January 14-21, 2019

We are sad to report that Dr. Edward Della Torre, professor of engineering and applied science, and a longtime faculty member of ECE, passed away during the winter break. Dr. Della Torre joined GW in 1982. He was a scholar and researcher in the field of magnetic material behavior and modeling, and was the director of GW’s Institute for Magnetics Research.

Anyone who wishes to provide condolences should please contact ECE's operations manager, Robert Baden. Dr. Della Torre’s family is requesting that no flowers be sent, and that if anyone wishes to make a donation, to please make one to: medical research for cardio and heart-related areas; medical research for the treatment, prevention, and cure of lupus; or the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra OrchKids program.

Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE) was awarded the Myron-Zucker IEEE-IAS Student-Faculty Grant Program Fund for the project “Power Grid Resilience to Extreme Weather Conditions: Unlocking the Full Potential of Grid-Scale Renewables and Battery Storages.” This $25,000 grant is from the IEEE Foundation.

The National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has awarded Dr. Igor Efimov (BME) a four-year, $2.5 million R01 grant for the project “High-Definition Conformal Electronics for VT/VF.” Ventricular fibrillation (rapid and irregular heart beat) is responsible for 300,000 sudden cardiac deaths (SCD) annually in the United States. Current treatment options have limited efficacy and are hampered by serious side effects. Future development of an effective therapy requires detailed knowledge of the disorganized electrical waves in the fibrillating human ventricles. This project will apply novel organ conformal chiplet electronics real-time networks technology to track the development and propagation of these rapid, disorganized electrical waves and terminate them with high precision and minimized side effects, thereby creating a targeted individualized therapy dynamically tailored for each arrhythmia episode for each patient.

Dr. Emilia Entcheva (BME) and Dr. Matthew Kay (BME) are the MPIs (Multiple Principal Investigators) on a four-year, $2.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The project, “Scalable platform for optimizing human cardiac tissue engineering via optical pacing and on-demand oxygenation,” will develop new high-throughput, all-optical technology for chronic monitoring and control of human stem-cell-derived heart cells. The team will combine optogenetics, on-demand oxygenation with perfluorocarbon nanocarriers, microfluidics, optical instrumentation and control, as well as transcriptomics analysis, to help improve the maturity of these human heart cells and their use in drug screening applications. Data analytics on the generated large experimental data sets will be leveraged in constructing computational models for in silico personalized medicine. The team includes Dr. Zhenyu Li (BME), Dr. Anelia Horvath and Dr. Anastas Popratiloff (School of Medicine and Health Sciences), and Dr. Yordan Kostov (Center of Advanced Sensor Technology, UMBC). Dr. Entcheva is the contact MPI for the project.

Dr. Matthew Kay (BME) has received a four-year, $2.17 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Dr. Kay is the principal investigator of the project, titled “Hypothalamic neuron activation to blunt myocardial remodeling during chronic sleep apnea.” His co-investigator is Dr. David Mendelowitz (School of Medicine and Health Sciences). The goal of the project is to identify the specific impact of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) on cardiac health. Patients suffering from OSA have a three-fold increase in cardiovascular mortality, yet very little is known regarding how OSA directly increases the risk for cardiac disease. The studies will also test the innovative hypothesis that appropriately timed activation of a small population of hypothalamic paraventricular neurons will slow the development of, or reverse, the deleterious autonomic and neurocardiac alterations that occur during OSA.

Dr. Leila Farhadi (CEE) gave the talk “Coupled estimation of evapotranspiration and recharge from remotely sensed soil moisture and temperature” at the American Meteorological Society meeting held January 8 in Phoenix, AZ.

Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) was awarded the Highest Expected Future Impact Paper prize at the 2018 Cognitive Computing Conference, held December 18-20 in Hannover, Germany. The paper, titled “Photonic Neuromorphic Processors and Convolutional Neural Network Accelerator,” represented a joint effort with Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi (ECE) and Dr. Paul Prucnal (Princeton).

Dr. Jason Zara (BME), Dr. Vesna Zderic (BME), Dr. Shahrokh Ahmadi (ECE), and Dr. Ekundayo Shittu (EMSE) attended the KEEN National Conference, held January 3-5 in Dallas, TX. KEEN is a network of universities that focus on developing an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering undergraduates. Developing this mindset helps students learn how to be curious about the problems surrounding them, make connections between diverse areas of information, and create value for the world by developing engineering solutions to important problems. GW joined KEEN in the fall of 2018 and is very excited to work with our partners to improve undergraduate engineering education.

Mr. Alex Beehler (former research professor, Environmental and Energy Management Institute) was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on January 2 to be the assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy, and environment. He will assume his new duties at the Pentagon on January 14, and will have responsibility for establishing policy, providing strategic direction, and supervising all matters pertaining to infrastructure, energy, and environmental programs affecting U.S. Army installations and contingency bases worldwide.

On January 9, Beatrice Savarie and Nolan Dawson, 9th Grade students representing the National Science Fair Project at TC Williams High School (Alexandria VA), visited the Material Laboratory at GW’s Science and Engineering Hall, to test 24 concrete prisms. The goal of their project was to study alternative reinforcement materials that may be readily available in developing countries, if steel bars are not available. They tested concrete prisms reinforced with traditional steel rebar, natural rope, bamboo, corn stalks, and braided cotton t-shirt strips. The test allowed the team to observe the behavior of each reinforcing material. Many thanks to Mark Wagner (Material Lab technician), Dr. Majid Manzari (CEE), and Dr. Sameh Badie (CEE), who provided help and support to the team.