New Mexico Tech honored

From the Mountain Mail in Socorro comes this story:

Tech One Of 25 ‘Hottest’
by: Thomas Guengerich For The Mountain Mail

Contact: mountainmailreporter@gmail.com

Current issues of Newsweek and Popular Science laud a small science and engineering university on the Rio Grande for its work in Homeland Security and explosive research.

New Mexico Tech is regularly featured as a “best buy” by the Princeton Review and nearly always gets a high ranking from U.S. News & World Report. Those rankings are based on Tech’s overall value and the quality of the education.

The recent headlines are generated from a small – but lucrative – division at the university – the Energetic Materials Research Testing Center, or EMRTC.

In its list of the 25 “hottest” universities, Newsweek named Tech as the university that is “Hottest in the War on Terror.”

The single paragraph said, “Tech, in a friendly desert town an hour south of Albuquerque, has reduced admissions red tape while quietly building, with a flood of federal dollars, one of the prime research centers for fighting the War on Terror. It is in some ways the Los Alamos of a new age, this time focusing on searching suitcases and disabling roadside explosives rather than building the

A-bomb. The school boasts a stylish collection of historic buildings with red tile roofs and a lush 18-hole golf course.”

In the September 2007 issue of Popular Science, Tech is featured in a two-page pictorial spread that highlights research opportunities for undergraduate students at EMRTC.

The spread includes a seven-frame sequence of a Buick sedan exploding, plus a large photo of Tech students Stephen Graves, Matthew Nelson and Matthew Majors examining the remains – or posing and pretending to examine the remains – of a 1978 Skylark destroyed by a five-pound bomb.

In the feature titled, “PopSci Goes To College,” Tech and EMRTC are praised as “one of the country’s foremost lab for explosives research,” and where “students work on every aspect of the research, including setting up shots, analyzing data and conceiving new tests.”