Carnegie Mellon's Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) now has a small office in Washington D.C. to serve as a base for educational activities, professional outreach, and research.  Opened during the past summer, the new office was officially inaugurated with an Open House on September 18. 
     The office is staffed by Office Director Alexandra Carr on a part-time basis.  Carr, a Carnegie Mellon alum, completed a B.S. in Engineering and Public Policy (ChemE option) in 1981.  Since graduating, she has worked as an environmental engineer, earned a law degree at Duke University, and spent ten years working with Washington-based non-governmental organizations primarily on environmental and energy policy. 
     "By having a consistent presence, we hope to increase interaction between Washington policymakers and our students and faculty,"  Carr says.  "In addition to the obvious benefits to the educational experience of students in EPP, we will use the office to gain greater input from the policy community in shaping the department's  research, and to better communicate the results of EPP's work in national policy circles." 
     Located at 1200 New York Avenue, NW, in the heart of downtown Washington, the office occupies a two-room suite on the third floor of the new headquarters building for the AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Science.  Because the $69-million 12-story office com-plex was built with environmentally sensitive design and construction methods, it uses about one-half of the energy of typical office buildings of its size. 
     During the past summer the office served as a base for the first two Tom Johnson Fellows from EPP (see box on page 4). This new endowed fellowship will support EPP students to spend time in Washington, DC studying and addressing problems of public policy in which science and technology are of central importance.  The Fellowship honors the late Tom Johnson, a Ph.D. in Applied Physics, faculty member at West Point, and a former Executive Director of the White House Science Council.  Johnson was about to begin a new venture as a full professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy when he died of cancer in 1990 at the age of 46. 
    Other current activities in the office 
 

     Dr. Urmila Diwekar (EPP) is beginning new work on pollu-tion prevention in the chemical process  industry.  In addition, she and Prof. Ed Rubin (EPP/MechE) are expanding their similar work on conventional and advanced energy systems. 
With support from NSF, Diwekar is developing tools for designing and analyzing pollution prevention options for complex chemical processes.  Building on earlier work that she and Rubin did for DOE, the new research addresses process synthesis, probabilistic modeling, multi-objective optimization, and real world applications.  In July, Diwekar and Rubin hosted  the first meeting of an advisory board of 25 representatives from industry and government laboratories.  Board members expressed interest in applying improved process design methods to a variety of specific case studies of interest, as well as in refining and developing the methods further.  Applications identified as interesting by board members include: estimating emissions and improving performance of batch processes where solids are involved; synthesizing complex plants under uncertainty; and 
 

 
 

 
The EPP Washington office includes a small conference room with videoconferencing link to the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh.