May 2008

The winners of the Meeting of the Minds' CIT Honors Research Program have been announced. First place went to Benjamin Cannon for his research: “Wireless Power Transfer via Magnetic Resonant Coupling.” Geeta Shroff and Hemant Sikaria won second place with their project: “Trinetra: An Assistive Technology for the Blind.” Third place was awarded to Courtney Ondeck for her project: “Iron Cobalt Nanoparticles in Hyperthermic Cancer Application.”

ICES Professor Ender Finol's Vascular Biomechanics and Biofluids Lab received two grants totaling $600,000 from NIH.

April 2008

ECE alumnus Ram K. Krishnamurthy (Ph.D. 1998) has recently been promoted to Senior Principal Research Engineer at Intel Corporation's Corporate Technology Group.

ECE graduate student Basil AsSadhan was selected as a King Abdullah Scholar with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

ChemE Professor Lee White was recently awarded the 2008 Colloid and Surface Chemistry Division award of the American Chemical Society.

Nikolaos V. Sahinidis has been selected to receive the John E. Swearingen University Professorship of Chemical Engineering.

Professor Cliff Davidson was selected as a Fellow of the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR).

CEE Professor Burcu Akinci was selected as the winner of the Outstanding Early Researcher Award given by FIATECH at their CETI Awards Gala.

ECE graduate student Devi Parikh and Professor Tsuhan Chen won a Best Paper Award at the 2007 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). Chen and ECE graduate student Andrew Gallagher also won a Best Paper Award at the conference.

CEE Professor Larry Cartwright will become the owner and "manager" of Carnegie Mellon's new live mascot, a Scottish terrier given to the university by comedian Bill Cosby.

BME Professor Stefan Zappe received a $400,000 NSF CAREER Award to develop MEMS-based fruit fly embryo injection technologies for high-throughput RNA interference screens. The technologies will enable systematic studies on how genes function and diseases develop.

Vanessa Schweizer, a Ph.D. student in engineering and public policy, was selected to receive Carnegie Mellon's 2008 Graduate Student Service Award.


March 2008

ECE, BME, and CS Professor Richard Stern was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) "for contributions to binaural hearing and speech recognition."

ECE team takes third place in IC Design Challenge Phase One

BME Head Todd Przybycien received $250,000 on March 14 from Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell through the Keystone Innovation Start Kit (KISK) program for recruitment of a new faculty researcher in biomedical engineering focusing on biomaterials.

Microsoft Research has awarded EPP Professor Lorrie Cranor and Heinz Professor Alessandro Acquisti $60,000 for their Privacy Finder research.

CEE undergrads Stephanie Seki and Ryan Swick recently won ASCE Pittsburgh Section Student Awards for excellent academic standing, participation in extracurricular activities, and community service. Seki won the Student Award Foundation American Bridge Leadership Award, and Swick won the Student Achievement Award.

ChemE Professors Ignacio Grossmann, Larry Biegler, Nick Sahinidis, as well as Tepper Professor Francis Margot and researchers from the IBM Watson Research Center, received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation. They received this grant for their work to address the solution of large-scale mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problems arising in real world applications in engineering, biology, and finance.

Recent CEE grads Chris Weber (and colleagues in Norway and China) and Rob Pinder (with co-authors CEE Prof. Peter Adams and ChemE Prof. Spyros Pandis) were recognized for having outstanding environmental policy papers for the year 2007 by Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T). Weber and Pinder took the top and runner-up spots, respectively. CEE Professors Scott Matthews and Chris Hendrickson were key contributors on Weber's dissertation while CEE/EPP Prof. Cliff Davidson was a key contributor for Pinder's.

ECE Professor Alex Hills has been elected Engineer of the Year by the Alaska Engineering Societies.

ECE Systems Scientist Franz Franchetti is one of five recipients of the City of Wiener Neustadt's 2007 Culture Prize.

February 2008

During National Engineers Week at the Carnegie Science Center, ICES Professor Phil Campbell was filmed for a WQED documentary, "Invented, Engineered, and Pioneered in Pittsburgh." Campbell was filmed with a student using the Build a Bone activity Campbell created for the event. The documentary will premiere on WQED on Thursday, April 10.

MechE Head Nadine Aubry was named an AAAS Fellow.

The CIT Faculty Awards recipients have been announced. Jeremy Michalek (MechE), Kenneth Mai (ECE), Sridhar Seetharaman (MSE), Jonathan Cagan (MechE), and Edward Rubin (EPP) all received awards.

Associate Dean and CEE Professor David A. Dzombak was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his development of models used in evaluating chemical behavior in water quality engineering and environmental remediation. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature," and to the "pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

CS and ECE Professor Edmund M. Clarke was one of three 2007 A.M. Turing Award winners.

ECE Professor Shawn Blanton was named the new director of the Center for Silicon System Implementation (CSSI).

ICES staff members Christina Cowan, Alicia Brown, and Matthew Sanfilippo received awards at the annual CIT Staff Awards.


January 2008

ChemE Professor Lee White won the American Chemical Society Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry.

Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon will join leaders of business, politics, intellect, and society this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland.

ECE/CS Professor Rob Rutenbar and ECE Ph.D. student Amith Singhee and colleagues won the 2008 Best Student Paper Award at the 21 International Conference on VLSI Design.

BME and CS Professor Cam Riviere's work on tremor-cancelling surgical instruments has been highlighted by NIBIB on its web site.

MechE Professor Jeremy Michalek has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant aimed at constructing an integrated quantitative model to predict the impact of energy and environmental policy on vehicle design.

EPP alumnus Jim Corbett (Ph.D., 1999) and several of his students and collaborators published two papers on air pollution from ocean-going ships in the December 15 issue of Environmental Science and Technology. One, featured in the cover photo for the journal, was titled "Mortality from Ship Emissions: A global assessment." The other was titled "Cost-Effectiveness of Reducing Sulfur Emissions from Ships."

Also be sure to check out the Personal Mentions from 2007.