New buses to take students to Inner Harbor on weekends

Beginning this week, there will be a new bus tooting around campus. On Saturdays and Sundays the Power Plant bus will shuttle students from the Homewood campus to the Inner Harbor, courtesy of the Cordish Company and the Downtown Partnership.

To inaugurate the free service, which will serve other college campuses as well, a launch party will be held for students on Friday, Oct. 8, at the Lava Lounge at the Power Plant. Buses will leave from XandO, in the Homewood Apartments building, at 6:45, 7:30 and 8:45 p.m., returning at 10:15 and 11 p.m. Regular service will begin Oct. 9, with some routes using XandO and others Levering. Schedules can be found on the Baltimore Collegetown Network web site. A student ID is required.

Engineering grants provide new tools to students

Chemical engineering students will soon be using innovative computer software and new materials processing equipment to help them learn laboratory skills that are increasingly valued by employers in private industry.

"These are new tools to make us more competitive in the new frontiers of chemical engineering," said Michael Paulaitis, chair of the Whiting School's Department of Chemical Engineering. "It's part of an effort to move forward with the chemical engineering industry. This new equipment will help us continue to attract the best students in this evolving discipline."

These research and teaching enhancements will result from two $250,000 grants recently received by the department.

The Grace Davison Foundation, based in Columbia, Md., has agreed to provide $50,000 annually for five years to help the department renovate and purchase new equipment for the undergraduate materials processing lab in Maryland Hall and to provide a permanent endowment for maintenance and upgrading of the new equipment.

In this lab, students will learn that the way a material is created can affect the characteristics of the final product. This requires the ability to study the fabrication process at the microscopic level. To accomplish this, the department plans to purchase two high-tech tools: a spectroscopic ellipsometer and a dynamic light-scattering photometer.

The second grant is the donation of $250,000 worth of computer hardware and software that will allow students to simulate chemical engineering experiments on a computer, then use the computer to control and monitor real equipment used in the actual lab experiment.

This computer software and hardware is being provided by Baltimore-based GSE Systems Inc. Chemical engineering majors will be able to use the new software to help set up their capstone senior design projects.