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Professor Shapour Azarm (ME) was the recipient of the 2007 Design Automation Award of the ASME. He received this award for his sustained and meritorious contributions to research in design automation, specifically in computational design optimization and engineering design decision-making. Assistant Professor Ray Sedwick was awarded the first Bepi Colombo Prize in 2007 for individual research performed at Pennsylvania State University. The 50,000 euro prize is sponsored by a consortium of Italian regional, civic, scientific and educational organizations in honor of the late Giuseppe Colombo. The Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) presented Professor Emeritus John L. Bryan (fire protection engineering [FPE]) with its first Mentoring Award. This award will be named the John L. Bryan Mentoring Award and recognizes commitment to mentoring that enhances the practice of fire protection engineering. Associate Professor Min Wu (ECE/University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies [UMIACS]/Institute for Systems Research [ISR]) was selected as one of Computerworld's 40 innovative IT people to watch, under the age of 40, a special feature which appeared in Computerworld's 40th anniversary issue. Wu was chosen for the "40 Under 40" list for her innovative research in information security forensics. Professor Uzi Vishkin (ECE/UMIACS) was honored by the Maryland Daily Record with an Innovator of the Year Award for his recent advances in desktop parallel computing technology. Capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops, Vishkin’s new technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip, allowing multiple processors to work together and make programming practical and simple for software developers. FPE Associate Professor and Associate Chair James Milke was the recipient of the 2007 Founders Award from the Chesapeake Chapter of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. Milke was recognized for his life of service to the profession. FPE Assistant Professor Peter Sunderland was recognized for Excellence in Oral Presentation by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) for his talk, “Fire Hazards of Small Hydrogen Leaks,” at the SAE World Congress. Postdoctoral researcher Vijay Gupta has accepted an assistant professor position in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame. As a postdoc, Gupta conducted research with Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR) and Assistant Professor Nuno Martins (ECE/ISR) on collaborative control of multi-agent systems and the interplay between communications and control in such systems. |
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UNIVERSITY AWARDS
Professor Rama Chellappa (ECE/CS/UMIACS) was awarded the Clark School’s Outstanding Faculty Research Award. The award recognizes Chellappa’s innovative research in pattern recognition and signal processing, which has included advances in human gait and face recognition and the development of intelligent surveillance applications. Assistant Professor Thomas Murphy (ECE) won the Clark School’s E. Robert Kent Outstanding Teaching Award for Junior Faculty. Murphy was cited for his passion for education, his versatility as an instructor and the supportive environment he creates in the classroom. Millard S. Firebaugh was appointed Minta Martin Professor of Practice and James Short was appointed a visiting professor of mechanical engineering this fall. Firebaugh and Short will contribute to 1) the development of the energetics graduate program; and 2) efforts in the Center for Energetic Concepts Development, and the Energetics Technology Center of Southern Maryland. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AND CONFERENCE CHAIRS
Professor John S. Baras (ECE/ISR) gave a plenary address at the International Federation of Automatic Control Conference on Control Applications in Marine Systems. Baras's talk was titled "Collaborative Control of Underwater Vehicles Under Severely Limited Communications." He gave another plenary lecture on Security and Trust for Wireless Autonomic Networks at the Med-Hoc-Net 2007 Conference. He was also an invited featured speaker at the MIT Enterprise Forum-hosted Tech Transfer Lab. Professor Anthony Ephremides (ECE/ISR) presented a plenary lecture at the 37th IEEE Communication Theory Workshop. The title of the lecture was "At the Crossroads of Layer Crossing." Ephremides also delivered a plenary lecture at the same workshop last year in Puerto Rico, where he spoke about "What is in Sensor Networks for Communication Theorists." It is unprecedented for someone to be selected as a plenary speaker two years in a row at the IEEE Communication Theory workshop. Ephremides also recently served as the Co-Chair of a National Science Foundation workshop on "Bridging the Gap between Wireless Networking Technologies and Advances at the Physical Layer." Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Jan V. Sengers spent the fall semester in Europe as a visiting professor and invited lecturer. Sengers served as a Visiting Professor in Applied Physics at the Complutense University of Madrid and traveled throughout Spain, France and Germany for invited lectures. FELLOWS
Associate Professor S.K. Gupta (ME/ISR) has also been elected a Fellow of ASME, in recognition of his significant contributions to the field of computer-aided design and manufacturing through the incorporation of application-specific intelligence into geometric reasoning algorithms. Professors Michael Fu (Smith/ECE/ISR) and Alexander Barg (ECE/ISR) have each been elected as a Fellow of IEEE, the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology. Fu was recognized for his contributions to stochastic gradient estimation and simulation optimization. Barg was recognized for his contributions to coding theory. Associate Professor Christopher Cadou has been elected to the grade of Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). This grade is awarded to AIAA members who have demonstrated a successful practice in the arts, sciences, or technology of aeronautics. ECE Professor Mario Dagenais was recently named a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. Dagenais was recognized for pioneering contributions in quantum optics and nonlinear optics of gases and semiconductor devices, and for the development and integration of active semiconductor devices. EDITORSHIPS AND BOOKS
Professor Victor Granatstein (ECE/Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics) has authored a new book titled Physical Principles of Wireless Communications. The book offers a rigorous analysis of the devices and mechanisms that constitute the physical layers of wireless systems. MEDIA PRESENTATIONS
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Assistant Professor Miao Yu (mechanical engineering [ME]/Institute for Systems Research [ISR]) received the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award for her research proposal to study the development of fly ear-inspired sensors on a micro-opto-electro-mechanical system platform for use in micro-air-vehicles. The total award amounts to $308K for three years and will further support Yu’s research on bio-inspired small-scale sensors. 
Electrical and computer engineering (ECE) Assistant Professor Edo Waks received an Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Award. The grant is worth $50,000 per year for three years. The ARO Young Investigator Program recognizes young faculty less than five years out of doctoral studies who show exceptional promise for creative research. Waks's research interests include studying the application of photonic crystals to quantum information processing, as well as the use of photonic crystals for practical tools in optical telecommunication and sensing.
Avram Bar-Cohen, ME chair and Distinguished University Professor, was elected Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for his contributions to the development of the scientific foundation for thermal management of electronic components and systems. Honorary membership within ASME has come to be regarded as recognition for a lifetime of service to engineering. The only other UM ASME Honorary Member is President C.D. Mote, Jr. 
Civil and environmental engineering (CEE) Professors Glenn Moglen (pictured left) and K. J. Ray Liu, (pictured right) ECE associate chair for graduate studies and research and professor (ECE/ISR), were selected to become fellows of the Academy of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (AETL) at the University of Maryland this fall. AETL was created in November 2000 by a faculty-led initiative to build a community of scholars committed to fostering a culture of excellence in teaching and learning. 
FPE Associate Professor and Associate Chair James Milke received the “Outstanding Gemstone Mentor Award” from the Gemstone Program for his work with the BurniNATION team, which focused on improving the fire safety of on-campus dorms.
William Bentley, chair of the Fischell Department of Bioengineering, has been named the Clark School's inaugural Robert E. Fischell Distinguished Professor. The renewable five-year professorship, established within the existing $31M Fischell endowment, recognizes Bentley's sustained and influential scientific and scholarly work in the area of bioengineering.
Professor Rama Chellappa (ECE/computer science [CS]/UMIACS) was selected as an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Signal Processing Society's 2008 Distinguished Lecturer. Chellappa also gave a plenary talk titled "Looking for Patterns in Video" at the 30th Anniversary Seminar of the Pattern Recognition Society of Finland.
ECE Professor A. Yavuz Oruc delivered a keynote lecture at Suleyman Demirel University in Isparta, Turkey. The title of the talk was "Frontiers of Science and Technology: Which is Driving Which and How Discoveries Are Made."
ECE Professor Isaak Mayergoyz was a plenary speaker at the 13th International Symposium on Applied Electromagnetics and Mechanics. Mayergoyz spoke on "Electromagnetic Analysis of Plasmon Resonances in Nanoparticles."
Professor Patrick G. O’Shea, chair of ECE, has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). O’Shea is one of a select group of new fellows recognized as leaders whose contributions toward the advancement of science and technology are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. 
Department of Materials Science and Engineering Associate Professor Luz Martinez-Miranda has been elected to Fellowship in the American Physical Society (APS). The Council of the APS cited Martinez-Miranda "for sustained achievements in recruiting, mentoring, and advancing women and minorities in physics; for engaging K-16 students in the excitement of research; and for being a superb role model through her elegant research to understand liquid crystal systems and further their application."
Professor Bongtae Han (ME) has been elected a Fellow of ASME. His election recognizes his seminal contributions to the industry through his work in the measurement and interpretation of thermo-mechanical deformations of microelectronic and photonic devices.
The IEEE Board of Governors has approved the appointment of ECE Professor Virgil Gligor as editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, one of the top journals in the field of computer engineering. Gligor is also the Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and serves on the boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers and ACM Transactions on Information Systems Security.
ECE Associate Professor Bruce Jacob is the lead author of a new book on computer engineering, titled Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, and Disk. The book is the first to cover comprehensively the logical and physical design, operation, performance characteristics and resulting design trade-offs, and energy consumption of modern memory hierarchies.
Fischell Department of Bioengineering Professor Art Johnson is publishing a new textbook scheduled to hit classrooms in time for the Fall 2008 semester. Biology for Engineers presents a new approach to teaching biology to engineering students. 
Professor Uzi Vishkin (ECE/UMIACS) gained international attention for the invention of a desktop supercomputer prototype 100 times faster than today’s desktop computers. The news brought more than 11,000 visitors to the Clark School web site in one day.
Civil engineering Senior Fellow Lewis E. Link Jr. was interviewed numerous times in the media, including by the Associated Press and in The New York Times, regarding flooding risk and repair of damage in New Orleans. He also wrote a commentary piece for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
MSE Associate Professor Raymond Phaneuf was featured around the world for finding a way to prod nature to “grow” computers. Phaneuf’s work was featured in the mainstream media such as the BBC and in technical and industry publications like PCWorld and Semiconductor International.