For your information, Dennis Roote has been selected to fill a vacancy on the Board of Directors of RES! He is a welcome addition, please join me in congratulating him to our august group. I am certain he will add his inestimable wisdom to the Board.
We have a tour of the U of R's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) set up for 4:30 pm on October 26th (many thanks go to Greg Gdowski for setting it up!). Please see the RES website (www.roceng.org) for further details and to register. The tour promises to be fascinating as well as providing an opportunity for camaraderie with your fellow engineers!
Terra Fair is looking for volunteers to assist with a "science and engineering fair" in Rochester scheduled for The Rochester Museum and Science Center in March of 2019. See their website https://terrafairs.org for further details.
That's all for now. Hopefully when you read this, snow will still be a long way off, at least around here.
Joe Dombrowski, 2018-19 RES President
Hopefully everyone has been enjoying the great weather this summer. Summer has found the RES busy planning for upcoming events.
We have had a board opening for a while, and two folks stepped up to volunteer to fill the vacancy. The current board, at its regular meeting of 8/22 selected Dennis Roote, President of CDE Engineering and Environment, PLLC to fill the void. Dennis is not a stranger to the RES, having worked with us before often. Many thanks to the people who stepped forward to be consideredand welcome aboard Dennis.
The president, and the first and second vice presidents (who are destined to be president eventually) held a strategic planning session hosted by Greg Gdowski at U of R on 7/18. The outcomes involve some homework for the executives and the Board; we agreed to create a list of duties of the RES board members and their committees, update the Constitution and Bylaws to eliminate some clumsy and outdated items (found at http://roceng.org/Constitution-&-By-Laws) and investigate lengthening the terms of the officers to two years from one year as a way of increasing efficacy. Any other suggestions would be helpful; feel free to let us know what you would propose. I will use this forum to report on our progress.
Hot enough for ya? Hopefully everyone has been enjoying the great weather. Although it is summer, it has been a busy time for RES; aside from some mundane chores (like new bank signatures) and two monthly board meetings, we have been busy planning some activities for later this year (details to come as plans get firmed up) and holding a strategic planning session hosted by Greg Gdowski at U/R (more details on the outcomes later). There is a pressing need your RES has, a chair for Programs and Meetings. We are envisioning one or two annual meetings of either a social or educational nature. We have many possibilities, contact and venue that can be made available to you. If you can lend assistance to this task please contact the RES. We would be forever grateful! This month’s issue features a story on the new railroad bridge over the Genesee River at Portageville near the southern end of Letchworth State Park. Hopefully you will enjoy the article as I did. It is an impressive structure. I found the bridge to be a fascinating mixture of history, modern construction techniques and environmental concerns. Controlled blasting is a bonus and always gets my attention. Joe Dombrowski RES President
And we are always looking for other input and direction.
There are many things to do, among which are filling some gaps, namely on the Board of Directors (I believe we are looking for a Director for one year, please contact us if interested; we can always find something for a willing participant to do.
I also would like to solidify the position of our very generous sponsors for the near term and explore the possibility of more exclusively "networking" or family events such as Red Wings or Amerks Games or a family event at Seabreeze or Darien Lake.
It is with a sad heart that the Rochester Engineering Society mourns the loss of one of its own. Barry Quinn, a warm individual, past president, and friend of the society passed on February 10th. Barry's spirit for voluntarism included 20+ years of service with NYSATE (including selection as Transportation Engineer of the Year), E3 Fair (an Engineering fair funded by local engineering societies) and a great passion for the RES scholarship program. Based on the recommendation of the family, RES has made a donation in Barry's memory to the Czeutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation.
It is appropriate that we get ready to acknowledge our newest scholarship award recipients. Michelle Sommerman, the current Scholarship chairperson, and the Scholarship committee have made selections on eight new recipients. They will be celebrated at our upcoming GALA on April 14th along with the awards for the 2017 RES Engineer of the Year, 2017 Kate Gleason Young Engineer of the year, two Finalists for the Kate Gleason Young Engineer of the Year, and four Engineers of Distinction. A special thank you goes out to the teams that help to interview, review, and select our award recipients.
If you have never attended or it has been a while since you have been to the RES GALA, please consider joining us this year. There are great things in store for this year's event. The popular silent auction is back, Ashley Dorzbacher will be the MC again, and we continue to make the event lighter and more lively. Check out the details on the RES website, along with the many great sponsors for the Gala this year!
Remember to get your ticket for the RES GALA at the Riverside Convention Center on April 14th. See more information at www.roceng.org/RES-Gala or email res@frontiernet.net
Mike TriassiRES President
The RES website has a had a redesign! As part of the team that originally moved our site to Wild Apricot, some time has passed since it was chosen as our hosting platform. There has since been a massive shift to responsive designs in websites and the RES has become increasingly more online oriented with the birth of our electronic edition of Rochester Engineer magazine. Greg Gdowski has taken the initiative to change the site's theme to one called Kaleidoscope Redwood that I am certain you will find more friendly to navigate.
As far as new features…
Responsive Design
The site is now mobile friendly. This means the menus and content will change appearance to look better on your phones and tablets. We know that many of you are heavy users of mobile devices.
Visually appealing
Hopefully you will find the layout easier on the eyes. The content is bordered by colors to help make it easier to transition from section to section. Some of the subpages are in better shape than others so please stay tuned. By all means, look down past my ugly mug on the home page to Ashley Doerzbacher's photo for a more pleasing experience. We couldn't be happier to have her as this year's host for the Gala.
Content Rich
The site features more regularly updated content from recent months. In addition to past magazine editions and an electronic calendar, there are Gala sponsorship updates, a "Today" message, popular historical minutes from Lee Loomis, and much more.
A special thanks goes out to those of you that took the opportunity to fill out the Rochester Engineering Society's survey. We have over 100 responses. Since the holidays may have been hectic for many of you, we will leave the survey open for a while longer. If you have not already done so, please take this chance to complete your responses.
Survey link….
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Y86K5H3
Thank you for taking time for the Rochester Engineering Society
Mike Triassi
As we all prepare our new year resolutions, the Rochester Engineering Society is gathering feedback from its membership on to how better to serve our engineering community. This includes several critical items as we make changes going forward.
How is it best to communicate with our members? Our website has been in place for many years and could use a facelift. The hosting server we use has responsive design templates that would make it behave better on mobile devices but we are not sure if that is enough. We have not used emails very frequently to help keep down the steady stream of emails that everyone needs to parse out. Should we email more? Is it time for social media? Which one do you prefer? Could we make it easier to keep you aware of the many engineering events in our community by tweeting or using our LinkedIn site?
The Rochester Engineer magazine is one of the more popular badges of the RES. What feature do you like best? Affiliate News, Articles, Employee News, Job Postings? Now that 7 of the issues are electronic copies, are there other things that would make it more valuable?
Can you give us grades on our most popular events, including our annual Gala dinner and the Symposium for PDH credits? How can they be more entertaining or more useful? Should we provide other networking sessions? Are PDH credits needed to make them be more attractive?
Please take the time to fill out our survey and we will work to make it happen.
HERE IS A LINK ADDRESS FOR THE SURVEY https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Y86K5H3 or go to the RES Webite and clink on the link.
Happy New Year, Mike Triassi
RES President
This month’s issue features a story on the emergence of Rochester as a hub for imaging and audio technologies. The success of this kind of effort requires the collective efforts of business, government, academic and private resources. It is my hope that engineering leadership within our area can get fully behind technology growth initiatives. The attractiveness and the long term viability of Rochester as this type of hub certainly depends on the type of training and STEM development fostered by activities of the Rochester Engineering Society and its affiliates.
In this regard, RES welcomes our newest affiliate, Terra Rochester Finger Lakes (https://www.terraed. org). Terra organizes events, fairs, and symposia to provide STEM solutions to educational issues, and offers platforms for students and educators to learn from one another. Encouraging our youth to pursue STEM through these efforts and the work of our many RES tutors helps prepare students for the advanced degrees at our local colleges. In turn, engineering graduates from our local colleges have been the driving force for our local engineering firms and technology companies. It finishes the cycle when we can do our part to promote technology growth here in Rochester. RES is grateful to its corporate members and welcomes others to join us in promoting engineering in Rochester.
Enjoy your holidays,
Any of you that take advantage of the annual Symposium are aware of the service that Rochester Engineering Society in cooperation with multiple affiliate member organizations serve in what is sometimes referred to as a "PDH Fest". It is a unique event that gives professional engineers a cost effective and convenient means to fulfill training requirements. The popularity of this event continues to swell with almost 400 attendees that come from for all over upstate New York. It has now been moved to a larger venue at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center. There is even a proposal under consideration to have a mini "half day" event to offer another training opportunity for our members. The coordination of a large event is something we can handle by use or our online registration service "Wild Apricot".
For the last several years the RES has extended its ability to handle event registration by supporting the ABCD Fall Bridge Conference. This is another large conference in Buffalo that is hosted by one of our affiliates, Association for Bridge Construction and Design (ABCD), with hundreds of attendees.
In recognition of ABCD's Conference this month we sought out and found a very interesting article on the Lyell Avenue Bridge Replacement. I hope you find this article interesting and informative. I know that I am grateful for the relatively low traffic delays we are fortunate to enjoy in Rochester NY and reading this article reminds me the amount of planning and effort that it takes to stay on top of transportation solutions. A shout out to Katherine B. Fragale and all our professional engineers for their great work.
It is the perfect time to submit a candidate for nomination as Engineer or the Year or Young Engineer of the Year. This is a tradition of the Rochester Engineering Society that dates back to 1963 and its recipients include a highly respected group of technical and business leaders in the Rochester community. For the sake of space a partial list of award recipients back to 1987 is shown below. There are 15 Professional Engineers, 14 PhDs, a Dean of Engineering from RIT, and many presidents and CEOs of engineering firms.
Engineers or the Year (2016-1987)
2016:Diane M. Trentini 2015:Robert L. Clark Jr. PhD 2014:Lalit Mestha PhD 2013:Maureen S. Valentine PE 2012:Sergio Esteban PE 2011:Brian J. Thompson PhD 2010:Gary W. Passero PE 2009:Kevin J. Parker PhD 2008:Satish G. Kandlikar PhD 2007:Harvey J. Palmer PhD PE 2006:Thomas C. Mitchell PE 2005:Sophie V. Vandebroek PhD 2004:Neville F. Rieger PhD D.Sc. PE 2003:Cornelius Illenberg PE 2002:G. Michael Morris PhD 2001:William C. Larsen PE 2000:Kenneth G. Budinski 1999:Salvatore A. LaBella PE 1998:Duncan T. Moore PhD 1997:Jay M. Eastman PhD 1996:Walter Cooper PhD 1995:Edward Maybeck PE 1994:Michael Triassi PE 1993: John M. Davis PE 1992:Edwin P Przybylowicz PhD 1991:Erwin G. Loewen PhD 1990:William K. Pollock PE 1989:William J. Stolze 1988:Donald J. Bergmann PE 1987:Keith W. Amish PE
Our most recent Engineer of the Year helped form a Young Engineer of the Year award in cooperation with the Kate Gleeson foundation. The list of awards recipients since its start in 2007 is shown below. They were all below the age of 40 and demonstrate exceptional engineering acumen as company managers and PhDs.
Young Engineers or the Year
2016:Danielle S. W. Benoit 2015:Matthew Thomas Sidley 2014:John M. Papponetti, PE 2013:Courtney E. Reich, PE 2012:Clement Chung, PE 2011:Sherwin A. Damdar 2010:Michael J. Walker, EIT 2009:Nathan Gnanasambandam, PhD 2008:Venkatesh G. Rao, PhD 2007:Vishal Monga, PhD
Nominate an Engineer or Young Engineer for consideration this year! More information about the EOY and YEOY nomination process can be found online at http://roceng.org/Recognition (Nominations are due by Dec 11th).
The family of the last EOY shown in the list, Keith Amish, recently funded an RES scholarship in his name to recognize outstanding students. This is another great tradition of the RES and a reminder to also consider sending an application to engineering, engineering technology, science and technology students that have completed two years, maintained a 3.0 out of 4.0 GPA, and plan to continue forward to an ABET accredited degree and live locally. Please review the application at http://roceng.org/page-1702084.
We hope to see you all at next year's Rochester Engineering Society Gala to recognize EOY, YEOY, and scholarship winners.
Celebrating Engineering,
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