Julie Zimmerman, who received a joint doctorate degree last year from Engineering and Natural Resources and the Environment, has been named the recipient of the Distinguished Dissertation Award for exemplary original scholarship. She received the award this spring at a ceremony at the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies.
The purpose of the awards, each of which includes a $1,000 honorarium, is to recognize exceptional and unusually interesting work produced by doctoral students in the last phase of their graduate work. The award is presented through the support of Rackham and UMI Dissertation Publishing, a division of ProQuest Information & Learning. Of over 600 Ph.D. graduates from UM in 2003, she authored one of only eight dissertations to receive this distinction. She had previously received the Best Graduate Student Research Paper in 2003 from the Environmental Chemistry division of the American Chemical Society.
In keeping with the award's emphasis on significant scholarship, Zimmerman's dissertation, Formulation and Evaluation of Emulsifier Systems for Petroleum- and Bio-Based Semi-Synthetic Metalworking Fluids, focused on improving the environmental performance of manufacturing processes by designing a substitute green product that could compete with the current product in key performance criteria.
Following graduation, Zimmerman joined the Office of Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Chief among her responsibilities is managing grants to academia and small businesses in the areas of pollution prevention and sustainability. She is also managing several projects working to integrate sustainability concepts into engineering education, including the P3 Award.
"I felt very honored and appreciative that my dissertation was recognized by the U-M community," said Zimmerman. "This award also demonstrates that a joint PhD between the Schools of Engineering and Natural Resources and Environment can lead to scholarly work in both disciplines."
She also credited the breadth of her ME education for both the award and her current responsibilities. "My ME education was extremely helpful in preparing me to think systematically about design-designing everything from products and processes to policies to methods-to move towards the goal of sustainability by mutually promoting prosperity, benefiting people, and protecting the planet."
In support of Zimmerman's candidacy for the award, her advisor, ME Assistant Professor Steven J. Skerlos referred to the significant advances she had made during her studies. Chief among these was her exposure and correction of fundamental weaknesses in the ASTM standard methodology for metalworking fluid evaluation through the application of rigorous statistical design of experiments techniques. This was a critically important first step in her research, as her goal was to develop novel metalworking formulations with reduced environmental impact, while maintaining or improving metalworking fluid performance. Without this advancement, she would not have been able to distinguish metalworking fluid performance on a meaningful scientific basis. This was a well known problem in the metalworking fluid industry, and Zimmerman's advancement was quickly lauded by the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, which awarded her a coveted "Future Research in Tribology" prize in 2002 for this research.
Skerlos also cited her passion for service through the Environmental Engineering Student Body organization GREENPEaS and her active participation in the initial effort to build more formal educational ties between Engineering and the School of Natural Resources and the Environment (SNRE) at both the Masters and PhD level. "Both on-campus and off-campus, Dr. Zimmerman was a leader for positive change in the community during her years here in Ann Arbor," he wrote.
In perhaps the highest praise an educator can bestow on a student, Skerlos wrote, "She has had a major impact on the research and education climate in both U-M Engineering and SNRE. Her energy, creativity, leadership, enthusiasm, and passion for research and education related to environmental improvement are unmatched by any student that I have worked with or have known since coming to U-M."