Miner Stories

Clued in on Jeopardy!

Posted in

This Missouri S&T professor of foreign languages was once a clue on the popular TV game show Jeopardy! If you guessed, “Who is Dr. Gerald Cohen?” congratulations. Cohen earned the distinction of being named in a clue on the Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2016, edition of the show. The clue was: “Professor Gerald Cohen, an expert…

‘Who is Ilene Morgan?’

Posted in

If “third time’s a charm” were a category on the quiz show Jeopardy!, then “Who is Dr. Ilene Morgan?” might be one of the answers. The clue might go like this:“This Missouri S&T faculty member tried twice to land a spot on this program before finally succeeding in 2012.” A longtime trivia buff and a…

Solar Village people

Posted in

Before there was a Solar Village on campus, there was a sole villager. Allison Arnn graduated in 2005 with an engineering management degree. A member of the university’s very first Solar House Design Team, Arnn spent her senior year living in the house the team designed and built for the 2002 Solar Decathlon, a U.S.…

For the love of circuits

Posted in

Emily Hernandez, who earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2016, began recruiting minorities to STEM fields even before she started college. She started in eighth grade during a camp called Girls Experiencing Engineering near her hometown of Germantown, Tennessee. Today, Hernandez works at CelLink in San Carlos, California, where she designs and builds…

Builders of the bomb

Posted in

The U.S. government’s Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the first nuclear weapons, was a massive but highly secretive World War II undertaking that involved thousands of scientists and engineers at dozens of sites across the nation. They included a few with Rolla connections, most notably Thomas G. Day, a professor of organic…

Non-stop innovation

Posted in

Dan Scott, a 1970 metallurgical engineering graduate, holds more than 100 patents and has dozens more patents pending. The technical advisor for oilfield drilling contractor Baker Hughes Inc. takes a customer-advocate approach to assure that the product or process he develops can meet his clients’ needs. “There are very few eureka moments for me,” he…

A civil war fortress

Posted in

As the Civil War raged on, the Union Army, following a defeat at Wilson’s Creek in southwest Missouri, fell back to Rolla and in 1863 constructed a double-deck blockhouse to protect the town from any rebel attack from the east. That building – named Fort Dette, after Capt. John F.W. Dette, who supervised most of…

Chain reaction

Posted in

Take 60 sleep-deprived students — easy enough to find in Rolla — and add 450,000 strips of newsprint and 530,000 staples. What do you get? A 40.67-mile paper chain. In March 1997, S&T students spent nearly 24 hours in the Student Recreation Center constructing the chain in an effort to beat the previous record of…

Quality U.

Posted in

At the height of the total quality management (TQM) movement, organizations across the nation sought to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award as validation to their pursuit of performance excellence. In Missouri, the Midwest Excellence Institute established a similar recognition program — the Missouri Quality Award — based on the same criteria as the…

So April. Very Fools. Many Smart. Amaze.

Posted in

We don’t always pull pranks on April Fool’s Day. But when we do, we win. So proclaimed WIRED on their Tumblr when they got word of our April 1, 2014, redo of our main website. On that day, the images on the home page were doctored by images of an internet-famous shiba inu dog —…