Feature: Speedway Pioneer
Posted on April 26th, 2010 by ASEE
A woman and a Latina, Alba Colon is a leader of a new generation of engineers in a sport — auto racing — long dominated by white men. After a few years in data acquisition, Colon entered racing management, becoming GM Racing’s Chevrolet program manager in 2001 — the only top-ranking female engineer in NASCAR and a key point of contact between drivers, owners, and crew chiefs.
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Tags: Cars, NASCAR, Women in Engineering
For residents of Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, Blue Mountain is a scar on the landscape and a health hazard. But for 120 sixth graders at Eyer Middle School in Macungie, Pa., Blue Mountain became a laboratory for understanding the nation’s problems with toxic waste and ways to clean it up.
Students have to grapple with real-world applications of environmental engineering, Prof. Jeanine Plummer of Worcester Polytechnic Institute believes: “They need to see how it applies, why it’s important — ‘why am I here’ sort of questions.” An article from ASEE’s Prism magazine.
In the late 1950s, Rachel Carson began to realize that mankind had acquired the power “to change drastically — or even destroy — the physical world.” Her book on the damage caused by chemical pesticides changed history. 
The dance between technology and music has long been a close one. Now, the tempo of that tango is picking up speed. Breakthroughs in engineering and electronics are radically altering how music today is played, recorded, distributed and listened to. Want a surefire way of becoming a big noise in the music biz? Earn an engineering degree.
At Drexel University, Assistant Prof. Youngmoo Kim and his students think up ways to put the power of a music arranger into the hands of unskilled and untutored listeners. Literally into their hands: Soon, if Kim’s research pans out, an iPhone could be all a listener needs to imprint downloaded music with his or her own taste and style, adjusting tempo, pitch, and mood.
Top instrumentalists often own a collection of guitars, in part because no two sound exactly alike. As the grain of every piece of wood is unique, so, too, are the acoustics of each instrument. Now, Massachusetts Institute of Technology master’s student Amit Zoran has created the Chameleon Guitar. Its wooden midsection — the soundboard — is removable, so that soundboards made from different woods or materials can be inserted.
