Dr. Michael D. Griffin, Ph.D. '77, Aerospace Engineering (AE), is the new head of NASA. President Bush appointed Dr. Griffin for the post in March. Dr. Griffin previously served as Space Department Head at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory.  Prior to that, he was President and Chief Operating Officer of In-Q-Tel, Inc.  He also served in several positions within Orbital Sciences Corporation, including Chief Executive Officer of Magellan Systems, Inc. Earlier in his career, Dr. Griffin served as Chief Engineer at NASA.

Gordon England, '61, an alumnus of the University of Maryland's Electrical and Computer Engineering department (ECE), has been nominated by President George W. Bush to fill the position of Deputy Secretary of Defense. The nomination of England, who currently serves as Secretary of the Navy, is pending approval of the U.S. Senate.

Lucent Technologies has announced that Clark School alumnus, benefactor and professor of practice, Jeong H. Kim, Ph.D. '91, Reliability Engineering, will become president of its Bell Labs unit. Kim also was recently selected as one of the top ten most influential Asian Americans in business by the U.S. Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce. Dr. Kim, for whom the new Kim Engineering Building is named, holds the first Ph.D. in reliability engineering from the Clark School. He also has received the Clark School's Innovation Hall of Fame award, has been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and sits on a number of corporate, university and non-profit boards.

Mechanical Engineering (ME) alumnus Edward A. Miller (left), B.S. '50, and Electrical Engineering (EE) alumnus James W. Plummer (right), M.S. '53, received the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering—one of the world's preeminent awards in engineering—for their pioneering work on the top-secret Corona Project. Mr. Plummer went on to become Under Secretary for the Air Force and Mr. Miller went on to become Assistant Secretary of the Army for Research and Development. Both led highly successful corporate careers as well. The Corona Project (1959 to 1972) created the field of satellite surveillance, providing vital photographic information that permitted the United States to gauge the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War and pursue more effective foreign policies. Mr. Plummer served as project manager and Mr. Miller as project engineer. Their team accomplished the first successful recovery of a man-made object from earth orbit. The two men have also been selected for induction in the Clark School's Innovation Hall of Fame.

ECE alumna Naomi Leonard, Ph.D. '94, whose field is underwater robotics research and who made waves last year by winning a MacArthur Fellow "genius grant," recently delivered the Mohammed Dahleh Distinguished Lecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She spoke on "Foraging by Design: Schools of Self-Guided Robotic Gliders Explore the Ocean." Leonard is a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University.

Aaron Falk, M.S. '94, Systems Engineering, was named the new chair of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). IRTF is a confederation of researchers in academia and industry who coordinate research, foster collaboration, and exchange information on Internet research. Falk is a computer scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, where his latest research work is focused on the new XCP Internet protocol, aimed at easing Internet congestion.

Matthew DeLisa, M.S. '99 and Ph.D. '00, Chemical Engineering (CE), is among this year's recipients of National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Awards, NSF's most prestigious awards for new faculty members. The program recognizes and supports the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. DeLisa, an assistant professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University, will receive a five-year grant of about $500,000. In the project funded by the NSF award, DeLisa will develop techniques to analyze and engineer a model complex protein machine, namely the bacterial twin-arginine translocation machinery.

Koushik Kar, M.S. '99 and Ph.D. '02, EE, also received an NSF Career Award. He is on the faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Kar's research focuses on computer and communication networking in relation to routing and traffic engineering, congestion control and resources allocation, ad-hoc and sensor networks and multicasting.

Pradeep Sharma, M.S. and Ph.D. '00, ME, has been selected as an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator for his work in nanomechanics. Dr. Sharma is currently an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston.