Aerospace engineering alumnus Zach Olshenske helped to built this telerobot, allowing a boy to throw the first pitch at a Yankees-Athletics baseball game without being at the stadium.

Hall of Fame baseball player Tom Seaver is slated to toss the ceremonial first pitch in this year’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game on Tuesday in New York.

Earlier this season, a very different – and special – first pitch occurred.

Nick LeGrande, a boy with baseball dreams, has been sidelined with aplastic anemia, a life-threatening disease that’s damaged the blood stem cells in his bone marrow.

The Oakland Athletics invited the now 14-year-old Kansas City resident to toss out the first pitch on June 12 before their game against the New York Yankees. The problem was the disease left LeGrande’s immune system so weakened that he couldn’t travel.

To accomplish the feat, Google Fiber constructed mini baseball field at its Kansas City campus and a telerobotic pitching machine that was flown to Oakland.

Assisting with the telerobot was Deeplocal, an innovation studio and ad agency in Pittsburgh, Pa. Zach Olshenske, a 2008 aerospace engineering alumnus, served as the lead mechanical engineer on the team that designed and built the robot.

Olshenke said the telerobot was designed to mimic LeGrande’s movement. “For the most part, it was an adjustable pneumatic catapult that was actuated by young Nick’s motions.”

He continued, “The project was made possible by employing Google high-speed Internet so that everything happened in near real time. Nick was also able to operate a camera on the machine so that he could look around the ballpark and interact with players.”

More on the project can be found on Google Fiber’s website at: https://fiber.google.com/about/nicksfirstpitch/.

Penn State chemical engineering alumnus and former faculty member Jack McWhirter rang the opening bell on Wall Street on July 5.

Jack McWhirter, a former chemical engineering faculty member and Penn State alumnus, rang the ceremonial opening bell on Wall Street on July 5.

A YouTube video of the bell ringing can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmKlLSOzHWA.

McWhirter’s trip to the New York Stock Exchange celebrated Campus Crest Communities’ purchase of a 48 percent stake in his student housing company, Copper Beech Townhome Communities.

McWhirter is the founder, president and CEO of Copper Beech, the fifth largest student housing operator in the country, with properties in more than a dozen states. He is president of Mixing and Mass Transfer Technologies LLC and the founder, former president and CEO of Nittany/BullDog BioDiesel LLC.

The chemical engineer began his career with E.I. DuPont de Nemours as a research engineer in 1962 and then manager of research and development for LIGHTNIN Inc. Between 1966 and 1986, McWhirter worked for the Union Carbide Corp. where he ultimately became vice president and general manager of the Environmental System Division and the Union Carbide Agricultural Chemical Co.

From 1986 to 2000, he was a professor of chemical engineering at Penn State. McWhirter holds more than 40 U.S. patents in wastewater treatment and chemical process systems technology and has been widely recognized for his pioneering efforts in the invention, development and commercialization of the UNOX High Purity Oxygen Activated Sludge Wastewater Treatment System in the 1960s and 1970s.

He has received a number of awards, including the Penn State Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award, and in 2008, was honored as one of the 100 preeminent Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era during the centennial celebration of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

This past April, McWhirter was one of only two people to receive the University’s 2013 Graduate School Alumni Society Award Lifetime Achievement Award. The award recognizes graduate alumni who have achieved exceptional success throughout the course of their profession and have demonstrated their loyalty to Penn State and the Alumni Association.