Two CSE faculty named McKnight Land-Grant Professors
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (02/04/2014)—Two College of Science and Engineering faculty members are among eight recipients of the 2014-16 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, a program designed to advance the careers of the most promising junior faculty members who are at the beginning stages of their professional careers. The winners were chosen for their potential to make important contributions to their field; the degree to which their achievements and ideas demonstrate originality, imagination, and innovation; the significance of their research; and the potential for attracting outstanding students.
Each recipient will receive a research grant in each year of the two-year appointment, to be used at the recipient's discretion for expenditures directly related to research and scholarly activities. In addition, each professor is awarded either a year's leave to pursue research during the second year of the award or a supplementary research grant.
The new McKnight Land-Grant Professors are:
Assistant professor James Van de Ven (mechanical engineering) Innovations in Energy Storage and Conversion with Fluid Power
Van de Ven’s research goal is to study innovative solutions for storing and converting hydraulic and pneumatic energy. His energy storage research eases integration of wind and other renewables into the power grid and enables hydraulic hybrid vehicles. His hydraulic energy conversion work enables a new control paradigm where systems are rapidly switched between efficient on and off states. The impact potential is large as 3% of US energy is transmitted by fluid power.
Assistant professor David J. Flannigan (chemical engineering and materials science) Materials Science at the Space-Time Limit with Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy
Current transmission electron microscopes are able to reach sub-atomic spatial resolutions but cannot be used to image dynamic events that occur faster than a few milliseconds. To overcome this, Flannigan is working to develop a new electron microscopy technology that couples the high-spatial resolutions achievable with electrons with the very short temporal resolutions of ultrafast, pulsed laser systems. In this way, the ability to directly visualize femtosecond events occurring at the atomic-scale will be possible.