Research universities and colleges such as UConn, which offer doctoral and master's degree programs, invest considerable time and effort in recruiting top candidates to their graduate programs. Many top tier universities compete with UConn to offer enticing packages. One ongoing challenge is how effectively to promote UConn among prospective graduate students and foster a dialogue that leads to greater recruiting success.

That is the premise behind Dr. Horea Ilies' new grant from the National Science Foundation. An assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, Dr. Ilies has proposed a new way to define classes and families of skeletons that characterize, describe and manipulate geometry.

The School of Engineering will once again host and sponsor the 2010 Connecticut State Chess Championships at the UConn campus in Storrs. The matches, in four different grade divisions.

The School of Engineering inducted six accomplished alumni into the Academy of Distinguished Engineers and also feted two other exceptional engineers during its annual awards banquet on December 10, 2009. The festive event, held at the University's Alumni Center, capped a day in which the new inductees presented seminars on a range of technical topics, including waste water treatment, sustainable building design, combustion research, efficient energy production and shock-tolerant submarine design.

Dr. Lanbo Liu, an associate professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE), won a prestigious Fulbright Scholar grant in the fall ('09) to conduct research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. He is among six UConn scholars to receive the honor during the 2009-10 academic year.