Manufacturing Engineering
Elsie Lappin Receives the Georgia Institute of Transportation Engineers ScholarshipAward
Elsie Lappin, a senior in Civil Engineering, stood out as the sole recipient from Georgia
Southern for the Georgia Institute of Transportation Engineers (GAITE) Scholarship Award last
month. According to their website, the Georgia ITE has awarded over $250,000 to students in
Georgia through the GAITE scholarship. Read more about the GAITE scholarship here:
https://gaite.org/Scholarship.
Ms. Lappin recently collaborated on a groundbreaking GDOT project with Dr. Hossein
Taheri, assistant professor in the Department of Manufacturing Engineering, making her a
promising candidate for the scholarship. Amongst a pool of talent from Georgia Tech, Kennesaw
State, and UGA, Ms. Lappin’s work earned her the second-highest award amount of $3,000 at
the GAITE annual luncheon meeting.
Ms. Lappin is currently working with Dr. Taheri on the “Investigation of Ultrasonic
Nondestructive Testing for High Accuracy Defect Sizing and Localization in Civil Steel
Structures,” and will present this research in the 2024 PCEC Student Research Symposium on
April 19, 2024.
Metalcasting Industry Awards National Scholarships to GS Grad Students
Last November 18-20, 2021, six students from MechE and MfgE, along with Dr. Jingjing Qing, assistant professor of Manufacturing Engineering, and Dr. Mingzhi Xu, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, attended the Foundry Educational Foundation (FEF) College Industry Conference in Chicago. At the conference, 116 student delegates from 30 FEF certified and affiliated schools competed for 36 prestigious scholarships. Mr. Shelton Fowler and Mr. Samuel Holt, both graduate students in Mechanical Engineering, received $2,000 scholarships. Both Mr. Fowler and Mr. Holt are researching metalcasting with Dr. Qing and Dr. Xu. Last summer, Mr. Holt held an internship with Nemak, an aluminum die casting foundry in Wisconsin, while Mr. Fowler held an internship with J.C. Steele & Sons, a cast iron foundry in North Carolina.
FEF’s College Industry Conference is an annual metalcasting career fair exclusive for FEF certified and affiliated universities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. At this year’s conference, more than 160 job openings from 50 international companies were available for the student delegates. There are currently 21 FEF certified (a higher standard that affiliated) universities, of which Georgia Southern is one. Dr. Mingzhi Xu is the FEF Key Professor at Georgia Southern. Dr. Xu and Dr. Zing also advise the student chapter of the American Foundry Society (AFS) at Georgia Southern.
Back row, L to R: Dr. Mingzhi Xu, Shelton Fowler, Mark Thompson, Evan Carter
Allen E. Paulson College of Engineering and Computing • P.O. Box 7995 • Statesboro, Georgia 30460 • 912-478-7412 • engrcomp@georgiasouthern.edu
