Interpersonal Communication

John Pierre is retiring after 32 years of extraordinary research, teaching, and service.

Piere earned his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Economics from Montana State University in 1986. After working as an electrical design engineer for Tektronix, he continued his education at the University of Minnesota where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in EE in 1989 and 1991, respectively, with a graduate minor in Statistics. Pierre joined the faculty at UW in 1992 and served as Interim Department Head from 2003 to 2004. He was the G.J. Guthrie Nicholson Chaired Professor of Power Engineering from 2016-2019 and from 2022-present.

Realizing how teaching and research are highly intertwined, Pierre strove for excellence in both. He taught courses at every level from freshmen through graduate. This included nine different undergraduate and eight different graduate courses. His many publications include technical papers primarily published by IEEE as well as educational papers published by ASEE. IEEE is the professional society for electrical and computer engineers and ASEE is the American Society of Engineering Educators. Over his career, he published papers with 19 of his department colleagues, with colleagues from five different departments across campus, and with 40 graduate students. 

Pierre built and sustained a funded research program throughout his career with substantial funding from a variety of sources ranging from federal agencies to private industry. He developed a significant research program in electric grid reliability monitoring. Pierre’s research also encompassed digital signal processing education and applied statistical signal processing including sensor array calibration and infrasonic sensor arrays for avalanche detection.

Pierre’s passion for teaching, research, and mentorship is illustrated in the success of his students. Over his career he was fortunate to receive a number of recognitions from his students and colleagues. Pierre was selected three times as a Mortar Board Top Prof, received the Sam Hakes Graduate Teaching and Research Award from the College of Engineering & Applies Science, and received UW’s Distinguished Graduate Faculty Mentor Award in recognition of his outstanding mentorship of graduate students. He greatly enjoyed mentoring his many graduate students. He also received UW’s Faculty Senate Speaker Series Award in the spring of 2022. His research accomplishments were highlighted by multiple IEEE best paper awards and his selection as an IEEE Fellow where less than 0.1 percent of IEEE members are chosen as a fellow in any given year.

The group photo on the right is from the most recent conference John Pierre attended, and illustrates the lasting impact that Pierre will have through his work with colleagues, collaborators and students. Pierre looks forward to his new role as an emeritus professor.

IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, July 2023 group photo: Clockwise starting from lower left corner – Dr. Rich Wies (Alum BS, MS, & Ph.D); Professor John Pierre; Dr. Jim Follum (Alum BS & Ph.D.); Professor Nga Nguyen; Dr. Ning Zhou (Alum Ph.D.); Professor Dongliang Duan; Professor Zejian Zhou; Dr. Luke Dosiek (Alum Ph.D.); Dilip Pandit (Ph.D. student); Dr. Frank Tuffner (Alum BS, MS, & Ph.D.); Dr. Zikai Xu (Alum MS & Ph.D.); Dr. Sanjay Hosur (Alum MS & Ph.D.); and Xuao Wang (Ph.D. student).

Three University of Wyoming College of Engineering and Physical Sciences faculty members' research proposals recently were selected to receive seed funding through the Hydrogen Energy Research Center’s (H2ERC) Hydrogen Production and Transportation for Wyoming initiative.

The funding, available through the UW School of Energy Resources (SER), is part of Phase II of a funding initiative to promote and facilitate hydrogen research among current UW faculty members and researchers that will be applicable in Wyoming.

“We are excited to have the ability to offer opportunities like this to members of the university who are interested in advancing a hydrogen economy,” says Eugene Holubnyak, H2ERC director. “We have received a lot of support from the state, and our objective is to grow this area of research for the benefit of the state. We were really pleased with the quantity and quality of proposals we received, and I am grateful and humbled to be surrounded by so many brilliant colleagues.”

The selected proposals will receive up to $150,000 over a two-year period. The selected projects are:

-- Saman Aryana, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and the Occidental Chair in Energy and Environmental Technologies, will lead the project “Hydrogen Production through Coal Gasification -- State of the Art and Future Directions.”

-- Haibo Zhai, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management and the Roy and Caryl Cline Chair of Engineering, Environment and Natural Resources, leads the proposal titled “A Multi-Scale Computing Framework for Advancing Hydrogen Transportation Infrastructure.”

-- Charlie Zhang, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering and Construction Management, leads the proposal titled “Developing a Smart, Safe, Sustainable, Resilient (SSSR) Hydrogen Transport Ecosystem in Wyoming.” The project team includes Selena Gerace, an SER associate research scientist, and Danish Kumar, a graduate research assistant in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences.

Keep reading here to learn more about the Hydrogen Energy Research Center.

Thermoelectrics are a class of materials and devices that convert a temperature difference into electricity and vice versa. In other words, thermoelectrics can generate electricity from a heat source. To achieve maximum efficiency, thermoelectrics must be excellent electrical conductors but poor thermal conductors. These properties are interconnected and difficult to disentangle. 

“Thermoelectric metal-organic frameworks are highly porous materials. Due to their porosity, they have extremely low thermal conductivities, a principal requirement for thermoelectric applications,” says Laura de Sousa Oliveira, a University of Wyoming assistant professor of inorganic chemistry. “By the same token, however, in addition to being thermal insulators, metal-organic frameworks tend to be electrical insulators as well. The general question we would like to answer is: Can we design metal-organic frameworks with improved electrical transport without significantly altered thermal properties?” 

Her goal is to develop the fundamental knowledge to predict key quantitative structure-property relationships to inform the rational design of thermoelectric metal-organic frameworks.

Explore more about the grant here.

Mid-ocean ridges represent regions of the planet where volcanic activity is generating fresh oceanic crust and submarine mountain chains -- known as axial volcanic ridges -- as two tectonic plates spread apart. Seventy-five percent of Earth’s magmatic activity happens at mid-ocean ridges.

Despite the importance of mid-ocean ridges, many essential details of their construction and genesis are still unknown or poorly understood.

Ken Sims, a professor in the University of Wyoming’s Department of Geology and Geophysics, recently received a $325,841 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to better understand the processes and timescales of basalt petrogenesis -- the generation of magma from the mantle -- and oceanic crustal construction at slow-spreading, mid-ocean ridges.

The three-year research grant is for a project titled “Collaborative Research: Understanding the Processes and Timescales of Basalt Petrogenesis and Oceanic Crustal Construction at Slow-Spreading Mid-Ocean Ridges.” The project was selected through NSF’s Ocean Science Marine Geology and Geophysics Program. The grant began July 1 and runs through June 30, 2026. 

Find out more here.

College of Engineering and Physical Sciences Department of Energy and Petroleum Engineering Associate Professor Morteza Dejam has recently published an article entitled, “Thermal Dispersion in a Fracture-Matrix System with Application to Geothermal Energy Extraction” in Water Resources Research, which addresses thermal dispersion in a fracture walled by a porous and permeable rock matrix, where the fluid flow and heat transport are coupled across the interface between these media.

The reduced order model of the advective-dispersive heat transport in the fracture-matrix system is resulted from the Reynolds decomposition. The model allows the calculations of the upscaled dispersion and advection terms. A simple scaling relation is developed to estimate heat extraction from geothermal fracture-matrix systems. It was shown that the extracted heat is inversely proportional to the height of the matrix squared.

The finding also revealed that the dimensionless extracted heat is weakly dependent on fracture Peclet number and matrix Darcy number and is threefold the matrix dimensionless thermal diffusion time. The developed model, along with the findings of this study, provides valuable insight into the physics of thermal energy extraction from fractured geothermal reservoirs and can be used for testing the underlying hypotheses in real-field applications.

College of Engineering and Physical Sciences Department of Energy and Petroleum Engineering Associate Professor Morteza Dejam has been recognized by the American Chemical Society (ACS) as the recipient of the Energy & Fuels 2023 Excellence in Review Award.

This award is expressed as ACS sincere gratitude for his constant and timely contributions as a peer reviewer for Energy & Fuels. As part of ACS’ ongoing efforts to recognize the dedication of outstanding reviewers like him, ACS is excited to announce an upcoming initiative of Energy & Fuels.

In an upcoming issue, ACS will be featuring a front cover that proudly highlights best reviewers from the 2022-2023 period, and his name has been selected to be part of it. In addition to the cover feature, he will also be presented with a Certificate of Appreciation to formally acknowledge his substantial contributions to the journal’s peer-review process.

The Departments of Physics and Astronomy and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science hosted its first Quantum Summer School from July 31^st to August 1^st, a trailblazing initiative aimed at exploring the dynamic field of quantum information science.

The two-day event was a collaborative effort, organized under a team of professors including Jifa Tian, Jinke Tang, TeYu Chien, Yuri Dahnovsky, and Suresh Muknahallipatna.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the university's Department of Physics & Astronomy, the summer school provided an immersive experience in the rapidly evolving field of quantum information science, spotlighting the crucial realm of quantum computation. The curriculum was meticulously curated to cover basic concepts and contemporary developments in quantum computing hardware and software.

The Vice President for Research and Economic Development (VP-RED), Parag Chitnis, opened the event with welcoming and inspirational remarks. Distinguished lectures Prof. M. Suhail Zubairy (Texas A&M University), Prof. Qiang Li (Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory), Prof. Jukka Vayrynen (Purdue University), Yaniv J. Rosen (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and Kaelyn Ferris (IBM) shared their expertise through insightful lectures, engaging discussions and hands-on quantum coding activities.

A highlight of the event was a panel discussion on the future of quantum research and education. The discussion brought together viewpoints of the panelists, offering the participants a unique opportunity to engage in dialogue on future perspectives.

The Quantum Summer School attracted a diverse range of participants from various academic disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, electrical engineering and computer sciences, math, etc., and institutions, including the University of Wyoming, Northwest College, Western Wyoming Community College, Colorado State University, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and Purdue University.

Of special note was the presence of Patrick Ivers, a long-time donor to the Department of Physics and Astronomy, who attended the summer school. His presence underscored the strong ties and ongoing commitment between the university and its community of supporters.

With this successful event, the University of Wyoming has demonstrated its commitment to building research and education capacity in quantum information science and engineering, fostering the growth of tomorrow's scientists and engineers in this groundbreaking field.

The Wyoming NASA Space Grant is sponsoring a team of eight UW College of Engineering and Physical Sciences undergraduates (the “UW Space Cowboys”) to participate in the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP).

As part of the project, the team will be flying weather balloons and collecting atmospheric data during the two upcoming solar eclipses – the annular eclipse this October and the total eclipse next April.

To prepare for this, in August the team held a 2-week training “workshop” in Laramie. During the training, the students learned how to assemble the equipment, set up datalogging software, and analyze data in Python. The team also successfully completed 17 practice weather balloon flights from the UW Balloon Shack out by the airport, and even went on a field trip to visit the Riverton National Weather Service Office to watch one of their daily weather balloon launches.

In October, the team will be traveling to Richfield, UT, for the annular solar eclipse on October 14. They will be launching 30 weather balloons, one every hour for 30 consecutive hours before, during, and after the eclipse. This event will be somewhat of a “dry run” to help the team prepare for the total eclipse next year. For the total eclipse, the hope is that the team's measurements, along with those from other NEBP teams, will resolve rapid changes in the atmosphere as the moon’s shadow passes by.