Two SEAS Students Achieve Success in ASME Competitions

ASME’s 2014 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE) begins one week from today—and that’s where you’ll find mechanical engineering majors Mavila Marina Miller and Joseph Kim. 

For Miller, IMECE is a victory lap, having won ASME's Arthur L. Williston Medal in May for her paper entitled “Engineering: Learning from the Past and Building the Future.” The 2014 award, which honors the best student paper on the topic of “mechanical engineering and public safety,” includes a $1000 honorarium, a bronze medal, a certificate, and a travel stipend so that the winner can receive the award at ASME’s Members and Students Luncheon.

Kim, too, is attending IMECE as a winner, though his work isn’t yet finished. At ASME’s Student Professional Development Conference (SPDC) in April, Kim won 1st prize in the ASME Old Guard Oral Presentation Competition for his presentation entitled “Using Artificial Microstructures to Understand Microstructure-Property Relationships in Metallic Glass,” which was based on research Kim completed under professor of mechanical engineering & materials science Jan Schroers.

The research focused on the small structures and architectures—known as microstructures—that dictate the properties of any given material. While conventional modeling and computer simulations are unable to accurately characterize how microstructural features affect a material’s properties, Schroers’s lab uses thermoplastic forming to controllably create a wide variety of microstructures for experimental characterization.

In addition to earning Kim a $500 honorarium and a paid-in-full trip to IMECE, winning the SPDC competition advanced Kim to the final round of ASME’s oral presentation competition; at IMECE, Kim will compete against winners of the nine other ASME SPDCs from around the world for a $2,000 grand prize.

Kim’s advancement to this final competition marks the second year in a row that a Yale engineering student has won the regional SPDC; last year, recent graduate Jerry Wang won 1st prize at the same SPDC competition then went on to win 2nd prize in the international competition.