March 25-31, 2013

Newsletter

March 25, 2013

Faculty News

Research:

Prof. Mona Zaghloul (ECE) has received $33,000 from the European Space Agency to do a study on the applications of MEMS/NEMS, RF-MEMS, and GaN devices for satellite communications.  The contract was issued through the company EUROCONSULT.

Publications:

Prof. Kausik Sarkar (MAE) and his  graduate student Shirshendu Paul  have published the following paper with their collaborators at North Dakota State University: R. Nahire, M.K. Haldar, S. Paul, A. Mergoum, A.H. Ambre, K.S. Katti, K.N. Gange, D.K. Srivastava, K. Sarkar, and S. Mallik, "Polymer-Coated Echogenic Lipid Nanoparticles with Dual Release Triggers,  Biomacromolecules , 2013, 14, 841-853.  The paper reports the development and analysis of drug-bearing, cancer-cell-targeting, echogenic nanoparticles that can be used for ultrasound imaging and at the same time are shown to deliver drugs (doxorubicin) inside cancer cells.

Conferences & Presentations:

Prof. Shelly Heller (CS) gave a talk titled "Peer Reviewed Journals, Do They Lead or Follow the Research?” at PAG Asia 2013, held in Singapore, on March 19.

Prof. Tianshu Li (CEE) gave an invited talk, titled "Probing no man's land: ice nucleation at nano scale," at the American Physics Society (APS) March meeting, held March 21 in Baltimore, MD.

Prof. Ergun Simsek (ECE) gave two talks last week.  On March 19, he gave an invited talk titled "Engineering the Field of Electronic Warfare" at the Electronic Warfare Summit (EW 2013), held in Alexandria, VA.  On March 20, he presented "Graphene Based Tunable SPR Sensors" at the 2013 APS March Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD.

Other News:

Prof. Joost Santos (EMSE) was recently inducted to the Philippine-American Academy of Science and Engineering (PAASE).  This academy is a non-profit organization composed of scientists and engineers of Philippine descent who have distinguished themselves in scholarly and research related activities.

Student News

ECE doctoral student Bhaven Mehta has had his paper, "Tuning Nano Antennas with Graphene," accepted as a finalist to the 2013 IEEE AP-S International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation.  The conference will take place this coming July in Orlando, FL, and the conference will pay Bhaven to present the paper.  This year, 141 papers were submitted to the competition. Bhaven works with  Prof. Mona Zaghloul (ECE).

Other News

Team Capitol DC —the collegiate Solar Decathlon team composed of GW, Catholic University of America, and American University students—has received more local media attention, most recently in the ElevationDC  article “ Harvesting energy for the win: D.C. students compete to build energy-efficient house of the future .”

Guest Vignette

Due to water scarcity in the US and other parts of the world, the necessity to provide a solution for clean, affordable water is becoming increasingly important.  CEE doctoral students Taqsim Husnain and Nuruol Mohd, led by Prof. Rumana Riffat in environmental engineering, are investigating the potential of using bioreactor-enhanced advanced membrane processes for sustainable reuse of wastewater.  The integrated system has the potential to produce high quality water from wastewater using alternate sources of renewable energy.

Emerging membrane technologies like forward osmosis (FO) and membrane distillation (MD) have many advantages over traditional pressure driven membrane processes like reverse osmosis.  In this project, a combined forward osmosis and membrane distillation system was developed and the performance of the system was investigated.  Membrane distillation was used to recover draw solution for the forward osmosis system, and forward osmosis worked as a pretreatment barrier to reduce membrane distillation fouling.  The integrated FO-MD system will be used for treatment of effluent from an anaerobic digester.  The quality of treated water will be compared to that of tap water.  One of the products of anaerobic digestion is biogas (methane).  The reuse of biogas as fuel to provide heating necessary for the membrane system is another interesting aspect of the project.  The ultimate goal is to develop a self-sustaining, on-site system for wastewater reuse.  (Provided courtesy of Prof. Rumana Riffat  and Taqsim Husnain  of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering)

SEAS Events

MAE Seminar: "The Mechanism of Axi-Asymmetric Mass Transfer Phenomenon Behind an Orifice in a Curved Swirling Flow"
Dr. Nobuyuki Fujisawa, Niigata University, Japan
Monday, March 25
2:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall

ECE Faculty Candidate Colloquium: “Compressed Sensing in Computed Tomography”
Faculty Candidate: Dr. Hengyong Yu, director of the CT Lab and assistant professor, Wake Forest University Health Sciences
Tuesday, March 26
1:00 pm
640 Phillips Hall

MAE Faculty Candidate Seminar: “Warm-blooded Plastics: Bio-inspired Solutions to Smart Material Systems"
Ximin (Tracy) He, Ph.D., Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University
Tuesday, March 26
2:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall

ECE Faculty Candidate Colloquium: “Scalable and Flexible Bulk Architecture”
Faculty Candidate: Xuehai Qian, Ph.D. candidate, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, March 28
1:00 pm  (Note: new time)
640 Phillips Hall

ECE Faculty Candidate Colloquium: “Optical Spectroscopy and Imaging of Tissue Metabolism”
Faculty Candidate: Dr. Mahsa Ranji, assistant professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Monday, April 1
11:00 am
640 Phillips Hall

MAE Seminar: "Soft Active Polymer and their Composites: Bringing Future Structures to Shape Adaptive”
Dr. Jinsong Leng, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
Monday, April 1
11:00 am
736 Phillips Hall

ECE Faculty Candidate Colloquium
Faculty Candidate: Dr. Hoang Le, Senior Scientist, Irvine Sensors Corporation
Talk title: “High Performance Architectures for Packet Forwarding and String Pattern Matching”
Tuesday, April 2
1:00 pm
640 Phillips Hall

Free COMSOL Multiphysics Workshop at GW
Host: Prof. Pinhas Ben-Tzvi (MAE)
Thursday, April 4
Please choose the session most convenient to you; both workshops are identical:
AM Session:    
9:30 - 11:00 am: Intro and Live Demo
11:00 am - 12:30 pm: Hands-on Session
PM Session:    
1:30 - 3:00 pm: Intro and Live Demo
3:00 - 4:30 pm: Hands-on Session
736 Phillips Hall

ECE Colloquium: “Developing mm-Scale High-Efficiency Power Converters”
Dr. Sarah S. Bedair
Friday, April 12
2:00 pm
352 Rome Hall

2013 Frank Howard Distinguished Lecture: "Promoting Cutting Edge Research: The Impact of the U.S. Navy"
Speaker:  Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, chief of naval research
Wednesday, April 17
6:15 - 9:00 pm
103 Funger Hall
As the Chief of Naval Research, RADM Klunder coordinates, executes and promotes the science and technology programs of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps,  distributing approximately $2 billion in funds annually .

Dissertation Defenses

Name of Student Defending: Qianyi Zhao
Title of Dissertation: “Methodology of Modeling Multiple Scattering Effects in Microwave Remote Sensing of Vegetation”
Advisor: Prof. Roger Lang
Tuesday, March 26
10:00 am
640 Phillips Hall