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Fall Tech Tour Preview Visits Kettering U

Research and entrepreneurial projects now under way at Kettering University will soon be making your car safer, your child's safety seat more crashworthy, your supermarket more energy efficient -- and it may even save your baby from dying in a fire.

I learned about several of the fascinating research projects under way at Kettering Friday during a five-hour visit to the Flint campus.

On Oct. 7, I'll be taking off on my annual GLITR Fall Tech Tour of Michigan's  universities, looking for research that can be spun off into Michigan jobs. I'll be visiting Michigan Technological University, Central Michigan University, Ferris State University, Grand Valley State University, Western Michigan University and Michigan State University. The whole point of the Tech Tour is to get me to places too far away for me to get to on a daily basis, what with the daily crush of newsletter production.

Kettering? Heck, Kettering's only an hour away. I could visit any time. And after Friday, I wish I visited more frequently. This place has literally hundreds of great stories.

My day began with Patrick Atkinson, professor of mechanical engineering, a Kettering undergrad alumnus who's been on the faculty for 12 years now. His research interest is bioengineering, vehicle crash safety and orthopedics.

"My interest is in applying engineering fundamentals to the human body, how injury would occur in a car crash, and how we design a product that would prevent the injury from occurring," Atkinson said. "We also admit that injuries are inevitable, and when they occur, we need to design surgical procedures that will treat the patient and return them to full health."

Atkinson is a key part of the push to market Kettering as a sensible school choice for the pre-med undergrad.

"The biggest thing going right now is to blend engineering and science with medicine," he said.

After all, medicine is becoming increasingly a technical matter, from the physics of nuclear medicine to materials science in joint replacement to the fluid dynamics of the heart to the optics and lighting required for minimally invasive surgery. All this leads to an engineering major as being a natural springboard to medical school.

So Kettering now allows students to add a pre-med course of study to any of its degrees. And Kettering now has an articulation agreement with Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine where there are two seats at MSU's medical school set aside for Kettering students.

Kettering students have been accepted by MSU, the University of Michigan medical school, New York Unversity and Marshall University. And they've done bioengineering study co-ops at leading biotech companies like Biomet, Zimmer, Medtronics and Advanced Cardiovascular.

Not only that, Atkinson said, but the engineering degree offesr students a "great fallback career" if they change their mind about med school or don't get in on the first try.

Kettering is offering a program Nov. 6 called "Doctor for a Day" to high school students. They'll be offered the chance to do something a doctor would do, like a surgical procedure. And they'll meet Kettering pre-med students and talk about the realities of getting into med school. Check out audio about the program at this link.
http://wwj.cbslocal.com/2010/09/24/kettering-doctor-for-a-day-program-0924/

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Next I met with Janet Brelin-Fornari, a colleague of Atkinson's in mechanical engineering and director of the Kettering Crash Safety Center.

She told me the latest news about Kettering's impressive crash sled setup, including a new research partnership with Michigan Technological University and the federal government to study the side impact crash safety of police cars.

Brelin-Fornari runs a program at Kettering called "Crash Into Physics|" that has every  incoming freshman run experiments on the crash sled as part of a mandatory freshman physics class.

The Kettering sled has several research advances to its credit, including changes in Formula SAE student race car designs based on a Kettering crash test. But Brelin-Fornari said she's particularly proud of a survey of high school girls brought in to a Kettering program called Lives Improve Through Engineering. Three months after the LITE participants saw the results of crashes on the sled, 70 percent said they had started requiring passengers in the cars they drive waer their seat belts.

Right now, Kettering is also working with Dorel Juvenile Group, the nation's largest manufacturer of child safety seats, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to come up with a standard for side impact for child seats.

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Next up was a talk with Douglas E. Melton, associate professor of electrical engineering, who's in charge of a faculty-wide program to infuse entrepreneurship education across the university.

Melton said many people wonder whether you can actually teach innovation. "It's kind of like teaching curiousity," he said. "But the answer is yes, we believe you can teach that, if you have a disciplined approach to it, and yes, you have to do this if you're going to be competitive in today's engineering and global market, and yes, you have to have a process to teach it that is immersive."

The disciplined approach comes in faculty workshops and other efforts to bring different disciplines together in unprecedented ways -- to provide a place where, it might be put politely, different kinds of ideas can mate -- and bear offspring.

Several questions "drive us," Melton said: "How do you engage faculty teaching technical topics to continually stimulate and revisit the purpose of learning, so that students view their education as a toolset for strategic innovation? We want faculty to not just have the syllabus on their mind, but to make sure they have a larger purpose. Whatever they are teaching, mathematics, liberal studies, engineering, their purpose in teaching has to come across very clearly to the student, that the idea is to provide them with a toolset so they have opportunities to implement ideas."

The workshops also encourage opportunities for entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship (the creation of new ventures within larger companies).

And the effort is immersive in that it is in all departments -- but it's up to each department what the effort will look like.

Melton is also one of the minds behind TEDxFlint, a conference coming up Oct. 23. TED events draw together creative minds from technology, entertainment and design to share ideas and create everything from art to businesses. Melton said Flint is the fourth city in Michigan to have a TEDx event, and it's not like any of the others -- it's not a metropolis like Detroit, it's not an intellectual college town like Ann Arbor, and it's not a state capital and college town like Lansing. Instead it's a gritty factory town in the process of reinvention. Melton promised a great lineup of speakers around a theme that spells the city's name: Focus, Learn, Innovate, Nurture, Transform. More at www.tedxflint.com.

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Next, I got a look at groundbreaking new teaching software developed by Richard Stanley, associate professor of mechanical engineering. But don't take my word for it -- Stanley won the 2010 Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware award for his work. Stanley will present the software at the 2010 Frontiers in Education Conference Oct. 27-30 in Washington, D.C.

Stanley, who's been at Kettering 12 years after a stint at Lawrence Technological University and an education at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan-Dearborn, said he got the idea for his software while teaching dynamics and statics classes.

While describing the motion of parts inside an engine, he said, "I found myself making all sorts of weird motions in front of the whiteboard and students were just not getting it."

Well, it took literally 10 years of development and 12,000 lines of code, but Stanley's Web-based animation software has solved the problem.

The software is based on Adobe Flash, but also uses Dreamweaver, Camtasia, Live Scribe Pen and XML Spy software. It's also written in a wide variety of languages, including Javascript, PHP, XML Schema, Actionscript, Visual Basic for Applications and XHTML.

But you can take a look for yourself at the elegant solution to describe the motion of a wide variety of objects at www.randjanimations.com/Wiley_Flash_Development/premier_award_2010.htm.

Stanley won the award from a panel of six independent professors in a contest sponsored by John Wiley and Sons, the textbook publishers, along with Microsoft Corp. and Okemos-based TechSmith, which makes animation and presentation software.

Stanley said the software is part of what he's expecting to be a sea change in how courses are presented.

"I think it's going to change dramatically in the next 20 years," he said. "Right now it's still textbook-based. You might have an animation or two. But I believe eventually it's all going to be Internet based. And there are textbooks now with CDs in the back but nobody uses the CD. My goal is to make this stuff so simple that professors are willing to adopt it. The challenge now is getting professors to look at it."

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I then met with a client of Kettering's new business incubator, Chad Green.

Green isn't a professor of anything, and doesn't have a doctorate in anything but hard work. He's been a professional firefighter for 15 years, starting in the United States Air Force, and something's been bothering him much of that time.

"I started thinking that firefighters don't have any means of carrying infants and children out of buildings," he said. "Carrying them back out through the fire by putting them inside your coat is dangerous to both the child and the firefighter."

Green's solution: A suitcase-sized bag made of the same fire-resistant material as a fireman's suit, supplied with positive air pressure to keep toxic smoke out. The air can be provided by the fireman's air pack or a separate one inside the bag.

The Positive Pressure Infant Air Bag will be produced by a company Green has started, Figure 8 Rescue LLC, a reference to the figure-8 made by the straps on the bag. Green has applied for a patent for the device and is looking for $40,000 to $50,000 -- mostly for expensive materials and sewing machines -- to start making prototypes.

"Ultimately, I want to make this company happen in Michigan, preferably in Flint," Green said. "I moved back because I love Michigan and I want to do this here."

The bags will eventually cost about $850, the same as a fireman's coat, since the bags use about the same amount of material as the coat. The market is huge -- 52,400 fire stations around the country, and 225,000 fire trucks. And then there are thousands of high-rise hotels that might want to buy the bags to put along emergency exit stairwells.

To contact Green and learn more about the company, e-mail chad@figure8rescue.com.  There's also more information at www.figure8rescue.com.

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Next I had a repeat visit with Kristina Kamensky, a Kettering graduate student and CEO of Prismitech LLC, a company that is commercializing the research of mechanical engineering professor Homayun Navaz into making commercial coolers of the type you see full of frozen foods in the supermarket more effiicent.

The company provides consulting services to cooler manufacturers and users, and also offers a set of tools to other consultants.

Kamensky said the company's research is already at work in grocery stores. The company's latest project is in California in walk-in coolers.

The company's technology can make a commercial cooler 14 percent more efficient, resulting in huge energy savings for supermarkets and other cooler users.

Kamensky said that when she finishes her grad degree and can devote full-time to the company, she plans to grow it rapidly.

"I'm thinking 20 people a year from now," she said. "I'm planning on hiring lots of co-ops and a few full-time engineers."

And she too is sold on Flint as a place to build a new business. "I think everyone in Flint is working very hard to get businesses here," she said.

Kamensky is also part of Flint's Green Tech Task Force, a group founded by Flint Mayor, the Mott Foundation, the Genesee Chamber and the Flint Reinvestment Council to make Flint a leader in sustainable technologies.

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My final official meeting Friday was a presentation from Neil Sheridan, who manages the Kettering Univerity TechWorks technology business accelerator program.

The effort targets rapid growth companies that can create jobs in a hurry -- primarily in Genesee County but seconadrily all over Michigan. One of its early clients in fact is in Grand Rapids, a wind turbine company founded out of the assets of a yacht builder.

TechWorks divides its clients into three phases -- the concept phase, when a company is set up as a legal entity, registers for startup competition and gets intellectual property protection; the early phase, commecialization and the first revenue; and the growth phase, when companies graduate from an incubator into their own space and become self-sustaining.

TechWorksalso offers a "Soft Landings" program that eases the path into Flint for companies from outside the area.

Sheridan said IT companies can get through all three phases in a year, while more capital intensive companies like manufacturers can take longer.

Sheridan said Kettering's involved in the venture because there's evidence that companies that incubate through universities are more likely to remain and grow in the community where they were incubated.

TechWorks has also put 180 would-be entrepreneurs through the FastTrac TechVenture training program. By the end of the year, Sheridan said, that will have resulted in the founding of about 10 companies.

More at www.k.

ettering.edu/techworks/index.jsp

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I wrapped up my Flint visit with a delightful lunch with Sheridan, Kamensky, Kettering public relations boss Patricia Mroczek and several students, including Michael Woznicki, president of the Kettering's student entrepreneurial society and a TechWorks fellow working on the Cetner of Energy Excellence process with Swedisk Biogas, Kaitlyn Just, vice president of KES and a business major thinking about a career in communications (I warned her!) and Mike Calandra and Zach Zybynski. Great young people all. I'm pretty sure someday I'll be asking them for a job.

I'll have more about this visit in future issues of GLITR. For now, visit www.kettering.edu for more information. And go Bulldogs!

(c) 2010, WWJ Newsradio 950. All rights reserved.

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