"If you have those skills, there are jobs waiting," says Phil Calabrese, a mechanical engineer and director of I.B.M.'s real estate engineering and construction unit.
His mother, a travel agent and interior decorator, left Cuba in 1961; his father, a mechanical engineer and director of Latin American and European sales for an air-conditioning company, left in 1966.
When a tomato is identified as being ripe, the robot uses its vision system to locate the fruit on the vine and pick it with a mechanical arm.Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Distributed Robotics Laboratory, says there are a number of ways in which automated systems could improve crops and "remove some of the hard tedious work from greenhouses".
Tilman Walterfang Tilman Walterfang, the German mechanical engineer and director of a large concrete-supply company who discovered the wrecks, created a new company to pursue a salvage project, dubbed Seabed Explorations.
Conference organizer Anil Agarwal, a mechanical engineer and director of the Center for Science and Environment, praised Norphel's "simple but elegant technology," and Indian President K. R. Narayanan hailed him as the "invisible rural engineer".
For example, researchers are developing "smart" biomaterials such as temperature-sensing hydrogels that can respond biologically to environmental conditions by changing their biomechanical or drug-releasing properties, says Seeram Ramakrishna, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Center for Nanofibers & Nanotechnology at the National University of Singapore.
Linda Griffith, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering and director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center at MIT, was voted one of the annual "Brilliant 10" young scientists by Popular Science in 2002 for her ground-breaking research in tissue engineering and her vision for creating the human body on a chip.
His father, a mechanical engineer, is the director of operations at Dilon Technologies, a manufacturer of medical imaging systems in Newport News.
"If you do extreme sports, you don't want a mechanical watch," said Fabien Tref, director of Exquisite Timepieces, a watch salon in Naples, Florida.
On Wednesday night, a resident Tajura called a journalist to report that five people had been arrested leaving a mosque on Saturday, including Mohammed Safi, the director of mechanical engineering at a university here.
