June 2-15, 2014

Newsletter

June 2, 2014

Faculty News

Awards & Honors:

Prof. Ken Chong (MAE) has been selected to receive the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ 2014 Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award "for fostering new research directions to meet national needs through efforts including visionary leadership in the fields of nanomechanics and materials; for mentoring and nurturing a new generation of engineering educators; and for pioneering work in architectural sandwich panels and brittle-fracture testing methods." The award, which will be formally presented in November of this year, gives a leader in pure and/or applied science or engineering the opportunity to present to the Society a lecture that encourages stimulating thinking on a subject of broad interest to engineers.

Research:

Prof. Zoe Szajnfarber (EMSE) has been awarded an 11-month, $20,000 subcontract from the University of Alabama in Huntsville as part of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center-lead systems engineering program. Prof. Szajnfarber and her students' specific contribution to the multi-university collaboration will focus on the interaction of policy and systems design in the aerospace context.

Media Mentions:

Prof. Joseph Barbera (EMSE) was interviewed by MBC TV (Korea) about how to prepare for disasters and respond more efficiently to large-scale emergencies. The interview aired on May 20 in Korea.

Allan Friedman (visiting scholar, Cyber Security Policy Research Institute) was interviewed by CCTV America (China) on May 20 about the announcement that the U.S. brought criminal charges against members of the Chinese military for hacking into private U.S. companies’ systems and stealing secrets. (video)

GW was mentioned as a partner in Google’s Project Tango in the May 29 Forbes article, “Google's Mysterious 3D Project And The Humongous Business Appetite For Imaging.” This work is being done by Prof. Gabe Sibley’s (CS) Autonomous Robotics and Perception Group.

Prof. Rene van Dorp’s (EMSE) vessel traffic risk assessment research was mentioned in a May 22 AP story picked up both by the Seattle PIand the Bellingham Herald . Prof. van Dorp conducts this research jointly with Dr. Jason Merrick of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Publications:

Prof. Pinhas Ben-Tzvi (MAE) and his former doctoral student, Dr. Paul Moubarak, have published the following peer-reviewed journal paper: P. Moubarak and P. Ben-Tzvi. “A Tristate Rigid Reversible and Non-Back-Drivable Active Docking Mechanism for Modular Robotics,” IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Vol. 19, Issue 3, pp. 840-851, June 2014.

Prof. Chunlei Liang (MAE) and his colleagues from Imperial College London, University of Michigan, and Berkeley have successfully completed editing a special issue of high-order methods for computational fluid dynamics for the journal Computers & Fluids. They also published the following editorial article: C. Liang, K. Fidkowski, P. Persson, and P. Vincent. “Celebrating the 80th birthday of Professor Antony Jameson,” Vol. 98, 1-2, Computers & Fluids, 2014.

Prof. Zoe Szajnfarber (EMSE) and her former research assistant have published the following two papers on technology management in the space sector: 1) Z. Szajnfarber. (2014) “Space Science Innovation: how mission sequencing interacts with technology policy,” Space Policy; and 2) A. C. Wicht and Z. Szajnfarber. (2014) “ Portfolios of promise: a review of R&D investment techniques and how they apply to technology development in space agencies ,” Space Policy.

In May, Pan Stanford Publishing published Prof. Lijie Grace Zhang’s (MAE) textbook, Tissue and Organ Regeneration: Advances in Micro and Nanotechnology (ISBN: 978-981-4411-67-7, 822 pages). The book presents the latest cutting-edge research in nano- and microfabrication techniques and biomaterials for the regeneration of various tissues and organs. It is designed to serve both as a coherent textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine and as a useful resource for biomedical researchers.

Prof. Lijie Grace Zhang (MAE) and her doctoral students Wei Zhu and Christopher O’Brien have published the following paper: W. Zhu, C. O’Brien, J. R. O’Brien, and L. Zhang. “3D Nano/Microfabrication Techniques and Nanobiomaterials for Neural Tissue Regeneration,” Nanomedicine, 2014, DOI: 10.2217/NNM.14.36.

Conferences & Presentations:

Prof. Erica Gralla (EMSE) gave a talk at the Production and Operations Management Society Annual Meeting, held May 9-12, in Atlanta, GA. The talk was titled “Problem Formulation and Solution: A Behavioral Study of Humanitarian Transportation Planning.”

Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) gave a plenary talk titled “Towards understanding the mechanism of cold atmospheric plasma in cancer treatment” at the 5th International Conference on Plasma Medicine, held May 18-22, in Nara, Japan. His students and colleagues presented the following posters: 1) B. Trink, M. Keidar, J. Canady, S. Abelson, Y. Shamai, L. Berger, K. Skorecki, and M. Tzukerman. “The Effect of Cold Plasma Treatment on Cancer Stem Cells;” 2) A. Shashurin, D. Scott, M. Shneider, and M. Keidar. “Physics of nonequilibrium atmospheric plasma jets; ” and 3) X. Cheng, D. Yan, J. Sherman, and M. Keidar. “The Effect of Differing Cold Plasma Composition on GlioblastomaCell Viability.”

Prof. Taeyoung Lee (MAE) attended the International Symposium on Space Flight Dynamics held May 5-9 at the Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Laurel, MD. He gave a talk on the paper “Nonlinear Observability for Relative Satellite Orbits,” which was co-authored with Dr. Lovell at the Air Force Research Lab, Kirtland AFB.

Prof. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) and his graduate students, Krishna Nandan Kumar, Lang Xia, and Nima Mobadersany, attended the 167th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America held in Providence, RI, May 5-9. Prof. Sarkar chaired the lecture session 3pBA, “Nonlinear Response of Encapsulated Microbubbles,” and the group presented the following talks: 1) K. N. Kumar, S. Paul, and K. Sarkar. “Ambient pressure estimation using subharmonic emissions from contrast microbubbles;” 2) N. Mobadersany, A. Katiyar, and K. Sarkar. “Effects of ambient pressure variation on the subharmonic response from contrast microbubbles;” and 3) L. Xia, S. Paul, P. Chitnis, J. Ketterling, P. Sheeran, P. Dayton, and K. Sarkar. “Acoustic characterization of polymer-encapsulated microbubbles with different shell-thicknessto-radius ratios using in vitro attenuation and scattering: comparison between different rheological models.”

Prof. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) served as the technical program co-chair of the 20th IEEE Workshop on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN '14), held May 21-21, in Reno, NV.

Other News:

Prof. Lorena Barba (MAE) recently started a campaign to feature women in high-performance computing on the blog of graphics-chip maker, Nvidia. The “ Women Who CUDA” series will highlight the work of women who are innovators in the area of GPU computing. As part of the effort, Prof. Barba spoke about the campaign on a recent HPC Wire podcast. Prof. Barba is a CUDA Fellow, an invitation-only fellows program of Nvidia.

Prof. Lorena Barba (MAE) was a guest participant at the invitation-only 2014 Annual Meeting of The President's Circle of the National Academies, held May 21-22, here in Washington, DC. At the meeting, participants took an inside look at some surprising and pressing issues facing policy makers, heard about cutting-edge innovations in the economy through the lens of global science and technology, and dove into discussions on big data and the expanding universe.

On May 23, Prof. Taeyoung Lee (MAE) hosted a robotics group from the Bell Multicultural High School (BMHS) as an outreach event. BMHS is located at the Columbia Heights Educational Campus, DC, and is composed primarily of Hispanic and African-American students. The workshop started with a presentation on the origin and future of feedback control systems, and then students were given a chance to design their own control system by using Matlab Simulink. Afterwards, the students received a tour of several SEAS labs, including the Positronics Lab (CS), the Flight Dynamics and Control Lab (MAE), and the Motion Capture Lab (MAE, CS), where operations of various ground and aerial robots were demonstrated, and students played a competitive game with a motion capture system. Graduate students of Prof. Lee and Prof. Evan Drumwright (CS) assisted with the event.

GW Planet Forward recently featured the research of Prof. Claire Monteleoni (CS) in the online article “ What Machine Learning Can Do For Climate Science.”

On May 29, Prof. Julie Ryan (EMSE) participated in the NSF-sponsored “Cool Careers for Girls in Cybersecurity” workshop, held at Hagerstown Community College in Hagerstown, MD. The workshop featured security-related activities for the girls, such as lock-picking and cryptanalysis.

Prof. Julie Ryan (EMSE) has been appointed to be GW's alternate representative to the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P), a consortium of universities and other research institutions.

Prof. Rene van Dorp (EMSE) has been awarded a $139,000 in-kind grant in Simio simulation software licenses. He will use the software to teach his simulation course beginning in the fall 2014 semester.

Student News

Andrew DeJong , a Ph.D. student of Prof. Chunlei Liang (MAE), won a best presentation award on May 28 at the 2014 Joint Burgers Program/Johns Hopkins Center for Environmental and Applied Fluid Mechanics (CEAFM)/George Washington University Mechanical Engineering Fluids Group Symposium. Andrew worked on a high fidelity simulation of vortex induced vibration. He is currently working on fluid structure interaction.

Recently graduated doctoral student Hatem ElBidweihy (ECE) was awarded a travel grant from the IEEE Magnetics Society to attend the 2014 IEEE International Magnetics Conference (INTERMAG), held May 4-8, in Dresden, Germany. There he presented a paper titled “ Vector and rotational magnetization of high-strength steel,” co-authored by Profs. Edward Della Torre and Lawrence Bennett and doctoral student Ali Jamali, all from GW's Institute for Magnetics Research.

Jake Mortensen , an outstanding swimmer for GW who recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, has been awarded an Atlantic-10 post-graduate scholarship. The competition for these awards was very keen with outstanding student-athletes from all 12 of the conference's schools competing. Jake's accomplishments in the academic realm, as well as in the pool, earned him this award

On May 27, Junfeng Wang, a Ph.D. student of Prof. Chunlei Liang (MAE), successfully passed the second annual review of his Newkirk graduate fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). His scholarship will be extended for an additional year.

Other News

Ron Chiang , a recent Ph.D. graduate of Prof. Howie Huang (ECE), will join the University of St. Thomas as a tenure-track assistant professor in fall 2014. His research at GW focused on optimizing I/O virtualization in cloud data centers and providing essential support for data-intensive applications.

SEAS Events

MAE Seminar
Speaker: Dr. Varun Kulkarni, En’Urga Inc., West Lafayette, IN
Friday, June 6
2:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall

ECE Colloquium: “Sparse Representation of Multispectral Images and Application to Remote Sensing”
Speaker: Dr. Peng Liu, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Thursday, June 19
2:00 – 3:00 pm
640 Phillips Hall

External Events

NanoDay 2014 & Electron Microscopy Workshops
Wednesday, June 11 – Friday, June 13
Kim Engineering Building, University of Maryland, College Park
NanoDay 2014 will feature plenary talks by prominent scientists in nanoscience, a poster session for breaking research (with awards), and networking opportunities. The next two days will be set aside for Electron Microscopy Workshop days, with in-depth presentations by experienced microscopists. The event is hosted by Prof. John Cumings of UMD’s Department of Materials Science and Prof. Gary Rubloff, Minta Martin Professor of Engineering and Director, Maryland NanoCenter. Register and submit poster title and summary at: http://www.nanocenter.umd.edu/nanoday/register/

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