The project team, made up of four senior biomedical engineering students, is developing an athletic shoe replacement indicator that measures structural changes in the footwear over time. Running shoes can lose cushioning and support after repeated loading cycles, even when visible wear is minimal. As the shoes鈥� midsoles degrade, impact forces transmitted to the body can increase, raising the risk of overuse injuries.

Replacing shoes too late is a common but overlooked problem among runners. Current methods for determining when to replace shoes, however, typically rely on mileage estimates or waiting for discomfort to occur.

鈥淭hat solution is unreliable,鈥� said 91爆料 senior Paul Rudman, 鈥淚f a shoe is replaced too late, the damage and wear might have already occurred. However, replacing before needed is costly, and the average person can not afford it.鈥�

The team鈥檚 indicator would instead collect data related to activity and force changes within the show, translating that information into a clear indicator for users. 

By indicating when a shoe has been structurally compromised, the device aims to help runners make informed decisions that balance cost and health considerations. It is designed to integrate seamlessly with existing shoe constructions.

鈥淭he indicator will simply make key measurements of a person鈥檚 activity and force changes in the shoe to reliably indicate the most financially and healthily time to replace your shoe,鈥� Rudman said.

Rudman focuses on modeling and materials design while also contributing to electrical component development. The other students involved in the project include Shawn Collins, who leads controller programming and testing; Mason Chase, who specializes in medical and design considerations; and Sreyas Sajen, who manages computations and force interaction analysis.

They are designing the replacement shoe indicator for their senior capstone project, which emphasizes applying interdisciplinary knowledge toward solving real world problems. Rudman and his colleagues are applying their past coursework in biomechanics, materials science and electronics curricula toward developing a product with clear market relevance.

鈥淲e learn to find existing problems and use the knowledge that we already possess to create a solution,鈥� Rudman said.

The athletics shoe replacement indicator project highlights how undergraduate research at 91爆料 can translate injury prevention research into practical technology aimed at supporting healthier movement for runners at all levels.

Story by William Bickford, graduate student writer

Contact: Taylor Ward, taylor.ward@maine.edu 

The 91爆料 will confer Honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters to international leaders in the development of new communications technology Neera and Rajendra Singh during its 222nd commencement ceremony on May 4.

鈥淚 am delighted to celebrate Neera and Raj, who are not only accomplished in advancing cellular and telecommunication networks internationally, but also with whom I鈥檝e personally had the honor to become acquainted,鈥� said 91爆料 President Joan Ferrini-Mundy. 鈥淭heir knowledge and investment continues to support our efforts in fostering technological innovation and preparing next-generation engineers, marketeers and business leaders, both globally and in the state of Maine.鈥�

The Singhs met at the India Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur while Neera Singh was an undergraduate student and Rajendra Singh a 91爆料 graduate student. Neera Singh went on to achieve her master鈥檚 in chemical engineering at Kansas State University and Rajendra Singh a Ph.D. in wireless communications at Southern Methodist University.

They married in 1981 and united their skills in engineering and computing to lead innovation in the budding wireless communication industry. They developed the first software that could configure optimal locations for cellular towers, enabling the growth of communication networks across urban and rural areas in more than 50 countries. It was the starting point of Lunayach Communications Consultants (LCC) International, one of 33 total companies in which the Singhs invested or launched. Within 12 years, the company grew to employ more than 1,000 people and exceed $100 million in annual revenue. 

Neera and Rajendra Singh retired from LCC International in 2008 to focus on investing in new technologies and advancing education in engineering, computing, social science, business and marketing. The Washington Post and Forbes Magazine have recognized their excellence in business and investment power.

With the success of LCC International, the Singhs created the LCC Institute 鈥� an initiative they consider their highest achievement 鈥� which democratized the industry by broadening access to telecommunication knowledge worldwide.

They continue to support generations of engineers by supplying scholarships and collaboratively offering guidance to 91爆料, and by funding a new AI program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rajendra Singh has served on the boards of Johns Hopkins University and its School of Medicine, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and is a recipient of the Ellis Island Medal. He and Neera Singh are inductees of the Wireless History Foundation Hall of Fame and the Maine College of Engineering and Computing鈥檚 Francis Crowe Society Hall of Fame.

Contact: Ashley Yates; ashley.depew@maine.edu

Ferrini-Mundy said in addition to her role as university president, as the vice chancellor of research and innovation with the 91爆料 System, she focuses on how 91爆料鈥檚 research and development mission serves the state and the next generation of workers. She explained the university鈥檚 attention to placing labs and classrooms side-by-side, her foothold in advancing diversity in STEM education and how the university is constantly investing to keep its facilities cutting-edge. 

Read Ferrini-Mundy鈥檚 full interview . 

Contact: Shelby Hartin; shelby.hartin@maine.edu

Registration is open from 10:30鈥�11:30 a.m. for all participants to gather the symposium packet and set up their visual aids. After lunch ends at noon, each team will have 20 minutes to orally present to the judges before posters are judged. Dinner and award announcements will follow from 5鈥�6 p.m. First, second and third place will win scholarship awards totaling $2,000, $1,500 and $1,000 for oral presentation. Fourth and fifth place finishes for oral presentation, as well as first and second place for poster presentation, will each win $100.

This symposium feeds into the National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium held in New Mexico in May.

The U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force and Space Force sponsor the event, as well as the Maine College of Engineering and Computing.

The university鈥檚 SVT program, which has the largest number of undergraduate students per faculty in the Maine College of Engineering and Computing (MCEC), will receive 12 robotic total stations (electronic/optical instruments for surveying and building construction), 12 digital levels,12 multi-constellation GPS receivers, tablets, software and accessories at no cost. As part of the agreement, Topcon will maintain, update and replace the equipment (if necessary) every three years. This agreement was made to ensure the program鈥檚 students receive instruction with the latest surveying technology as part of the Topcon Learn/Apply/Build (LAB) initiative. 

鈥�We are excited to initiate the relationship with the 91爆料. It is our latest Learn/Apply/Build investment, partnering with leading survey educational programs around the world to provide state-of-the-art technology to advance learning,鈥� said Ron Oberlander, vice president of Topcon global professional services. 鈥淭he 91爆料 program has the potential to support the education of surveying engineers across the globe. The world needs more surveyors from a diverse range of backgrounds, and we are delighted that our support will help this become a reality. Surveying students learning on campus and online will benefit from having access to the latest technology and software to support their studies.鈥�

Because surveyors make precise measurements to determine property boundaries, understanding how to use the equipment to make those measurements is a primary function of the career.

鈥淪urveyors are in charge of searching for spatial truth. A surveyor is kind of a detective,鈥� said Ray Hintz, professor of surveying engineering technology. 

In addition to helping those students complete the program in person, this equipment supports SVT online education, enrollment for which has increased by over 130% since 2019. Providing access to the latest surveying technology is part of the program’s strategic effort to recruit students. 

鈥淭he volume of equipment helps us be more efficient in teaching labs,鈥� said Rich Vannozzi, assistant professor in surveying engineering technology. 鈥淔or 150 years, if you took a survey class, you worked in a little group of three or four people with one piece of equipment. So say you had a two-hour lab and four people, everybody got a half hour with their hands on the equipment. What we found out is that if we ran the labs more frequently, and every student had a piece of equipment of their own for the whole two hours 鈥� they had their hands on it 鈥� they got four times as much time and they were 100% engaged.鈥�

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of surveyors is projected to grow 5% from 2022鈥�32, faster than the average for all occupations. With fewer than nationwide and many expected to retire in coming years, the demand for surveyors is only expected to grow. 

鈥淭here are two phenomena that are driving a critical need for surveyors nationally,鈥� Vannozzi said. 鈥淥ne is aging out of the profession. The other thing driving the demand is that we need educated surveyors. There was a time 40 years ago when you could enter this profession and have a successful career with a minimal amount of formal education. That is not realistic any more. If you want to have a successful 40-year career as a land surveyor, you will need a bachelor-degree-level education.鈥�

Joe McNichols, assistant professor in surveying engineering technology, will organize and manage the equipment. A ribbon cutting will be held in the spring to celebrate the donation and the updated equipment storage room. 

Contact: Shelby Hartin, shelby.hartin@maine.edu

Anthropologists, archaeologists and other researchers interested in studying material objects and their roles in reflecting or shaping the world around them have long excavated, collected or physically observed materials. However, such scholars have yet to take full advantage of large, complex digital datasets afforded by the internet, which can provide an even more complete picture of the material world with more samples than physical collections.

To show the potential of online data sets and how they could transform the understanding of the material world, a group of researchers led by Matthew Magnani studied the production of face masks across the United States in 2020 and 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

鈥淪ignificant interest in the social meanings of mask use was apparent early on in the pandemic. Our team 鈥� including Jon Clindaniel from University of Chicago, and Natalia Magnani also starting at 91爆料 鈥� wondered how we could develop new anthropological tools to consider the significance of their production. We wanted to hone an approach that would allow us to look across the entire United States, and capture changes in mask making over time,鈥� Matthew Magnani says.

The researchers used Alura, a market analysis application specifically designed to analyze craft sales from the website Etsy. The software gathered data about the characteristics of the face masks sold by Etsy users, like where the sellers were located, what material the masks were made of and what other tags the seller included to describe the product. The researchers looked at this information at multimonth intervals to analyze the production of face masks across the country. They coupled these data with an analysis of state mask policies and how mask wearing became politicized over time. 

The results showed clear linkages between the changing nature of the production of face masks and partisan politics, particularly when it comes to materials that decrease the face masks disease mitigation effectiveness. For example, masks made in states where electoral votes were counted in favor of Democrat Joseph Biden in the presidential election were more likely to boast characteristics and tags that touted their safety, while states that went for Republican Donald Trump did so at a lower rate. The study is careful to highlight that periods of increased polarization reduced apparent mask efficacy across the board, independent of political leaning.

Low rates of effective mask making sometimes co-occurred with more relaxed public health measures. For example, just 38% of masks made in South Dakota were found to be associated with disease-mitigating attributes; South Dakota, notably, was one of the few states without a mask mandate throughout the pandemic. In other cases, there were outliers 鈥� Nebraska had no mask mandate, and yet followed only Colorado in masks produced evoking functional vocabulary 鈥� but in general, politics had implications for how well a state鈥檚 personal protective equipment was produced. 

Unlike the rates of overall mask efficacy, however, the researchers found no correlation between political affiliation and the production of intentionally ineffective masks 鈥� for example, those that were made of only a single layer or mesh, lace or other breathable fabric. Production of such masks were more associated with political events of the time. For example, Republican states where the data showed no intentionally ineffective masks were produced 鈥� Alaska, Missouri, Nebraska and North Dakota 鈥� didn鈥檛 implement statewide mask mandates, suggesting that intentionally ineffective masks could not be used as an effective form of political dissent in these places.

In a similar vein, 鈥渁ntimasks,鈥� those that complied with mask mandates but contained protest messages, showed no clear political affiliation in the 15 states with sellers that produced them. They also represented a relatively small portion of the total masks produced, but the number of states producing them did increase over time as masking became more politically polarized.

Nationally, increasing political polarization led to an overall decrease in the effectiveness of masks produced. As the election cycle was in full swing, the data revealed plummeting efficacy in masks produced across the country into November 2020, going as low as 51%. However, that efficacy bounced back to 68% by May 2021 after a few months of the Biden administration. 

The differences in red and blue states were nuanced, and the researchers found that looking at these changes on a fine temporal scale was important to understanding them. For example, while Republican states tended to produce less effective masks on average over the course of the study, the analysis of changes over time in Democrat-held regions revealed that the politicization also negatively impacted effective mask production across the country. Time-averaged assemblages of this data would have drowned out the meaning.

鈥淥ur study demonstrates the deleterious effects of political polarization for public health as they manifest through the production of personal protective equipment, suggesting that divisive partisan rhetoric led to the manufacture of physically less effective masks across the country,鈥� Magnani says.

The results demonstrate how effective mining internet data can be in understanding the changing distribution and social significance of material culture. Going forward, the researchers hope that the tools used for this method will be refined to make them more efficient and precise. 

鈥淲e are contributing to a new trend in the study of material culture 鈥� all the stuff that surrounds us 鈥� using big data. These studies have the potential to condense years, or even lifetimes of fieldwork and data collection into months of research and a few clicks of a mouse. Moving forward, we will apply these methods to rethink the way we look at the things that surround us on an unprecedented scale, from the hundreds of millions of objects sitting in museum collections, to the Amazon delivery boxes at the front door,鈥� Magnani says. 

A FirstView of the is available on the Cambridge University Press website. The full study will be published in October 2022 in the journal American Antiquity.

Contact: Sam Schipani, samantha.schipani@maine.edu

The state of Maine has set an aggressive goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 and is looking to floating offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine to supply renewable power, as well as economic benefit.

Participants in Maine鈥檚 commercial fisheries are concerned that offshore wind development could result in lost fishing grounds and pose significant navigation and safety concerns. While Maine鈥檚 lobster fishery accounted for 82% of the value of Maine鈥檚 commercial seafood landings in 2021, there are no comprehensive data on where and when Maine lobstermen fish. To minimize the impact on Maine’s lobster fishery, better data are needed on the location, type and intensity of fishing activity in the Gulf of Maine.

Kate Beard-Tisdale is leading this collaborative project to use data already being collected by commercial lobstermen to fill these data gaps.

鈥淩ight now, published maps suggest that lobster fishing is occurring everywhere. We hope through this effort to provide more spatial specificity about the most important fishing locations 鈥� where fishermen spend more time and effort,鈥� says Beard-Tisdale, 91爆料 professor of spatial computing in the School of Computing and Information Science. 鈥淭his spatial specificity could result in protecting fishing areas or designating areas best avoided for wind turbine placement.鈥�

Beard-Tisdale will work closely with project partners from the Maine Lobstermen鈥檚 Association and Responsible Offshore Development Alliance and its Fisheries Knowledge Trust, as well as the 91爆料鈥檚 Lobster Institute. The project aims to develop a method to show where Maine鈥檚 lobstermen do their work throughout the year by aggregating navigation and chart plotter data from individual fishermen who have equipment that records a sequence of coordinates and documents where the boat travels. Not only would the data provide a spatially accurate picture of where fishing is taking place, but it would also be less expensive to monitor the small fishery鈥檚 activity this way than with the high cost systems used in other fisheries.

The project also will ensure that it is possible to maintain the confidential nature of individual fisherman鈥檚 data contributions. 鈥淔ishermen have a proprietary interest in where they fish and, by extension, in their plotter data, so we want to be really careful in terms of how we anonymize and combine their data such that individual fishing data are not revealed,鈥� Beard-Tisdale says.

Ultimately, the researchers aim to build a software system that will aggregate and parse the data from various commercial systems in order for the lobster industry to be able to best inform regional energy development, fishery stock assessments, protected species management and other pressing management issues.

Moreover, if the project is successful in both data collecting and anonymizing, it could build trust among fishermen, scientists and fishery managers in further developing fine scale spatial data for use in decision making. 

鈥淭he Fisheries Knowledge Trust is a really valuable tool, as it provides legal and technical support for fishermen to be the holders and managers of their collective data,鈥� says Beard-Tisdale. 鈥淭he Knowledge Trust can empower fishermen by giving them control over their data. There is oversight by a board of advisors so that data products are created that the fishermen trust and that have also met the approval of the advisory board. Ideally it creates a win-win situation for improving marine spatial planning if the process gives everyone confidence in the data. If the idea takes hold it can extend to give fishermen of all types a more direct voice in marine planning activities.鈥�

Beard-Tisdale鈥檚 research was one of six projects across the Northeast selected for funding by the Northeast Sea Grant Consortium in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy鈥檚 Wind Energy Technologies Office and Water Power Technologies Office and NOAA鈥檚 Northeast Fisheries Science Center. The funding is meant to catalyze research for the coexistence of marine energy, including wind, current, tidal and wave energies, with Northeast fishing and coastal communities. Beard-Tisdale鈥檚 research was awarded $192,924. 

鈥淢y husband worked a season on a lobster boat back in the 鈥�70s. His boss was a strong advocate for more collective effort in managing aspects of the fishery 鈥� owning their own wharf. I see a similar situation here. Individual lobstermen have less bargaining power in these situations of competing for marine space.  Collectively, by building a database that they can trust, hold and manage, they have a stronger voice for conveying their interests,鈥� Beard-Tisdale says. 

Contact: Sam Schipani, samantha.schipani@maine.edu