News Releases

Cockrell School of Engineering professor and indoor air quality expert Richard L. Corsi has been named as the next dean of Portland State University’s Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. He will begin his appointment on Sept. 1, 2018.

In the developed world, human beings spend the majority of their lives indoors. Whether we are working, relaxing, cooking, cleaning or sleeping, it’s estimated the average person will spend 90 percent of his or her time in an indoor environment. Yet little is understood about how chemical compounds indoors interact and transform throughout our daily lives.

Launching this summer with four participants from three schools in Austin and Round Rock, Texas, a new Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program will invite K-5 educators to the Forty Acres for seven weeks to actively engage with cutting-edge engineering and science research. The program will include a workshop aimed at finding creative ways to explain the specialized research in which they will have participated over the previous weeks to their students.

On a Saturday in April, more than 50 high school students in the Houston area came together in small, multi-school teams to apply the engineering tools and techniques they learned in their Engineer Your World courses, developed by Texas Engineering faculty. The challenge for the one-day Solve it by Sunset Design-A-Thon was to create a product that prevents or mitigates flood damage to residential houses in Houston.

The enterprising engineer can find inspiration in anything. For a group of graduate students from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, under the guidance of associate professor of mechanical engineering Chris Rylander, it was the design of a Slurpee straw.