OU Engineering

Christian Newkirk, a mechanical engineering major and undergraduate certificate holder in engineering leadership, has been named the Gallogly College of Engineering Outstanding Senior at the University of Oklahoma. Newkirk, a native of Dallas, has served in leadership roles in the OU Class Council, Tau Beta Pi, The Big Event, President’s Leadership Class, Engineers’ Club and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.  As SHPE president, Newkirk creates effective relationships with campus and regional leaders while promoting community engagement with over 400 students in the Hispanic engineering community at OU.  Newkirk has interned at Spirit AeroSystems as a design engineering intern and diversity, equity, and inclusion intern. In the role, he supported employee business resource groups on talent acquisition, webpage updates, and community initiatives.  His passions include representing the LGBTQ+ community in diversity and inclusion efforts and being a mentor to fi...

H M Imran Kays and Maisha Khan ( photo, from left ), both Ph.D. students in the OU School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science, were two of three students awarded with $2,000 scholarships from the Oklahoma Traffic Engineering Association scholarships.   The scholarships are given to outstanding students pursuing a career in transportation or traffic engineering. Kays and Khan are both graduate research assistants under the supervision of Arif Sadri, an assistant professor in the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science. Kay’s research focuses on developing an aggregated resilience model for Oklahoma against natural hazards, investigating the dependence and cascading of failure from other infrastructures to the traffic system and the impact on communities in natural disasters, and developing a traffic prediction model using machine learning and big data for weather events. Khan's research involves incorporating transportation engineering into social science, d...

Rachel Bennett, a Ph.D. student in the OU School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, received a student poster award at the inaugural Oklahoma Conference for Statistics, Biostatistics and Data Science .  Bennett's presentation, titled “Early Detection of Preeclampsia using a Scalable Deep Neural Network Algorithm,” focused on detecting signs of preeclampsia (high blood pressure or hypertension) during pregnancy using deep/machine learning. Bennett conducted the research under Talayeh Razzaghi, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the OU School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Bennett shared her results at the conference and also received a cash award for her contributions. The inaugural event took place in October at the OU Health Sciences Center and was hosted by the Oklahoma Chapter of the American Statistical Association, Oklahoma Shared Clinical and Translational Resources, American Statistical Association, Bayesic Technologies and the Department of Biostatistics and Epide...

In October, three University of Oklahoma students received cash prizes from the Oklahoma Aerospace and Defense Innovation Institute Student Poster Competition. The winning research posters were selected by a panel of judges during the inaugural OU defense symposium held at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. Benton Smith, a graduate student in the OU School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a graduate research assistant with the Advanced Radar Research Center, received first place and a $500 cash prize for his poster, “Development of AI/ML Algorithms for All-Digital Arrays.” ARRC faculty Nathan Goodman, David Schvartzman and Tian-You Yu advised the research. ECE student Cameron Goodbar contributed to the project. Syed Shahan Jehangir, an ECE and ARRC doctoral student, received second place and a $250 cash prize for the poster, “Designing Ultrawideband High Precision Dual-polarized Antenna Probes for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Based Real-time Calibration of Digital P...

University of Oklahoma engineer Li Song, Ph.D., never imagined her research would occur in a 1940’s bungalow. After all, for more than 20 years she has primarily studied thermal science in large-scale complex buildings such as hospitals, office buildings and towers.  However, the mechanical engineering professor saw an opportunity a few years ago. Only on the market since 2017, Song thought that smart thermostats – Wi-Fi thermostats – showed the potential for further investigation. She noticed hundreds of computer scientists were collecting data about smart thermostat usage, but few were studying their actual physical systems. To begin, Song needed a laboratory. Enter the bungalow located just a block south of the OU campus. The home is made possible by research funding from the Oklahoma Center for Advancement of Science and Technology, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and OG&E with additional support from the Department of Energy. Before even converting the bungalow to a ...

Through a Department of Energy-funded project, University of Oklahoma engineers have developed a low-cost, field installable retrofit kit to reduce emissions and enhance the performance of integral reciprocating compressors used in the production, gathering, transmission and processing of natural gas. As part of the development effort, OU will partner with Elipsa, a leader in no-code industrial artificial intelligence.  “The partnership with Elipsa has resulted in a low-cost retro-fit kit specifically designed to reduce emissions from integral reciprocating compressors, a critical machine in the field of natural gas,” said Pejman Kazempoor, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the OU School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. Integral Reciprocating compressors, known as IRCs, are used to produce the pressure needed to propel natural gas through the networks of pipelines that deliver gas to homes and businesses around the world. There are over thousands of IRCs running 24 hours a d...

University of Oklahoma undergraduate students Adriana Landry ( left, in photo ) and Shivam Patel, both in the School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering in the Gallogly College of Engineering, received first and second place, respectively, at the 2022 Undergraduate Student Poster Competition during the AIChE Annual Meeting in Phoenix on Nov. 14. AIChE – American Institute for Chemical Engineers –is the world's leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, with more than 60,000 members from more than 110 countries. First-place winner, Landry, presented on the synthesis of modified spirocyclic polymers. Patel won second place for his research on the fabrication of perfluorinated polymer blends and their thermodynamic and transport characterization.  Landy and Patel are advised by CBME assistant professor Michele Galizia and are members of Galizia’s Membrane Lab , which aims to develop new polymer-based materials for large-scale gas, vapor and liquid sepa...

Three University of Oklahoma engineering students have taken top honors in the first Hydrogen Business Case Prize Competition supported by the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office in the U.S. Department of Energy.  The OU team – Hydrogen for South-Central Region of the U.S., or H24SCR for short – placed fourth in phase two of the national contest, receiving a $20,000 cash award.  Seniors John Fisher and Raelin Lane, along with graduate student Megan Fox, developed a financial analysis tool to help address the best places for hydrogen energy production. Their concept was titled “Probability of Hydrogen Integration (Phi) tool to calculate the viability of hydrogen production in a given location.” Mentoring the OU team were aerospace and mechanical engineering faculty members Pejman Kazempoor, Ph.D., and Farrokh Mistree, Ph.D., and Janet K. Allen, Ph.D., an industrial and systems engineering professor. The south-central region of the United States – Arkansas, Louisiana, Okl...

A three-year research project led by Song Fang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science in the Gallogly College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, aims to develop better ways to locate hidden wireless devices, develop countermeasures against unauthorized voice or motion detection, and create techniques to safeguard user privacy against unauthorized monitoring from such devices. From Ring doorbell cameras to voice assistants and many other such smart devices, technologists describe this network of internet-enabled data-capturing devices the Internet of Things, or IoT. These smart devices often use voice or motion detection to activate and then upload that sensing data to the cloud, which brings privacy concerns associated with how that data could be accessed. Fang says such devices also create privacy concerns associated with unauthorized monitoring, as such devices can be easily hidden in various locations with the intent to capture information. “Trad...

In October, more than 100 middle school girls from local and statewide schools visited the University of Oklahoma campus to learn more about engineering. The GLAMS program – Girls Learning and Applying Math and Science – introduced young women to the field using interactive hands-on activities led by OU engineering students. Hands-on activities included learning about Boolean logic by creating circuits to turn on a light and exploring electromagnetic fields using magnets and a battery to move a copper wire design. Sponsored by OG&E, eight OG&E employees helped host the students in the hopes of boosting the number of women studying engineering – currently, only 25% of students in the OU Gallogly College of Engineering are women. “As a woman in a STEM career myself, inviting girls and young women to explore and get excited about STEM concepts is a passion of mine,” said Andrea Dennis, vice president of transmission and distribution operations at OG&E. “The energy sector will ...

Front row, left: Qinghao Zhang, Chongle Pan, Feng Yan, Jessica Shaw, Sinaro Ly and Qinggong Tang. Back row, left: Zaid Alhajeri, Chen Wang, Justin Reynolds, Yunlong Liu, Paul Contreras and Parker Brandt. Each year more than 8,000 people die while waiting to receive a kidney transplant, many of whom have spent four or more years on donor waitlists, hoping for a miracle to arrive. These deaths occur due to a worldwide shortage of kidneys for transplantation because there is currently no reliable means to quickly and efficiently determine the viability of enough donor kidneys to meet the demand. A team of researchers from the University of Oklahoma and the OU Health Sciences Center, with assistance from LifeShare of Oklahoma, as well as researchers and clinicians from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Worchester Polytechnic Institute and Georgetown Medical Center will collaborate to investigate the use of optical coherence tomography to evaluate donor kidneys and develop new scanni...