Fall 2008
Entrepreneurship — the spark of an idea, the excitement of innovation, the labor of love, the satisfaction of accomplishment — is central to any society, any future. At McCormick, where ideas and innovation abound but often need a little push, entrepreneurship recently got a big boost when Jim and Nancy Farley offered a significant donation to endow the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
We are happy to report that the McCormick School has received a significant donation from alumnus James Farley and his wife, Nancy, that endows the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship. This donation will help us become the epicenter of entrepreneurship for Northwestern. The center will offer more classes for undergraduate and graduate students and will provide the tools faculty and alumni need to become successful entrepreneurs.
New dean’s office appointments, Copenhagen comes to Tech, McCormick in the media, New programs for undergraduates, Tech plaza renovation, New engineering life sciences facility
Rarely do recruitment posters for PhD programs parody movie trailers — but then again, rarely has a new group garnered the excitement that the newly formed Economics Group in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has generated over the past year.
When a new automobile or commercial aircraft rolls off the line, its paint — the slick sheen that ranges from bright blues to burnt oranges — is actually a multitude of layers applied through a multistep process.
For now, full-fledged quantum computers are the stuff of science fiction — as in the 2007 blockbuster movie Transformers, in which the bad guys use quantum computing to break into the U.S. Army’s secure files in just 10 seconds flat.
Circuits that can wrap around your arm. A camera based on the human eye. Electronic newspapers. These tantalizing technologies are not yet available to the public, but a partnership between Yonggang Huang, the Joseph Cummings Professor in civil and environmental engineering and in mechanical engineering, and John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has brought them closer to reality.
In the early days of the Internet, traffic was low, and users could spend a lazy day driving through scant message boards and minimalist web sites. But with the explosion of music, video, and other file sharing, the Internet is becoming clogged with the virtual semitrailer traffic of downloading and uploading from across the globe.
Diamonds and cloaks are the treasures and tools of jewel thieves, not professors. But when researchers use them on a much smaller scale, diamonds can help deliver drugs inside the human body, and cloaks in the form of polymer films can help shield the medicine from the body’s immune system and healthy cells.
From energy issues and environmental concerns to major financial strain, the nation’s transportation experts are increasingly faced with daunting challenges.
It has been called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression: consumers and banks suffering from the subprime mortgage crisis, airlines reeling from high oil prices, financial institutions like IndyMac, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers collapsing, investment banks restructuring.
How often does someone ask you with genuine interest, ‘What did you do today?’
On a rural highway somewhere between Texas and Canada, Patrick Markan (mechanical engineering ’09) watched as people gawked. They waved. They slowed down to stare. They pulled ahead onto the shoulder and got out their cell phone cameras, clicking away as the car rolled past.
