EAC met virtually as a whole for the first time on April 20, 2021. Smaller breakout sessions were held by each of the four ABET-accredited majors with members with relevant disciplinary expertise. The EAC provided input and insights to assist the School of Engineering, broadly, including emerging technology areas, modern professional skills, the skills, knowledge, and experience desired by industry, and best practices in engineering education. Additionally, the EAC provided separate input and feedback to the four ABET-accredited majors including curriculum feedback and support to ABET accreditation by reviewing the Student Outcomes and Program Educational Objectives. As the School of Engineering embarked on a comprehensive curriculum review this year, the EAC also provided input to assist with ensuring the Cooper Union engineering curriculum is producing graduates that can succeed in a dynamic and increasingly complex world. 

Thank you again for sharing your valuable time with me on Shoop’s Stoop! You should know that these are just a few of the highlights – the tips of the waves – of activities in the School of Engineering. It’s an exciting time to be part of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering. I look forward to sharing additional updates in future editions of Shoop’s Stoop!

Barry L. Shoop, Ph.D., P.E.

Dean of Engineering

Albert Nerken School of Engineering

Thank You to Our Donors!

As we conclude this Academic Year, I want to take this opportunity to recognize and personally thank our donors who make possible many of the exciting initiatives in the School of Engineering. Our donor contributions support activities like curriculum innovation, student travel to competitions and conferences, project opportunities, workshops, student mentors, student awards and many others. This year, those institutional and individual donors who have contributed $10,000 or more to the Albert Nerken School of Engineering are identified here.

Welcome back to Shoop’s Stoop! Thank you for joining me as I provide a brief glimpse into some of the exciting things that are happening in the School of Engineering.

Recall that in the fall semester we launched several new curricular initiatives. We launched a new type of course structure known as Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP), offering three VIP courses in both fall and spring semesters: one on the topic of Smart Cities, another focused on Solar Decathlon and the final one is Cooper Union Motorsports. I am pleased to share that our Solar Decathlon team has qualified as one of the 63 Finalist Teams in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2021 Design Challenge. The Finalist Teams will present their projects to juries during the virtual Competition Event, April 15‒18, 2021. Additionally in curriculum innovations, a group of faculty reimagined EID101, Engineering Design and Problem Solving, integrating a consistent design process across all six-sections, with common milestones, deliverables and rubrics and the addition of 18 student mentors for project teams to help with community building and student support as well as technical assistance on the projects. I encourage you to read the details of this exciting initiative in an article in this newsletter.

The composition of the engineering faculty continues to change as we hired four new full-time, tenure-track faculty who will join us in the fall semester of 2021. Kamau Wright will join the Department of Mechanical Engineering and comes to us with an undergraduate degree from Howard University and Ph.D. from Drexel. He was previously a Visiting Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology and is completing nearly five years teaching experience at the University of Hartford. Michelle Rosen also joins the Department of Mechanical Engineering from Harvard University where she received her Ph.D. and completed three years as a Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering Design. I would be remiss if I did not note that in addition to her focus on bio-inspired robotics, Michelle was the Season 34 Jeopardy! Champion. Abigail Raz joins the Department of Mathematics with an undergraduate degree from Wellesley College and Ph.D. from Rutgers University after completing three years as the Edith T. Hitz Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Abigail is also a Mathematical Association of America Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching) Fellow. Additionally, we are in the final stages of hiring a physics candidate to fill the new joint faculty position between the School of Engineering and the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) of the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute. I will share this result in our next newsletter.

On February 10, 2021, several of our engineering alumni were recognized at the CUAA Founder’s Day Award Ceremony: Jennifer Fenton Weishaupt ChE’95 received the Peter Cooper Public Service Award, Stephen P. Welby ChE’87 the Gano Dunn Award, and Anna Brook BSE’04 the Young Alumna of the Year Award. Their backgrounds, accomplishments and contributions are highlighted in an article in this newsletter.

Our students continue to strive for and achieve excellence. Yuval Philipson, a senior mechanical engineering student, won first place in the Physical Acoustics Technical Committee student paper competition with his paper “Application of a dual stage exhaust system using expansion chambers for Formula SAE” which was published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Yuval was advised by Visiting Professor Martin Lawless ME'13. Additionally, six electrical engineering students, comprised of two teams, competed in the annual, regional Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Programming Contest. The six comprised a combination of junior, senior, and graduate students included Andrey Akhmetov, Zachary Friedman, Chanoch Goldfarb, Jonathan Lam, Derek Lee, and Zhihao Zhang. The students were advised by Professor Carl Sable. Most schools that participate in this competition have computer science departments, including computer science majors and computer science graduate students. The two Cooper Teams ranked 8th and 16th out of 54 competing teams. Finally, just prior to publishing this newsletter we were notified that Alexa Jacob, a junior electrical engineering major, received the 2021-2022 Goldwater Scholarship, which is a prestigious undergraduate scholarship award for engineering, mathematics and natural science research. Our students Rock!

In another dimension, the scholarly efforts of Professor Robert Q. Topper and Cooper alumna Anna Joselle Lomboy ChE’18 MChE’20, have been accepted for publication. Using computational quantum mechanics software and high-performance computing platforms, they completed and released a study entitled “Nonuniform Proton Transfer and Strong Hydrogen Bonding within Cation, Anion, and Neutral Clusters of Ammonia and Hydrogen Fluoride” which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A.

Thank you for sharing some of your valuable time! You should know that these are just a few of the highlights – the tips of the waves. There are many more great things happening in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering. I look forward to sharing additional updates in future editions of Shoop’s Stoop!

Barry L. Shoop, Ph.D., P.E.

Dean of Engineering

Albert Nerken School of Engineering

Happy 2021 and welcome to the second School of Engineering Newsletter. I want to begin by sharing that we finished fall semester strong. The initial preparations and continuous refinement and evolution of pedagogy and delivery by our faculty and staff paid off. In the Fall 2020 Semester, the Albert Nerken School of Engineering delivered 100 unique courses with 164 sections across seven academic departments. Of these courses, all lecture courses were online with 10 having an in-person component. The in-person courses were predominately laboratory and capstone courses. In addition, nine project-based courses integrated CU@Home kits that were shipped to each student to build and test the project and thereby retain the rigor and authenticity of Cooper. Throughout the semester, we progressively increased student access to our shops and maker spaces for course, project and extracurricular activity fabrication. The Spring 2021 Semester will look very similar to Fall 2020, a hybrid modality with 93 unique courses and 161 sections. I invite you to join me on Shoop’s Stoop as I share some of the highlights of the great things that are happening in the School of Engineering.

During the fall semester, in addition to executing our primary teaching mission, we continued to innovate, improve and progress. Throughout the semester, we continued the bi-weekly faculty pedagogy workshops as well as the monthly diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) townhalls that we began in the summer of 2020. We experimented with several different formats for the townhalls including open forums, student-led focused topical discussions and we even expanded several to the entire Cooper community including one led by Adrianna Farmiga, Associate Dean for the School or Art, who introduced a racial equity definition project and our final townhall which was a distinguished lecture by Lynn Conway, an advocate for transgender rights who led a revolution in microchip design. You can find details of these DEI town halls in one of the articles in this newsletter. Early in the semester, we expanded our partnerships by formalizing a collaborative agreement with Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center to provide practical experience and joint research projects for Cooper students. MSK recently established a computational oncology group providing rich opportunities for applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Additionally, in November, the full-time faculty unanimously approved the strategic plan assessment plan which provides measures of performance by which we will assess our strategic plan. In December, we had nine students successfully complete our graduate program and receive Master of Engineering degrees. Finally, this semester saw an increase in the number of alumni and children and grandchildren of Cooper alumni who are inspired to financially support the exciting renaissance that is occurring in the School of Engineering. Looking ahead, I’d like to give a shout-out and foreshadow several engineering alumni who will be recognized at the CUAA Founder’s Day Award Ceremony on February 10, 2021 – Jennifer Fenton Weishaupt ChE’95 will receive the Peter Cooper Public Service Award, Stephen P. Welby ChE’87 will receive the Gano Dunn Award, and Anna Brook BSE’04 will receive the Young Alumna of the Year Award. Please join me in congratulating these engineering alumni!

In late October, after over a year long process, the Albert Nerken School of Engineering received a nearly $1.6M grant from a foundation that wishes to remain anonymous to unify and raise awareness of bioengineering and biomedical education, research, and project activities. This three-year grant provides funding for a Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering, summer salaries and research expenses for five faculty researchers, five Graduate Research Fellowships, and five undergraduate research assistants. I led the development, submission and presentation of the proposal with the support of Professors Ben Davis, Eric Lima, Oliver Medvedik, Ruben Savizky, Neveen Shlayan, Jennifer Weiser, and David Wootton.

In our October newsletter, I reported that we have four tenure-track faculty searches being conducted this academic year with one in Physics, one in Math, and two in Mechanical Engineering. I am pleased to report yet another first for Cooper Union – we have entered into an agreement with the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) of the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute for a joint faculty position. The Simons Foundation is a private foundation established in 1994 in New York City by Jim and Marilyn Simons. With an annual grants and programs budget of $300 million, the foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. The foundation pursues its mission through its grant-making division, comprising programs in Mathematics & Physical Sciences, Life Sciences, Education & Outreach and autism research, and through its internal research division, the Flatiron Institute. The position is generally a 50-50 joint appointment between The Cooper Union and CCA, with the appointee spending half of their effort in each place. The appointment at CCA will last for the duration of three years; afterwards, the joint appointment will end and the person in this position will continue with their faculty appointment at The Cooper Union. We are excited about this joint faculty position and the research collaboration with the Simons Foundation.

Thank you for spending some of your valuable time with me! You should know that these are just a few of the highlights – the tips of the waves. There are many more great things happening in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering. I look forward to sharing additional updates in future editions of Shoop’s Stoop!

Barry L. Shoop, Ph.D., P.E.

Dean of Engineering

Albert Nerken School of Engineering