April 13-19, 2020

The National Science Foundation has awarded Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) a one-year, $200,000 RAPID grant for his project “RAPID: Cold Adaptive Atmospheric Plasma Decontamination of COVID-19.” The RAPID funding mechanism is used for proposals having a severe urgency with regard to availability of, or access to data, facilities or specialized equipment, including quick-response research on natural or anthropogenic disasters and similar unanticipated events.

Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) was quoted in the April 8 Politico “Morning eHealth” roundup, “Building a national surveillance system,” and in the April 10 HealthDay article “Tweets Show Americans Are Following COVID-19 Precautions” regarding the use of Twitter data to determine compliance with social distancing policies. He also spoke to NewsChannel 8 about what Twitter can tell us regarding social distance practices.

Dr. Costis Toregas (director, Cyber Security and Privacy Research Institute) has published a blog post on Covid19 and cybersecurity, titled “COVID-19: When a health crisis drives cyber risk.” It is published on Prevention Web, the UN Disaster Risk Reduction Program portal that is read by risk professionals around the world.

The GW Today article “GW Community Collaborates to Produce PPEs for Hospital Workers” describes various efforts by members of the GW community to help the GW medical community respond to COVID-19. The article highlights the teams’ efforts— spearheaded by GW Innovation Center (GWIC) and SEAS faculty, staff, and students—to produce PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and develop a safer screening system for staff entering GW Hospital. Mentioned are BME graduate students Konstantin Mitic and Maria Sidulova; BME undergraduates Caitlyn Pratt and Karen Rius; ECE undergraduate Matt Taylor; Ms. Annamaria Konya Tannon (GWIC director); and Dr. Erica Wortham (GWIC project lead); SEAS faculty members Dr. David Lee (BME) and Dr. Robert Pless (CS); and Dr. Carl Wick, formerly of the GW Institute for Biomedical Engineering.

GW has awarded a one-year, $49,914 Cross Disciplinary Research Fund grant to Dr. James Hahn (CS), the principal investigator on the grant, and his co-investigators, Michele Mietus-Snyder (Children's National), John Philbeck (Psychology), Christine Pintz (Nursing), Jennifer Sacheck (Exercise and Nutrition Science), Xiaoke Zhang (Statistics), Khashavar Vaziri (Surgery), and Jonathan Sherman (Neuro Surgery), for the project “Predicting 3D Body Composition Using Optical Surface Scans.”

Dr. Danmeng Shuai (CEE), along with Dr. John Lafleur (Department of Emergency Medicine), has received a one-year, $50,000 GW Cross-Disciplinary Research Fund grant to work on developing photocatalytic graphitic carbon nitride for inhibiting biofilms on indwelling urinary catheters. Dr. Shuai's PhD student, Hongchen Shen, in CEE will work on this project.

Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE) and GW SmartGrid Lab members have published this journal article: S. Wang, P. Dehghanian, L. Li, and B. Wang. “ A Machine Learning Approach to Detection of Geomagnetically-Induced Currents in Power Grids,” IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 1098-1106, March/April 2020.

Dr. Can Korman (ECE) has published the following paper: C. E. Korman and I. D. Mayergoyz. “On Hysteresis of Ion Channels,” Mathematical Modelling of Natural Phenomena, Vol. 15, 2020.

Dr. Ahmed Louri (ECE) and his PhD student Ke Wang have published this refereed journal paper: K. Wang and A. Louri. “CURE: A High-Performance, Low-Power, and Reliable Network-on-Chip Design Using Reinforcement Learning,” IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2020.2986297. The work exploits the use of reinforcement learning and presents a Network-on-Chip design that simultaneously reduces network latency, improves energy-efficiency, and tolerates transient errors and permanent faults. This research is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Chung Hyuk Park (BME) and his PhD students have virtually presented/published the following papers in the Companion Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (March 23, 2020): 1) H. Javed and C. H. Park. “Behavior-based Risk Detection of Autism Spectrum Disorder Through Child-Robot Interaction;” and 2) B. Xie and Chung Hyuk Park. “Dance with a Robot: Encoder-Decoder Neural Network for Music-Dance Learning.”

A research group led by Dr. Thomas Mazzuchi (EMSE) and Dr. Richard Millar (research professor, EMSE) was mentioned in an April 3 WOAY-TV segment, “Company making coal-based products looks to move to area.” The group is developing a green technology for the US coal industry. The technology provides a route for low-cost and low-waste production of engineered coal, which can be used to rebuild lost and depleted topsoil in agriculture and urban settings and to treat municipal wastewater. GW Technology Commercialization Office is currently prosecuting a patent application covering this technology and is considering various commercialization paths. Engart, Inc., an international manufacturing firm, plans to open a new plant in West Virginia in 2020 to produce engineered coal using the new technology developed by Drs. Millar and Mazzuchi. The plant may create 700 new jobs or more.

On April 7, Mr. Scott Sklar (EEMI) made a presentation in the Environmental Protection Agency webinar “Efficiency and Renewables Finance for Small Business and Congregations.” A recording of his presentation, which provided a comprehensive overview of opportunities for the financing of renewable energy projects across the US, is available online. Mr. Sklar is an adjunct professor in EMSE and the director of sustainable energy in EMSE’s Environmental and Energy Management Institute (EEMI).