For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent awards, competitions and presentations include the following:

Awards

Joshua Condon, a doctoral student in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, recently won a best poster award from the American Chemical Society Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering. The poster, “Molecular Simulation Studies of Phase Transitions in Diblock Polymer Conjugates of Elastin-Like Peptides and Collagen Mimicking Peptide Triple Helices,” was co-authored by doctoral student Tyler Martin and assistant professor Arthi Jayaraman. The award was presented at the 2016 ACS National Meeting in Philadelphia on Aug. 24.

Competitions

The University of Delaware chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Traffic Bowl team competed in Anaheim, California, as part of the Grand Championship on Aug. 15. This was the team’s third appearance at the national finals in the seven years of the event. The Traffic Bowl is a Jeopardy-style competition among student ITE chapters from the U.S. and Canada and involves questions in transportation engineering and planning.

The team had won their slot in the nationals by winning the Mid-Colonial District Competition in April. The UD teamed faced challengers from Morgan State University, Penn State University, Villanova University and the University of Pittsburgh and emerged undefeated.

Nine teams from the ITE Districts competed in Anaheim. The UD team faced the University of South Florida and Purdue University in the first round and was defeated by the eventual champion, Purdue University.

“The team enjoyed the experience, had a great time at the conference and were excellent ambassadors of UD,” said Tripp Shenton, chair of UD’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Presentations

Rudi Matthee, John and Dorothy Munroe Professor of History, presented “Safavid Iran and the ‘Turkish’ Question, Or How to Avoid a War on Two Fronts,” at the 11th International Conference of Iranian Studies, held at the University of Vienna, Austria, on Aug. 5-8.

Lindsay Hoffman, associate professor of communication and associate director of the Center for Political Communication, gave a talk at the daylong Aug. 24 TEDxWilmington event, held at the World Café Live in Wilmington, Delaware. Hoffman spoke about ways to cope with the information overload that can seem to result from today’s abundance of online and social-media outlets and from other technological changes. Her talk, “A New Algorithm for Civic Life,” can be seen on this video, beginning about 3:10:00. TEDxWilmington is a global community that hosts independently organized talks that follow the TED model of “Ideas Worth Spreading” from all disciplines and topics.

Erik T. Thostenson, associate professor of mechanicall engineering and affiliated faculty of UD’s Center for Composite Materials, gave an invited plenary address at the 3rd Brazilian Conference on Composite Materials (BCCM-3) in Gramado, Brazil, on Aug. 29. Thostenson's plenary address, "Novel Multi-Scale Carbon Nanotube Hybrid Composites: Processing, Characterization and Applications in Smart Sensing,” and highlighted his pioneering research in processing of hybrid carbon nanotube/fiber composites and utilizing them as in-situ sensors for detecting damage in advanced composite materials and for use in structural health monitoring.

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