Awards & Honors
SEAS congratulates Dr. Jason Zara (BME) on being named the recipient of GW’s 2020 Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Teaching Excellence. The award, which was established in 1990 by President Emeritus Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in memory of his parents, honors outstanding undergraduate teaching. The university announced the award on April 21, and will honor Dr. Zara and the winners of other faculty awards at a later date, as the annual Faculty Honors Ceremony has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Zara also has been honored for his teaching by SEAS. He is a past recipient of both the SEAS Outstanding Junior Teacher Award and the SEAS Outstanding Distinguished Teacher Award.
Faculty News
Research:
Dr. Luyao Lu (BME) and Dr. Igor Efimov (BME) have received a three-year, $392,248 National Science Foundation grant for the project “Wireless implantable optoelectronic arrays for untethered high performance cardiac monitoring and modulation.” Current cardiac electrophysiology research is often based on acute in vitro and ex vivo experiments using cardiomyocytes or explanted hearts. Chronic in vivo cardiovascular studies on awake, freely behaving animals will offer some of the greatest areas of opportunity for understanding the complex pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases. This study aims to develop wireless, implantable optogenetic modulation and electrical sensing arrays to enable significant new opportunities for basic and translational cardiovascular studies with freely behaving animal subjects.
Publications:
Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE) and GW SmartGrid Labmembers have published the following journal article: B. Wang, P. Dehghanian, and D. Zhao. “ Chance-Constrained Energy Management System for Power Grids with High Proliferation of Renewables and Electric Vehicles,” IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 2324-2336, May 2020.
Dr. Emilia Entcheva's (BME) lab, along with collaborators from the UK, Finland and Italy, published a new study that uses machine learning on high-throughput functional data from human stem-cell-derived cardiomyocytes to generate a population of computational models for personalized medicine and cardiotoxicity prediction. The citation is: M. Paci, E. Passini, A. Klimas, S. Severi, J. Hyttinen, B. Rodriguez, and E. Entcheva. “All-Optical Electrophysiology Refines Populations of In Silico Human iPSC-CMs for Drug Evaluation,” Biophysical Journal, doi: 10.1016/j.bpj.2020.03.018, 2020.
Media Mentions:
The April 21 GW Today article “Using Satellite Data to Improve Climate Models” features the research that Dr. Leila Farhadi (CEE) is doing under her National Science Foundation CAREER award to understand the connections between the world’s water, carbon, and energy cycles using data from satellite images. Understanding the links among these cycles will improve models that predict how the environment will respond to climate change, enhancing their ability to predict extreme events such as floods and drought.
Dr. Volker Sorger’s (ECE) research developed and demonstrated for the first time a silicon-based electro-optical modulator that is smaller than, as fast as, and more efficient than state-of-the-art technologies. The April 20 GW Today article “Breaking the Size and Speed Limit of Modulators: The Workhorses of the Internet” describes the research and its potential impact.
Conferences & Presentations:
On April 21, Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) gave the talk “Can communicating the gist combat systematic online distortions of public opinion on health topics? (with new insights from COVID-19)” at the Carnegie Mellon University IDeaS seminar. IDeaS is a partner institution to the GW Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics. Dr. Broniatowski's talk featured his work, as well as that of SEAS students Pedram Hosseini and Michael Smith.
Other News:
Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) has been elected president of the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society (ERPS) for a four-year term. ERPS is an international society that represents a large community of academic, government, and industrial researchers and developers of electric propulsion for satellites.
Student News
SEAS congratulates CEE graduate student Mahmudul Hasan, who was selected to receive a 2020 Philip J. Amsterdam Graduate Teaching Award from GW.
ECE graduate student and GW Men’s water polo goalkeeper Matt Taylor was featured in the GW Athletics Department profile “Taylor Working to Help GW Hospital.”
The GW chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) has won the GW Career Services Collaboration Award for Excellence in Student Life. NSBE demonstrated consistent collaboration with the Center, participating in the Lego Design and Build Competition (and winning first place), working tirelessly on the GW STEM+Health Symposium, and representing GW at the BEYA 2020 STEM Conference. Whenever student organization input was requested, NSBE and its members responded.
Other News
Nada Kamona, a recent MS graduate in BME, and her advisor, Dr. Murray Loew (BME), have published the following paper: N. Kamona and M. Loew. “Automated detection of simulated motion blur in mammograms,” Medical Physics, Vol. 47, No. 4, April 2020, pp. 1786-1795.
Annamaria Konya Tannon, the SEAS chief evangelist for innovation and entrepreneurship, has successfully negotiated a partnership between SEAS and the XPRIZE Foundation’s Global Pandemic Alliance. The XPRIZE Foundation is the world’s leader in designing and operating incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges, and its CEO is SEAS alumna Anousheh Ansari (MS ’91). The Foundation’s Global Pandemic Alliance is committed to catalyzing critical solutions to address COVID-19 and improve our ability to predict, prevent, and respond to future pandemics. The Alliance includes corporate, non-governmental organization, and university partners; GW is one of 11 universities partnering with the Alliance. Any faculty member who is interested in learning more about the partnership and about opportunities to lend their expertise to it should contact Annamaria.
Upcoming SEAS Events
Please note that all SEAS and GW in-person events are canceled through the end of the Spring 2020 semester.
SEAS Center for Women in Engineering (WiE) Interactive Webinar: “Bringing Together the SEAS Community”
Monday, April 27
1:00
Webinar will be available on WiE website
This interactive webinar is designed to bring the SEAS community together virtually during this time of social distancing. SEAS Computing Facility Director Raoul Gabiam will lead the presentation and discussion, which will feature SEAS panelists discussing:
- How SEAS has addressed the opportunities and challenges of supporting academics, research, and everyday operations in this time of coronavirus;
- Some of the day-to-day technical issues being resolved; and
- Steps being taken to keep students connected and engaged and to respond to their academic concerns.
SEAS Undergraduate Virtual Graduation Ceremony
Friday, May 15
4:00 pm EDT
The ceremony will be live streamed, and a link and more information will be provided soon.
SEAS Graduate Student Virtual Graduation Ceremony
Friday, May 15
6:00 pm EDT
The ceremony will be live streamed, and a link and more information will be provided soon.
GW Virtual Commencement
Sunday, May 17
11:00 am EDT
The GW Virtual Commencement Celebration may be viewed on GW’s Facebook page and on the Commencement website.
Dissertation Defenses
Student Name: James Marshall
Dissertation Title: “Microprocessor Cache Fault Injection for Studying Radiation-Induced Transient Faults”
Advisor: Dr. Rahul Simha (CS); Presiding: Dr. Gabriel Parmer (CS)
Monday, April 27
1:00 – 2:30 pm
Student Name: Cheng Zhang
Dissertation Title: “Anonymization and De-Anonymization Attacks in Online Social Networks”
Advisor: Dr. Xiuzhen (Susan) Cheng (CS); Presiding: Dr. Abdou Youssef (CS)
Tuesday, May 5
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
Human Resources News
This week's HR Corner includes important information regarding the paid time-off option, qualified life event changes in status, medical virtual visit costs, and other topics. Please visit the HR Corner to read these updates.