Innovation and Invention – Missouri S&T 150

Contributing to a Nobel Prize

Peter Ehrhard — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 22:54:02 +0000

Dr. Clyde Cowan, ChemE’40, was posthumously recognized for his part in research that earned the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics. Cowan was a co-discoverer of the neutrino, along with prize winner Dr. Frederick Reines. In 1956, the two researchers discovered the nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos. But the role neutrinos served was still unconfirmed until recent research, which found that they play a role in the formation of galaxies by suppressing clustering of dark matter. Dr. Shun Saito, an assistant professor of physics at S&T, was part of a team that found that neutrino-rich regions are strongly correlated with massive galaxy clusters.

Alumni leading the telecommunications industry

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 21:02:11 +0000

Roy Wilkens, EE’66, and Mario A. Padilla, MetE’60, worked for years to challenge and change the status of the telecommunications industry in the early to mid 1990s.

Wilkens, founder, president and CEO of telecommunications company WilTel, worked to challenge and outpace the “big three” at the time of AT&T, MCI and Sprint. His 3,500 employees worked with business communications to provide network solutions. “All I had was a gimmick to start out with, and that was putting fiber inside a pipe,” says Wilkens about his fiber-optics cable project that turned into a company.

Padilla was vice president of new markets business development for AT&T in Morristown, N.J. He stated in 1993 to Missouri S&T Magazine that “we have come to the age of The Jetsons,” when referring to a communications revolution that would affect our life as dramatically as interstate highways or televisions.

For some, it is hard to imagine a life without the communication devices we have today, but perhaps future Miners can pick up the mantle of the two and continue to develop new technologies.

Building a legacy of mechanical engineering

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 21:01:14 +0000

John Toomey founded both VSE Corp. and Starr Management Corp.

A registered professional engineer, John Toomey, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering in 1949 and 1951, founded both VSE Corp. and Starr Management Corp. He is a member of the Naval Institute and holds five patents for photographs, safety and missile equipment as well as a copyright on design and technical-drawing computer software.

EV pioneer

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 20:57:34 +0000

As the auto industry begins to fully embrace the notion of electric vehicles, it has EV pioneers like Jon Bereisa to thank. Bereisa, who earned a bachelor’s degree in 1967 and master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1970, helped General Motors bridge the gap from the EV1 electric vehicle to the Chevrolet Volt’s successful launch. He was chief engineer for the EV1, systems architect on the Volt, and director of advanced engineering and technology strategy on GM’s hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle technology.

Non-stop innovation

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 20:51:37 +0000

Dan Scott, a 1970 metallurgical engineering graduate, holds more than 100 patents and has dozens more patents pending. The technical advisor for oilfield drilling contractor Baker Hughes Inc. takes a customer-advocate approach to assure that the product or process he develops can meet his clients’ needs.

“There are very few eureka moments for me,” he explains. “I like to sit down with someone else and bounce ideas off them.” Apparently, the process works.

Bringing back the wetlands

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 19:11:20 +0000

Donald Hey, a 1963 graduate in civil engineering, is passionate about proving the economic efficiency and sustainability of using restored wetlands for water quality management and flood control. Hey, an executive director and co-founder for Wetlands Research Inc. based in Wadsworth, Illinois, focuses his research on river and wetland restoration throughout the Mississippi River Basin. Hey also works to develop low-cost management programs in order to sustain natural aquatic ecosystems.

Over the past 200 years, the loss of more than 70 million acres of wetlands in the Mississippi River Basin caused poor water quality, increased water pollution and flood damage and reduced wildlife habitat and biodiversity, Hey says.

Surveying the future of mining

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 19:09:13 +0000

Karl F. Hasselmann discovered on the first oil pools in the Texas Gulf.

Karl F. Hasselmann, who graduated in 1925 with a degree in mining engineering, was oil prospecting in Europe when he began researching how to use gravitational survey methods to locate offshore oil. After returning to the U.S., Hasselmann began drilling with his own company in the Gulf of Mexico and discovered one of the first oil pools in the Texas Gulf — a forerunner of the massive offshore developments to come worldwide. His name lives on in Miner history at Hasselmann Alumni House, named in honor of the surveyor.

The fine art of tuning a Corvette

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 19:08:52 +0000

Charlie Rusher, a 2011 graduate in mechanical engineering, “makes Corvettes sound like Corvettes.” Rusher was interviewed by The New York Times about his work with Corvette engines as a noise and vibration engineer at Chevrolet in Milford, Michigan.

“I fine-tune what the engine sounds like, both inside and outside the car – I’m the composer of a symphony, in a way,” says Rusher. “I manually adjust exhaust pipes and record the engine sounds. The sound is a combination of the engine and exhaust system outputs, and there needs to be a balance between the two.”

NIH’s first woman scientist

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 19:08:30 +0000

Dr. Ida Bengtson was the first woman the National Institutes of Health (NIH) hired as a scientist in 1916. For 30 years she served the NIH – and several communities throughout the U.S., including Rolla, as Dr. Kathleen Sheppard, associate professor of history at Missouri S&T, details in Selective Blindness: Ida Bengtson and the Treatment of Trachoma, published in Lady Science in 2018.

As Sheppard notes, Bengtson came to Rolla in 1924 to lead research on a blindness-causing eye disease named trachoma at the city’s hospital on 13th Street. She also worked as a lecturer in bacteriology at S&T and conducted research in lab space in Parker Hall’s basement.

Over 1,500 patients treated at the Rolla hospital benefitted from Bengtson’s research, and she shared the results of her work at a meeting of the Saint Louis Ophthalmic Society. Her work led to the creation of Rolla’s Trachoma Hospital, one of only four such hospitals in the country. (This building on Kingshighway is now home to S&T’s Rock Mechanics and Explosives Research Center.)

Bengtson worked in Rolla from 1924 to 1931 before moving on to work in the typhus unit of the NIH. She helped develop a vaccine for typhus and created the complement fixation test, a test still used today to detect Rocky Mountain spotted fever and other diseases.

“Bengtson is just one of those women whose successes became the disciplinary scaffolding that others would build upon,” Sheppard writes. “She contributed to multiple urgent projects because of her drive, her expertise, and her precision. Bengtson and her contemporaries laid the cornerstones of multiple fields and research lines, but few look for those cornerstones, which make finding sources about them almost impossible. Bengtson’s work on trachoma demonstrates the value of not just looking for ‘Female Firsts’ in science, but of understanding the breadth and depth of women’s contributions to multiple fields.”

All a-Twitter

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 19:08:02 +0000

The creator and co-founder of Twitter — Jack Dorsey — spent a couple of years studying computer science at Missouri S&T in the 1990s before heading off to New York University. He never earned a college degree, but the St. Louis native, in addition to creating the influential social media platform, also co-founded the credit card payment tool Square, making him one of the most successful technologists of the 21st century.