Carnegie Mellon Engineering

ICES Announces 2010-2011 Fellows

The Institute for Complex Engineered Systems recently announced its Dowd-ICES and Northrop Grumman Fellows for 2010-2011. The Dowd-ICES Fellowship recipients are: Ethan Demeter from Chemical Engineering, Catherine Izard from Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Engineering & Public Policy, Minhua Qiu from Biomedical Engineering, and Mary Beth Wilson from Biomedical Engineering. The Northrop Grumman Fellows are Fernando Cerda Carrizo and Judy Shum.

This fall, both the new fellows and the outgoing 2009-2010 Dowd-ICES fellows will present their research projects to the CIT community and to Philip and Marsha Dowd at the Dowd Fellowship Symposium. Research projects of the new Dowd-ICES Fellows include:

  • Ethan Demeter - "Porous, Infiltrated Metal Electrodes for Oxygen Evolution in Water Splitting Applications," advisor: John Kitchin (ChemE);
  • Catherine Izard - "Dynamic Assessment of Infrastructure Flows in a Climate-constrained U.S. Electricity Sector," advisor: H. Scott Matthews (CEE), with collaboration from Ines de Lima Azevedo (EPP);
  • Minhua Qiu - "Nanometer Resolution Imaging and Computational Analysis of Axonal Transport Defects in Drosphila Models of Alzheimer's Disease," advisor: Ge Yang (BME);
  • Mary Beth Wilson - "Thermally Reversible Polymers for Engineering 3D Synthetic Vascular Networks," advisor: Phil Leduc (BME/MechE), with collaboration from Burak Ozdoganlar (MechE).


This year's fellows were selected based on the cutting-edge, innovative nature of their projects. These seed projects each exhibit a strong plan for obtaining future external funding and address current areas of direct strategic interest within ICES and the CIT. All of the selected fellows have been performing graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon for less than four years.

 The Philip and Marsha Dowd Engineering Seed Fund was established in 2001 through a generous gift to the College of Engineering from Philip and Marsha Dowd. Initially, the program supported one Carnegie Mellon doctoral candidate per year, but through additional endowments, the Dowds generously expanded the program in 2005 to support four fellows every year.


The Northrop Grumman Fellows are selected based on the academic excellence and high research productivity they have demonstrated in their doctoral work, as well as for the relevance of their work to ICES's research strategic directions.




Temporarily on leave from the faculty of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Universidad de Concepcion, Cerda has been a Ph.D. student in CEE since the fall of 2008. His doctoral research is being conducted with Thomas Lord Professor & Head of CEE James H. Garrett and University Professor Jacobo Bielak on developing a vehicle-data-driven approach for assessing damage in bridge structures using multiresolution signal processing techniques.




Judy Shum has been a familiar face at ICES since she began her doctoral program three years ago. She has been working with ICES Associate Research Professor Ender Finol and the Vascular Biomechanics and Biofluids Laboratory on developing a diagnostic tool that can automatically calculate a set of features that characterize the geometry of abdominal aortic aneurysms.




The Northrop Grumman Fellowship was established through an endowment gift given to ICES (then the Engineering Design Research Center) in 1988 by Litton Industries, now part of the Northrop Grumman Corporation. The Northrup Grumman Fellowship provides merit-based awards to doctoral students in CIT who are conducting multidisciplinary research that is associated with strategic directions within ICES. The 2010-11 awards mark the first time the Northrop Grumman Fellowship has been awarded.