Late last year, Portland State University’s (PSU) Maseeh College and School of Business were gifted 1.3 million by Daimler Truck North America. Angela Lentz, chief people officer for Daimler, notes the strong connection the company has with PSU and that “this philanthropic commitment is intended to help build a talent pipeline, enhance research collaborations around industry-applicable topics, and drive regional business and industry growth.” In addition to scholarships and assistantships for graduate students, funds were used to retain faculty.
Maseeh Dean Joseph Bull selected three stand-out faculty members to receive the Daimler Professorships, which each include $125,000 of support over a five year period. “Daimler Truck and PSU share fundamental areas of overlapping interest and expertise in engineering and business,” said Bull. “By leveraging these capabilities, we can jointly pursue research collaborations in areas such as autonomous vehicles and advanced manufacturing, and pursue innovative solutions to emerging challenges.”
Raúl Bayoán Cal
Raúl Bayoán Cal, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, whose work generally falls under the umbrella of fluid mechanics, has won recent grants to study microgravity in our own Dryden Drop Tower, experiments that will soon be also conducted on the International Space Station to understand the fate of microplastics and algae blooms. His research team also recently returned from a research trip to Oklahoma, carrying out a project studying agroecological renewable energy systems driven by values and knowledge of Indigenous communities. Cal is also exploring projects involving offshore floating wind energy for increased energy yield and enhanced models or determining if rain falls faster or slower in turbulent conditions, to name a couple. Solutions to these challenges have embedded outcomes that can potentially improve society.
Cal is "ecstatic about the named Professorship and the opportunities that it brings. We are excited to explore new areas/topics thinking about the science that we are currently doing. This provides further room to dare into ideas that might seem outlandish and also continue to engage with a diverse student population."
Antonie Jetter
Antonie Jetter, divides her time between teaching for the Engineering and Technology Department and serving as Maseeh College’s Associate Dean of Research. Both her academic and her administrative work are focused on innovation. Innovation, Jetter emphasizes, happens when people share their knowledge, combine it in novel ways, change their perspective, and learn from experimentation–in short, through cognitive processes. Accordingly, her lab creates tools and models that aid human cognition so that individuals, teams, and communities can solve "wicked" problems. These problems do not have known answers, are dynamic, and involve people with different perspectives and goals. The lab uses a variety of qualitative and quantitative research approaches, including Large Language Models. It uses LLMs in research grants to support transportation planning and to understand trust in innovation, such as cryptocurrency. Jetter is a co-founder of the Compassionate Computing Lab (CoCo Lab), a multidisciplinary lab with a mission to understand computational technologies through the lens of all of humanity, rather than just the goals, interests, and capabilities of select groups. Aligned with this vision, she creates new educational approaches, such as Ideathons and Learning Labs, to inform people about the quickly expanding capabilities of generative AI.
Jetter notes that it “is an extremely exciting time right now–we are witnessing a fundamental change in technology that will create a lot of innovation, including in my own lab. Many of the projects I have been envisioning for years are suddenly doable in a few hours, thanks to AI. But not everyone finds it easy to adapt and I am worried about a new digital divide between those who know how to use AI and those who don’t. That’s really worrisome because wicked problems cannot be solved unless we bring diverse knowledge to the table, and we have plenty of wicked problems we need to solve.” She is grateful for the funding, which will “provide access to new technologies for people and organizations that might find it a little harder to make sense of AI.”
Christof Teuscher
A professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Christof Teuscher has been heavily involved in PSU’s commitment to growing the semiconductor workforce pipeline, among other projects. His most recent grant from the National Science Foundation’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program combines work in biology, physics, computer science, and engineering to design electric circuits that are both computationally and energetically efficient. Teuscher’s lab also runs two research programs for undergraduates in the summer: the NSF REU site on "Computational Modeling Serving Portland and the altREU program to Design, Program, and Use Computers to Benefit Society.
Teuscher notes that “we're living in really exciting times with breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and how we build, program, and use computers. My team's mission is to further advance computer technology to help solve tomorrow’s technological and societal problems. We envision a world where computers are intelligent, secure, and energy-efficient problem solvers for all.” He is excited about the potential of this award to involve the larger local community and future engineering projects, as well: “the Daimler Truck Portland Professorship will support graduate, undergraduate, and high school students in our mission to develop disruptive new computing paradigms and machines that will allow for lasting breakthroughs and open new application domains in the next 5-20 years.”
With the support and generosity of companies like Daimler Truck, Maseeh College will continue to innovate and grow for years to come.