The department of engineering at Eastern Nazarene College has an exciting and active research program that encourages student involvement.
In line with ENC's commitment to social repsonsibility and ministry, the ENC engineering department focuses primarily on practical, humanitarian research efforts which tangibly help people around the world.
Take a look at some of our most recent and exciting projects below, or take a look at our GitHub page for more detail on the projects.
The principal research effort of the department of engineering at ENC is Earthquake forecasting.
Earthquake prediction is a branch of seismology that deals with the determination of parameters of future earthquakes to occur in a given region. Over the past 100 years, several papers have been published in the field of earthquake prediction which claim to correlate physical phenomena with seismic activity. These phenomena have become known as precursors, and they span a variety of disciplines. However, none of the studies conducted have provided sufficient statistical evidence for deterministic forecasting based on a precursor alone.
In the year 2000, Dr. Friedemann Freund published a paper which attempted to unite many of the observed precursors under the theory of epiconductor physics, which was developed out of his research into dissociation of ions in crystalline structures under extreme stress. Since under this theory all the precursors are related, the precursors should be able to be combined in order to provide greater statistical basis for the claim of correlation to seismic activity. ENC's research in this field has been toward accomplishing that goal, based on Dr. Freund's theory.
Dr. Pierre-Richard Cornely serves as the principal investegator for the engineering department's research.
Dr. Cornely’s background includes many roles in both the Corporate world and Academia. In Corporate, he has served as President and CEO of 374’s Electric Power Corporation, Project Manager at Synergy Incorporated and a Senior Systems Engineer at Raytheon. As an academic, Dr. Cornely has developed a novel class of algorithms, commonly known as: “Flexible Prior models”, to predict the variations in the Earth’s ionosphere in near real time. These algorithms have been quite useful for correcting Radar and Communication propagation errors in Civilian Aviation and in several other important military applications. Dr. Cornely has adapted these algorithms to earthquake forecasting, beginning the first of ENC's many contributions to the field.
Dr. Cornely has also taught at the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels in the Electrical Engineering departments at Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and at the Raytheon Learning Institute. Currently at Eastern Nazarene College, Dr. Cornely serves as Science & Technology Division Chair (2017: responsible for Physics, Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science, Environmental Science, Forensic Science, Chemistry and Biology).