June 3-23, 2019

Dr. John Lach, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia, has been named the new dean of SEAS. SEAS looks forward to welcoming him when he begins his new role on August 15. More information on Dr. Lach’s background and experience is available at GW Today.

Dr. Igor Efimov (BME) has received two new grants. He is the principal investigator on a four-year, $3.6 million grant from the American Heart Association for the project “Targeting intracellular calcium leak for ventricular arrhythmia prevention in structural heart disease.” He will work with PIs Drs. B. Knollmann and W. Stevenson (Vanderbilt University), and his part of the award is $977,128. In addition he received a two-year sub-contract on the NIH grant “Comprehensive Structural and Functional Mapping of the Mammalian Cardiac Nervous System.” His budget for this collaborative project with UCLA is approximately $540,000.

Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) recently published two papers: 1) X.P. Lu, M. Keidar, M. Laroussi, E.H. Choi, E. Szili, and K. Ostrikov. “Transcutaneous plasma stress: from soft-matter models to living tissues,” Materials Science and Engineering - R: Reports, Vol. 138, Pages 36-59; and 2) I. Schweigert, S. Vagapov, L. Lin, and M. Keidar. “Enhancement of Atmospheric Plasma Jet - Target Interaction with External Ring Electrode,” Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 2019. 52 295201.

Axios mentioned research led by Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) in the May 30 article “Russian misinformation campaigns target health fears." CBS News also mentioned his research in the May 31 article “Russian trolls fueled anti-vaccination debate in U.S. by spreading misinformation on Twitter, study finds."

On May 27, Dr. Lorena Barba (MAE) gave the third Annual Tutte Lecture at the Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing (TIMC), a Canadian government research institute focused on fundamental mathematics and computer science, supported and funded by the Communications Security Establishment. The TIMC is focused on four key research areas: cryptography, cyber security, data science, and quantum computing. Dr. Barba’s lecture was titled “Next in Reproducibility: standards, policies, infrastructure, and human factors.” The next day, she gave a public lecture organized by TIMC, titled “One step forward, two steps back: the frustration of diversity efforts in STEM.”

Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE) and his doctoral student Shiyuan Wang attended the 1st IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Synchronized Measurements and Analytics, held May 20-23 at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. They presented the paper “A Novel Multi-Resolution Wavelet Transform for Online Power Grid Waveform Classification.” The NSF provided travel awards for both Dr. Dehghanian and Shiyuan to attend the event. Dr. Dehghanian is the director of the GW SmartGrid Lab.

Dr. John Helveston (EMSE) was selected to participate in an Energy Innovation Bootcamp hosted May 19-24 in Washington, DC by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The boot camp was designed for early career researchers in public policy and management who have published research in the open literature in energy innovation policy or management and who are actively pursuing a research program in the field. Separately, Dr. Helveston was a guest on the most recent episode of “The Future Car” podcast, hosted by Siemens. In the episode, he spoke about his research on China's electric vehicle industry and, in particular, about his research paper published in Research Policy.

Dr. Howie Huang (ECE) was invited to present his DARPA project to the Coalition for National Security Research’s (CNSR) Science, Technology, and Innovation Exchange during a May 22 briefing on Capitol Hill. This congressional briefing, organized by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Basic Research Office, showcased innovative DoD-funded research for Members of Congress and their staffs.

Dr. Rachael Jonassen (director, Climate Change EEMI) participated May 8-10 in a panel at Asian Development Bank (ADB) headquarters in Manila, Philippines. She serves as senior adaptation expert advising ADB in developing and delivering good practice guidance on climate resilient infrastructure design in the transport sector.

Dr. Chunlei Liang’s (MAE) research group presented a paper at the 6th International Symposium on Marine Propulsors, held May 26-30 in Rome, Italy. The paper, authored by Bin Zhang, Roland Yu, and Chunlei Liang, is titled “A High-order Sliding-Mesh Spectral Difference Method with Application to Simulation of Flows around Open Marine Propellers.”

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) presented the following paper at the International Conference on Communications: M. Xu, J. Diakonikolas, E. Modiano, and S. Subramaniam. “A hierarchical WDM-based scalable data center network architecture.” The conference was held May 20-24 in Shanghai, China. The paper was co-authored with his former doctoral student M. Xu and collaborators.

Dr. Tim Wood (CS) helped organize the MERIF Education Workshop, hosted at GW May 29-30. The event taught university and college faculty how to use the various NSF-funded midscale experimental testbeds in their classes. The testbeds, including Chameleon, CloudLab, COSMOS/ORBIT, Edge-Net, GENI, and POWDER-RENEW, are available for research and educational use to members of US academic institutions.

Ms. Annamaria Konya Tannon (chief evangelist and director, GW Innovation Center) was an invited panelist for the “Fireside Chat with Innovators” at the American Council for Technology (ACT) and Industry Advisory Council (IAC) Igniting Innovation 2019 Conference and Awards. The conference was held on May 23 in Washington, DC and hosted by the Institute for Innovation.