Iowa State can sometimes be a tough sell to prospective faculty.

The school’s reputation as a land-grant university and its location in the Midwest can be excellent selling points. But the relative isolation of Ames from other large academic institutions may be a strike against the university for families with two adults seeking research positions, current faculty say. Iowa State’s emphasis on faculty excellence in both teaching and researching can also turn away job-seekers.

But the ISU College of Engineering boasts some of the best talent nationwide among female faculty, said James Melsa, dean of the college.

“We’re very committed to increasing the diversity of our faculty,” he said. “[Women] are a growing part of the pool of Ph.D. graduates.”

The college’s “Blueprint for Excellence” Web site, at www.eng.iastate.edu/blueprint/ objectives.html, lists increasing the ratio of women faculty to 20 percent among college objectives for 2003.

Some female professors said the attractions of Ames in general, and the College of Engineering in particular, brought each of them here from all over the United States and the world.

A far-from-exhaustive listing of Iowa State’s best includes Julie Dickerson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering; Surya Mallapragada, associate professor of chemical engineering; and Sarah Ryan, associate professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering.

Computers and fill-in-the-blank

Some of Dickerson’s research combines her field of computer engineering with the seemingly unrelated biological sciences.

“It’s an area that requires a lot of equipment,” she said.

Dickerson, who performed her undergraduate and graduate studies in the agreeable climates of Los Angeles and San Diego, said she found the platform she needed at Iowa State.

“[I came] because of the Virtual Reality Applications Center that was here,” she said.

Like many engineering faculty, Dickerson takes advantage of the C6 and C4 virtual reality facilities distinctive to Iowa State.

She said she uses the unique data presentation available in a virtual reality simulation to deal with the volume of information used in bioinformatics or modeling of biological systems.

“You have about 20,000 to 30,000 data points,” she said. “How do you tell a human the results?”

Jo Etzel, graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, works with Dickerson as part of the interdisciplinary program in bioinformatics and computational biology. “These experiments can generate a whole lot of data very fast,” she said.

Dickerson’s work with signal processing is a big help in learning how to analyze data, Etzel said.

Much of Dickerson’s work makes use of intelligent systems. “You’re trying to make [the computer] behave intelligently,” she said. Dickerson said the easiest way to simulate intelligence is by setting up a set of rules that describe the circumstances of a task, a process called “fuzzy logic.”

“If you’re driving a car, it’s knowing when to brake, when to steer and teaching that to the computer,” she said. “Computers are stupid; they have no sense. Once you’ve taught it a task, you make it into an optimization problem.”

Dickerson said one of objectives to her projects is to try to reproduce the growth processes of a plant in a simulation. Once information about the plant’s attributes are programmed, she said, testing and simulations begin on the conditions that aren’t known.

“One of this things we are trying to do is look at hypotheses,” Dickerson said. “What would it mean if this gene affected a particular process?”

Early success story

Mallapragada has earned more than enough awards in her brief time at Iowa State to fill a mantel.

In 2000, she received the Faculty Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review magazine named her one of its top 100 innovators in 2002. She achieved tenure at Iowa State one year ahead of the traditional schedule.

Mallapragada, however, is eager to distribute the credit for her accomplishments to her colleagues and students.

“Students play such an important role in my work,” she said.

Mallapragada’s hometown is Chennai, India. She said after obtaining a degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, she decided she wanted to study more about her field and came to the United States.

Mallapragada is responsible for several developments in biomedical engineering in recent years. One of the more recent developments involves using biodegradable polymers surgically to guide the regrowth of nerve cells.

Mike Determan, graduate student in chemical engineering and research assistant for Mallapragada, said he learns techniques by working on the problems she gives to her research team.

“She defines the project,” Determan said. “She suggests several experiments to do, but it’s up to grad students to design [most] experiments.”

Mallapragada had a similar explanation for her role. “I don’t consider research and teaching as separate,” she said.

That distinction makes a difference, Determan said.

“What you learn in grad school is how to research — to take a big problem and break it up into lots of little problems to solve,” he said. “You set your own direction within the scope of [Mallapragada’s] idea.”

Mallapragada said she tries to let students explore in her classes, as well. “Last semester, I was teaching a course I had taught before in polymeric biomaterials,” she said. “I was teaching a new lab associated with the course, a problem-based learning lab funded through the National Science Foundation.

“In [this] case, the problem is to grow a piece of skin,” Mallapragada said.

She said that her philosophy was not to tell the class what to do, and that most students were able to find a solution on their own.

“I was more of a coach,” she said. “We gave them nothing; they had to come and ask us the right questions.”

Engineering and shopping

As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ryan worked to discover the best way for shopping malls to rent out space.

“It was a consulting project for a real estate developer,” she said. “First, they get the big department stores to anchor the corners. Then, they have to figure out who to rent the space to.”

Ryan said that optimization problem is an example of the ways research in industrial engineering affects most aspects of life.

“A lot of people go into [industrial engineering] wanting to be in management,” she said.

Studying industrial engineering teaches students to have a different perspective when looking at traditional problems of production and logistics, Ryan said.

“I think you would tend to look more at the technical constraints,” she said.

Ryan said her research deals to a large extent with process improvement problems. One such project deals with issues like capacity expansion.

“[Companies] might have to forecast demand increasing and forecast increasing capacity to match,” she said. “We can use mathematical models to make those decisions.”

Ryan said an activity she is enjoying this year is working on a committee that uses a planning grant to find ways to better students’ experience within their major.

“We’ll give the students more real world problems,” she said.

Real world problems such as distributing space in shopping malls.

“[When] I go into a shopping mall, sometimes I wonder, ‘Are they meeting their optimization principles?’ “