Bio
EC 1233
Email
305.348.9978

Mayren Echeverria, Postdoctoral Associate

Dr. Echeverria is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Applied Research Center (ARC) at Florida International University. She received her Ph.D. (“Cum Laude” and International Mention) and M.S. from the University of Vigo (Spain) and a B.S. from the University of Matanzas (Cuba), all in Chemical Engineering. Her Ph.D. Thesis got the Extraordinary Doctorate Award by the University of Vigo (Vigo, 2015). She also received the Award of the Cuban Academy of Sciences for her participation as a coauthor of the work “Contribución a los estudios de la corrosión atmosférica y los sistemas de protección bajo la influencia del aerosol marino” (La Havana, 2016).

Dr. Echeverria has more than 10 years of experience as a researcher in the field of materials engineering, corrosion and protection, working in recognized research groups in United States (Dr. K. Lau), Spain (Dr. X.R. Nóvoa and Dr. C. Abreu) and Cuba (Dr. Carlos Echeverria). Her research interests include corrosion of infrastructures (concrete, grout segregation, steel components), microbiologically influence corrosion, coatings, composites, atmospheric corrosion, ionic liquids for electrochemical studies, etc. The results of her investigations have been spread by publication of articles in different international top-ranked peer-reviewed journals and the participation in international conferences. She has participated in national and international technological innovation projects and has served as a reviewer of several top-rank journals. During these years she has accumulated experience in teaching and tutoring students (undergraduate and graduate).

Currently, at ARC, she participates in a research project on high level nuclear waste management with the Department of Energy (DOE), addressing issues related to concrete infrastructure degradation and the search of adequate corrosion protection technologies for future deployment at strategic facilities located in Savannah River Site.

Hansell Gonzalez (Chemistry)

I’m delighted to share this excellent news with our community (the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, Savannah River National Laboratory, FIU ARC and FIU Chemistry). Today, our DOE Fellow, Mr. Hansell Gonzalez-Raymat successfully passed his dissertation defense for a Ph.D. in chemistry. Hansell graduated from FIU in fall 2012 with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. After being accepted as a Ph.D. graduate student, Hansell was also competitively selected as a DOE Fellow in fall 2013. This has been an incredible journey for Hansell. As a DOE Fellow, he conducted DOE EM related research at ARC and completed two summer internships at DOE’s Savannah River National Laboratory.  He has published his research in peer-reviewed journals and presented at numerous conferences.  He also won the best Student Poster Track at the annual Waste Management Symposia 2018. His research was developed at ARC in close collaboration with our colleagues at SRNL. In fact, one of his Ph.D. committee members was his summer mentor from SRNL (Dr. Miles Denham) during both of his internships. Hansell is an outstanding young man. Right after graduation, this fall, he’ll start his professional career as a Sr. Scientist at Savannah River National Lab in Aiken, SC. Hansell’s story reflects so very well the mission and vision of FIU’s DOE Fellows program, training and mentoring the next generation of engineers and scientists. This would not have been possible without Hansell’s incredible dedication and drive, as well as the tremendous support from DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, Savannah River National Lab, FIU Chemistry Department (Dr. Yong Cai – Hansell’s major professor) and his mentors at ARC (Dr. Yelena Katsenovich, Dr. Ravi Gudavalli, Dr. Hilary Emerson, and Dr. Leonel Lagos). 

We wish Hansell the very best of luck as he embarks on new adventures. GANAS !!!!! 

Dr. Leonel Lagos

ShellHacks is a recently-created annual hackathon held at Florida International University (FIU) during the month of September. The goal at each hackathon is to work in small teams to “hack together” a novel solution to a problem with the prospect to win prizes, recognition or both.

This year, members of ARC’s DoD Cyber Fellows team participated in ShellHacks 2018. This group consisted of Valerie Guerra, Andrew Santezenea and Paul Molina working on the Department of Defense (DoD) – Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) sponsored research project.  Victoria Guerra, an undergraduate computer science student at FIU, joined as the fourth member of the team.

This team chose to participate in the Oath challenge. Oath is a subsidiary of Cellco Partnership, otherwise known as Verizon Wireless, and is tasked with overseeing its parent company’s Yahoo and AOL acquisitions. Yahoo acquired Tumblr, a social media platform where users post personal blogs, in 2013.

The Oath challenge specifically required the team to use the Tumblr API in a unique and novel way. The team responded to this challenge by creating TumblrAngel, an active sentinel which monitors users’ posts to detect whether or not they are a danger to themselves or others. When such warning signs are detected, the sentinel sends a private message to the user with a list of resources that they may contact for help.

To accomplish this development task, the team first extracted recent posts made to the Tumblr API and ran sentiment analysis on the contents. The extraction mechanism was created by Paul Molina and was sent to a data analysis module created by Valerie Guerra and Andrew Santezenea. The tools developed by the team were written entirely in Python and utilized knowledge gained at the Applied Research Center to complete the challenge.

Bio
EC 2184
Email
305.348.0511

Muhammad Hakim, Application Developer

Mr. Muhammad Hakim is an Application Developer at Florida International University’s Applied Research Center (ARC). He has received his B.S in Computer Science from Bangladesh University of Eng. & Tech. and M.S in Computer Science from Florida International University. Hakim was actively involved in cybersecurity research during his academic years. He also holds multi-year industry experience working as a Software Engineer. Currently, at ARC, Hakim is involved in the Department of Defense (DOD) funded research project. He leads the virtualization team to develop advanced threat detection and mitigation techniques on a virtualized environment. He is also actively mentoring graduate and undergraduate students as part of the Cyber Fellow program by providing them training and technical support. Along with his work at ARC, he is also interested in virtualization, cloud security and IoT security.

Dr. Yelena Katsenovich and a post doc associate Dr. Daria Boglaienko attended the Goldschmidt Conference in Boston on August 12-17 where they presented research conducted at the Applied Research Center at Florida International University in support of the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management and the Department of Energy Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program (MSIPP) managed by the Savannah River National Laboratory.

Dr. Boglaienko presented results of experiments conducted to investigate the removal efficiency of technetium-99 from the liquid phase via reductive sorption of soluble Tc(VII). This work is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Tatiana Levitskaia from PNNL. The study is developing a potential method to separate the radioactive contaminant (⁹⁹Tc) from off-gas condensate to be recovered from the low activity waste vitrification facility at the DOE Hanford Site.

Dr. Katsenovich presented an overview of the research that the Soil and Groundwater Research Group at ARC is conducting to examine the effect of aqueous chemistry on the removal of uranium in synthetic pore water solutions as well as the impact of sediments and mineral phases. The Hanford Site is currently considering injection of reactive gases such as ammonia to decrease uranium mobility in the vadose zone via creation of alkaline pore water conditions. This research is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Jim Szecsody from PNNL.