Features

Summer 2015

Higher Ed 101 for Bronzeville Parents

Even parents with the best intentions who dream of sending their daughter or son to college may be naive when it comes to understanding how the admission process works or what resources are available to finance their child’s education. Deborah Young, director of new enrollment partnerships in the IIT Office of Student Access, Success, and Diversity Initiatives, says that growing up she was one of seven siblings and “found her way” to college on her own. Spurred on by that memory as well as discussions she had with staff from the Chicago Housing Authority and the Bronzeville Community Action Council, Young established Parent University.

Summer 2015

Reaping the Research Wind

With a moniker like “Windy City,” Chicago seems a natural choice for airflow studies. Yet Illinois Institute of Technology’s renown for aerodynamics research resulted not from its geographic location but rather the dedication of its faculty, students, and supporters. Pioneering work done in the 1960s by engineering professors Mark V...

Summer 2015

Soaring Above

Recall the aerial dogfights of World War II—where the best pilots and planes won battles—and then consider the modern need for a well-maneuvered fighter jet. Now imagine what happens when technology exceeds the limits of the human body and pilots can no longer endure the rigors of strategic aerial moves...

Summer 2015

Sailing Science

A firm grasp of aerodynamics allows you to understand what’s happening when wind passes over and around a boat’s sail, yet provides little strategic edge in a yacht race. The real advantage comes through teamwork, an understanding of the weather, and a little luck, says Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace...

Summer 2015

Mapping Windy City Airflows

Chances are you’ve ordered something online recently and your purchase arrived via truck to your post office, home, or workplace. Now online retailers want to deliver your packages using drones. Sounds simple enough, especially if the lightweight, unmanned vehicles have to zip over rural areas only. Yet once they hit...

Summer 2015

Airflow Art

At first glance, most viewers assume the fluid-like images originated from a computer. So when Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Candace Wark and her art colleague Shirley Nannini explain how they produce their photographs using a wind tunnel, the typical reaction is pure amazement.

Summer 2015

Machine-Age Master

The metal monster, olive-drab to gunmetal in color, is longer and wider than a hearse and weighs somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 pounds. Festooned with alloy shavings and outfitted with a series of hydraulic levers and hand-cranks, the 1939 Monarch lathe—“the first contour cutting machine in the world” according to...

Summer 2015

Crown Hall After Dark

In Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography , author Franz Schulze observes Mies’ intentions regarding the purpose of S. R. Crown Hall: “The ‘chaos of directions’ of the modern world in which [Mies] lamented,” writes Schulze, “might here be put to order by the formative, clarifying mind communally and...

Spring 2015

A Highly Charged Life

It was a scene that could have been out of a James Bond flick. A man knew he had been selected to participate in a top-secret mission and was given a train ticket to Chicago’s Union Station. Once at the station, he was to make a telephone call for instructions. The voice at the other end of the phone told the man to stand in a certain area of the station holding a newspaper under his left arm. He would then be approached by another man, who would ask him if he were waiting for someone to pick him up. If his response was “yes,” the man with the newspaper was to give his companion a designated telephone number, which was the password to their final destination, place unknown to the man with the newspaper.

Spring 2015

It’s a Skull... It’s a Brain... It’s GelMan

IIT-educated scientist Peter Matic and his team at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory put their heads together to gain a better understanding of how personal protective equipment can effectively shield military personnel from traumatic brain injury due to blast impacts.

Spring 2015

Getting a Grip

In the 1960s, “The Jetsons” cartoon creators Hanna-Barbera imagined the outer-space robot housekeeper of the future as Rosie, a sassy didactyl who was mostly successful at keeping the Jetson family’s Orbit City apartment tidy. Today, truth is arguably just as strange as fiction-considering an inspiration for the engineering behind real twenty-first-century robots able to clean up space debris comes from an unlikely place: the forests of southeast Asia.

Spring 2015

Consumer Crusader

Whether discussing gene patent issues or initiating research on medical apps privacy, Distinguished Professor of Law Lori Andrews has become the country’s go-to bioethicist on subjects at the junction of law and medicine.