Faculty News
Research:
Prof. David Broniatowski’s (EMSE) colleague Dr. Liana Fraenkel (Yale University School of Medicine) was awarded the Rheumatology Research Foundation's FY 2018 Innovative Research Award, and Prof. Broniatowski is the GW site-PI of a sub award on the grant. Their project aims to develop a new technique that the FDA can use to rank risks and benefits of drugs for rheumatoid arthritis. The total amount of the two-year award is $387,615, and GW's share is $137,550.
Publications:
Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) and his students have recently published two papers: 1) E. Gjika, M. Pekker, A. Shashurin, M. Shneider, T. Zhuang, J. Canady, and M. Keidar. “The cutting mechanism of the electrosurgical scalpel,” Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Vol. 50, No. 2; and 2) Z. Chen, L. Lin, X. Cheng, E. Gjika, and M. Keidar, “Cold Atmospheric Plasma Discharged in Water and its Potential Use in Cancer Therapy,” Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, Vol. 50, No. 2. Separately, the editors of the Journal of Pediatric Surgery notified Prof. Keidar on December 9 that his 2013 paper “Cold atmospheric plasma for the ablative treatment of neuroblastoma” was one of the most highly cited papers during 2014 and 2015.
Prof. Megan Leftwich (MAE) has published the following paper: E. D. Tytell, M. C. Leftwich, C-Y Hsu, B. E. Griffith, A. H. Cohen, A. J. Smits, C. Hamlet, and L. J. Fauci. “Role of body stiffness in undulatory swimming: Insights from robotic and computational models,” Physical Review Fluids, 1(7), 073202.
Profs. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) and Grace Zhang (MAE) published the following paper with graduate student Mitra Aliabouzar: M. Aliabouzar, L. G. Zhang, and K. Sarkar. “Lipid-coated microbubbles and low intensity pulsed ultrasound enhance chondrogenesis of human mesenchymal stem cells in 3D printed scaffolds,” Scientific Reports, 6, 37728 (2016).
Conferences & Presentations:
Prof. Ken Chong (MAE) gave an invited seminar at the International Research Center for Computational Mechanics at the Dalian University of Technology (China) on December 3 on the topic of new developments in computational mechanics, materials, and manufacturing. He also visited with graduate students and faculty members in mechanical and engineering mechanics and toured the state-of-the-art facilities and labs. On December 6, he was in Hong Kong as part of a panel conducted by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council to interview the finalists of the Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) Scheme, which is similar to the NSF group and equipment proposals. The proposals included many collaborators from the U.S. as co-investigators. On December 7, he was part of a group interviewed by the Rand – Europe Research Institute to review and assess the performance of RGC and possibly enhance it. On December 8, he attended the CRF Symposium in Hong Kong, highlighting the progress and findings of the CRF projects.
Professor Murray Loew (BME) was invited to the Emory University Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences as a Distinguished Lecturer, and on December 7 he presented a Grand Rounds lecture titled “Prospects for breast cancer detection using thermal imaging” and a Research in Progress Seminar, “Clinical applications of hyperspectral imaging: the example of cardiac ablation.”
On December 10, Prof. Claire Monteleoni (CS) gave an invited talk titled “Spatiotemporal online learning with expert advice, with applications to climate science and finance” at the Workshop on Machine Learning for Spatiotemporal Forecasting. The workshop was part of the 2016 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), which is one of the top two international conferences in the field of machine learning. Prof. Monteloni also served as an area chair for this year’s conference, which was held in Barcelona, Spain. With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, the NIPS conference has doubled in size for two years in a row, with 8,000 registrations this year.
Prof. Michael Plesniak (MAE) attended the 69th annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, held November 20-22 in Portland, OR. At the meeting, he chaired the invited Plenary session K40: Settling and Swimming in Density Stratified Fluids and co-authored four presentations with his students and collaborators, including MAE faculty Kausik Sarkar, Grace Zhang, and Chunlei Liang; MAE Research Professor Kartik Bulusu; and Ph.D. students Mitra Alibouzar, Ian Carr, Nathan Castro, Christopher Cox, and M. Reza Najjari:
- G15.00006: Secondary flow in a curved artery model with Newtonian and non-Newtonian blood-analog fluids
- G15.00007: High-order numerical simulations of pulsatile flow in a curved artery model
- A7.00002: Surface obstacles in pulsatile flow
- M20.00007: Investigation of polymeric scaffold degradation for drug delivery and neovascularization applications
Prof. gave an invited presentation titled “Dynamics of encapsulated microbubbles for contrast ultrasound imaging and drug delivery: from pressure dependent subharmonic to collapsing jet and acoustic streaming,” at the mini-symposium “Multiphase flows in Biomedicine.” The mini-symposium was part of the 69th annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, held November 20-22 in Portland, OR. Prof. Sarkar made a separate presentation at the 5th joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan, held November 28 – December 2 in Honolulu, HI. There, he presented the paper: M. Aliabouzar, L.G. Zhang, and K. Sarkar. “Low intensity pulsed ultrasound and lipid-coated microbubbles enhance chondrogenesis of human mesenchymal stem cells in 3D bioprinted scaffolds.”Kausik Sarkar (MAE)
On December 7, Prof. Scott Sklar (SEAS Environmental and Energy Management Institute), presented “Sustainable Energy Systems” as part of the Community Solar Webinar conducted by Sustainable Maryland Certified. In his presentation, Prof. Sklar explained how municipalities, businesses, nonprofits, and people can get involved in community solar projects, and he discussed the technical challenges of such solar systems.
During the week of December 12, Prof. Timothy Wood (CS) and two of his advisees will participate in two conferences. On December 12, Prof. Wood will co-chair the first Workshop on Cloud Assisted Networking as part of the CoNEXT Conference, held in Irvine, CA. The workshop brings together academic and industrial researchers working at the intersection of network management and cloud computing. At the same conference, his Ph.D. student Wei Zhang will present the paper “Flurries: Countless Fine-Grained NFs for Flexible Per-Flow Customization.” The paper is a collaborative effort among Wei, Prof. Wood, and U.C. Riverside and IBM Research. Ph.D. student Grace Liu will attend the December 12-16 IEEE/ACM Middleware Conference in Trento, Italy, where she will present two papers: “Netalytics: Cloud-Scale Application Performance Monitoring with SDN and NFV,” co-authored with CS students Wei Zhang, Yuxin Ren, and Michael Trotter, and “SDNFV: Flexible and Dynamic Software Defined Control of an Application- and Flow-Aware Data Plane,” co-authored with Wei Zhang, Prof. Wood, and colleagues at U.C. Riverside and IBM Research.
Other News:
Prof. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) recently served on the organizing committee of IEEE Globecom and was a TPC co-chair of the Optical Networks and Systems symposium. Globecom was held December 4-8 in Washington, DC and is one of the flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society. It consists of 13 symposia and attracts approximately 2,500 attendees, including several researchers from industry. On December 8, Prof. Subramaniam also organized the NSF JUNO PI meeting, held in the SEH. The JUNO program is a joint program between Japanese and US researchers on large-scale communication networks. The PI meeting included project presentations from the PIs of the funded projects, as well as a keynote talk titled “Stormy Clouds,” delivered by Prof. Muriel Medard, the Cecil H. Green Professor of EECS at MIT.
Other News
New Spring 2017 Online Offering: Climate Change: Policy, Impacts, and Response - EMSE 6290: Explore the basis of global concerns about anthropogenic climate change. Learn the science behind climate change policy. Prepare for the challenges of mitigating anthropogenic influences and adapting to impacts of unmitigated climate change. This is the first in a four-course sequence leading to a certificate in greenhouse gas management. A course description is also available in the University Bulletin. Students may register online via the GWeb system. Reduced fees apply. For more information, contact the program director, Rachael Jonassen.
Theta Tau food drive: Theta Tau is sponsoring a SEAS-wide food drive and will donate items to Martha's Table in here in Washington, DC! Please donate by bringing canned goods and any non-perishable foods to the drop-off box located in the Deans' Suite on the second floor of SEH. Theta Tau will continue collections until December 15.
Entrepreurship Events
Medical App Hackathon
Ideas submission deadline: January 15, 2017
Submit your app idea
The Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Children’s National (CTSI-CN), a partnership between Children’s National Medical Center and GW, will host a half-day hackathon on March 24, 2017, to develop the requirements and prototype user interface for medical software applications. They will select up to 10 ideas submitted from the Children’s National and GW community. There is no restriction on idea submissions, but the idea should be something that could lead to a useful medical software application. It can be extremely generic or highly specialized. Potential areas of interest include (but are not limited to) self-care, medical wellness, exercise physiology, clinical applications, public health, etc.
2017 GW New Venture Competition
Submission Deadline: Wednesday, January 25, 2017; 12:00 noon
Apply to compete
Compete for over $250,000 in cash and in-kind prizes to help you further your startup idea! The GW New Venture Competition is in its ninth year and was created to give GW students, faculty, staff, and alumni a real-world, experiential learning opportunity in entrepreneurship. It is also designed to foster an entrepreneurial climate at GW and allow competition winners to actually launch and operate their ventures while maintaining complete control of their ventures through the issuance of non-dilutive cash grants as prize money.