July 20 - August 2, 2020

Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) is the co-PI on a one-year National Science Foundation RAPID grant for the project “Automated Extraction and Validation of the Gist of Social Media Messages about COVID-19.” The PI on the grant is Dr. Valerie Reyna (Cornell University), and the total funding for the grant is $199,984.

Dr. Mona Zaghloul (ECE) and Dr. Jeanne Jordan (Milken Institute School of Public Health) have won a six-month, $50,000 COVID-19 Technology Maturation Award from GW’s Office of Technology Commercialization (TCO). Drs. Zaghloul and Jordan will work to develop a smartphone app to detect SARS-CoV-2. GW TCO works with industry partners to license and commercialize technology solutions to improve and save lives.

Dr. Matthew Kay (BME) and Dr. David Mendelowitz (SMHS) have received a one-year, $400,000 grant from the National Institute of Aging to study the effect of obstructive sleep apnea on cognitive decline and the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Kay is the PI on the grant, and Dr. Mendelowitz is the co-PI. The project will involve animal memory studies, neuropathology assessments using the imaging facilities of the SEH Nanofabrication and Imaging Center, and chemogenetics to activate the parasympathetic centers of the brain to protect against cognitive decline that is associated with obstructive sleep apnea. This project builds upon the strong long-term SEAS and SMHS cross-disciplinary research collaborations of Drs. Kay and Mendelowitz.

Dr. Saniya LeBlanc (MAE) has teamed with Drs. Ji Ma and Prasanna Balachandran (University of Virginia) to conduct the project “Single-step additive manufacturing of thermoelectric devices guided by machine learning and high throughput characterization.” Awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Manufacturing Office, the $500,000 ($250,000 GW share), two-year project will use machine learning accelerated design of laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing to attain thermoelectric devices with 40 percent increased efficiency and 20 percent cost reduction.

Dr. Danmeng Shuai (CEE), as the PI, has received two grants from the Environmental Engineering Program of the National Science Foundation. On the first project, “Bioinspired Catalysts with Earth-Abundant Metals for Reductive Treatment of Waterborne Contaminants,” he will collaborate with researchers at the University of California, Riverside and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to develop bioinspired catalysts (single atom catalysts) with earth-abundant metals for reducing persistent contaminants in water. The budget for the grant is $110,000. The second project, titled “Presence, Persistence, and Inactivation of Vesicle-Cloaked Rotavirus or Norovirus Clusters in Water,” has a budget of $220,000. On this project, he will collaborate with researchers at the University of California, Riverside and National Institutes of Health to understand the presence, persistence, and inactivation of vesicle-cloaked virus clusters in water, emerging yet largely unknown waterborne pathogens.

Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE) and GW SmartGrid Lab member Mostafa Nazemi have published the following journal article: M. Nazemi and P. Dehghanian. “Seismic-Resilient Bulk Power Grids: Hazard Characterization, Modeling, and Mitigation,” IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 614-630, Aug. 2020.

Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) has published two recent papers with his students and post-docs: 1) D. Yan, Q. Wang, M. Adhikari, A. Malyavko, J. H. Sherman, and M. Keidar. “The Anti-glioblastoma Effect of Cold Atmospheric Plasma Treatment: Physical Pathway vs. Chemical Pathway,” Scientific Reports, 10: 11788, 2020; and 2) C. Corbella, S. Portal, J. Rao, M. Kundrapu, and M. Keidar. “Energy Considerations Regarding Pulsed Arc Production of Nanomaterials,” Journal of Applied Physics, 128, 033303, 2020.

Dr. Luyao Lu (BME) and his PhD students have published the following paper: S. N. Obaid, Z. Chen, and L. Lu, “Advanced Electrical and Optical Microsystems for Biointerfacing,” Advanced Intelligent Systems, 2020, 2000091.

Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) has published the following paper: A. Elikkottil, M. H. Tahersima, S. Gupta, V. J. Sorger, and B. Pesala. “Silicon nitride grating based planar spectral splitting concentrator for NIR light harvesting,” Optics Express, Vol. 28, Issue 15, pp. 21474-21480 (2020).

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) published the following paper with his graduate Rujia Zou and collaborators from Japan: R. Zou, H. Hasegawa, M. Jinno, and S. Subramaniam, “Link-protection and FIPP P-cycle designs in translucent elastic optical networks,” IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, Vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 163-176, Jul 2020.

Dr. Arkady Yerukhimovich (CS) has published the following conference paper at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2020, held virtually, July 14-18: S. G. Choi (United States Naval Academy), D. Dachman-Soled (University of Maryland), M. Kulkarni (University of Massachusetts), and A. Yerukhimovich (GW). “Differentially-Private Multi-Party Sketching for Large-Scale Statistics.” Dr. Kulkarni gave the talk.

Dr. Taeyoung Lee (MAE) presented the following papers at the 2020 American Control Conference, held July 1-3, with his students and collaborators: 1) T. Lee. “Adaptive learning Kalman filter with Gaussian process;” 2) W. Wang and T. Lee. “Matrix Fisher--Gaussian distribution on SO(3) x R^n for attitude estimation with a gyro bias;” 3) W. Wang and T. Lee. “Spectral uncertainty propagation for generalized stochastic hybrid systems with applications to a bouncing ball;” and 4) H. Sharma, T. Lee, M. Patil, and C. Woolsey. “Symplectic accelerated optimization on SO(3) with Lie group variational integrators.”

Dr. Rachelle Heller (CS) is the PI on an $83,247 National Security Agency grant to host the GW Gen-Cyber Middle School Girls Cybersecurity Day Camp. This is the fifth year that GW has been awarded this grant in the Gen-Cyber program. This year Dr. Heller’s team will host the camp online during the week of August 10.