Making News, Part II, June 2010

Dr. Mohamed S. El-Aasser, PA A ’62, was profiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education as the new director of Lehigh University’s Office of International Affairs. Read the article

Dr. El-Aasser is a former dean and provost at Lehigh and is also a professor of chemical engineering. He himself was an international student, who arrived at Lehigh in 1972 as a postdoctoral fellow and became an assistance professor in 1974.

President of Lehigh, Alice P. Gast (CA D ’80), herself a chemical engineer, says that Dr. El-Aasser, “is a terrific scholar. He’s very dedicated to graduate research and recruiting excellent graduate researchers from all over the world.”

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Popular Science is reporting on recent breakthroughs that could “reduce the price associated with adaptive optics.”

Researchers at the Universite Laval in Quebec have published their work related to liquid mirrors. The new developments “make (the liquid mirrors) act like adaptive optics without requiring the adaptive optics price tag.”

Read the article for more information on liquid mirrors

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A team of researchers at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, CO, “have come up with a new air-conditioner design that they say will dramatically increase efficiency and eliminate gases that contribute to global warming.”

Eric Kozubal (CA S ’97), a senior engineer at NREL, is one of the researchers working on the new air conditioner. “The technology we have today is nearly a hundred years old,” said Kozubal. “The desiccant-enhanced evaporative, or DEVap, air conditioner is meant to address the old complaint, It’s not the heat; it’s the humidity.”

Read the full article here, for more on the indirect eveporative cooling method

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