Engineering Education Blog: Plutonium first produced at the Hanford Atomic Facility for the Manhattan Project
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (387) · November 6th, 2007 · Add a Comment
Today in History – November 6, 1944 – Plutonium is first produced at the Hanford Atomic Facility as part of the Manhattan Project, subsequently used in the Fat Man Atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan and bringing an end to World War II. Although nuclear engineering has its roots in weapons of mass destruction, peaceful uses led to the development of medical isotopes, nuclear imaging, cancer treatments and nuclear energy. With the high cost of fossil fuels and the need for energy self-sufficiency there is an interest in rethinking the world’s nuclear energy strategy. As with all technologies, engineers must work with the public to evaluate the ethical and social consequences of any technological development and deployment.
See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Manhattan Project and nuclear engineering. or visit the Nuclear Engineering Education Community site.
Also on this day in history, New York State is the first eastern state to fully enfranchise women in 1917. Alas we have a long way to go to achieve gender equity in science and engineering as the National Academy’s report titled “Beyond Bias and Barriers” highlighted: Women face barriers to hiring and promotion in research universities in many fields of science and engineering — a situation that deprives the United States of an important source of talent as the country faces increasingly stiff global competition in higher education, science and technology, and the marketplace.
Tags: Nuclear Engineering · Physics
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