Faculty News
Honors & Awards:
Congratulations to Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE), who received the 2016 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics-National Capital Section (AIAA-NCS) Engineer of the Year award at the May 24 AIAA-NCS Honors and Awards Banquet. The citation for his award reads: “For outstanding science and engineering of space propulsion systems using micro cathode arc thrusters and applications to US Naval Academy cubesat and NASA-Yonsei University/KARI CANYVAL-X cubesat, and for promoting education and research in space propulsion.”
Research:
Prof. Igor Efimov (BME) and his colleagues Natalia Trayanova (Johns Hopkins University) and John Rogers (UIUC) have received a $6 million Leducq grant as part of the Transatlantic Network of Excellence program. Prof. Efimov, who is the U.S. coordinator of the program, co-directs it with Dr. Michel Haissaguerre of the University of Bordeaux, France. The award is for "RHYTHM," which is an acronym for Repolarization HeterogeneitY imaging for personalized Therapy of Heart ArrhythMia. The GW share of this grant is $1 million.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)/Department of Commerce has awarded Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi (ECE) a $100,000 grant for his proposal “High-Performance Computing for Big Data.”
Prof. Matthew Kay (BME) and his collaborator Dr. David Mendelowitz (SMHS, Pharmacology and Physiology) have received an NIH R01 research grant from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute to study the activation of parasympathetic nerves during heart failure. The project was awarded for four years with a total budget of $1,564,600. Dr. Mendelowitz is the PI and will lead the neuroscience aspects of the project. Prof. Kay (co-investigator and key personnel) will receive one-third of the budget to lead the cardiovascular aspects of the project. Dr. Mendelowitz and Prof. Kay aim to show whether or not chronic activation of neurons in the hypothalamus will blunt the deleterious effects of heart failure disease on cardiac function.
Prof. Chunlei Liang (MAE) has received a five-year, $507,159 NSF CAREER award for his project “ CAREER: A Novel and Fast Open-Source Code for Global Simulation of Stratified Convection and Magnetohydrodynamics of the Sun .” The goal of this project is to create a unique capability for predicting density-stratified magnetohydrodynamics of the Sun. This research is expected to lay a foundation for developing methods for predicting extreme space weather, e.g. the event of a “super solar flare” followed by an extreme geomagnetic storm.
Prof. Danmeng Shuai (CEE) and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been awarded $480,000 by NSF to conduct a three-year collaborative research project on algal separation for biofuel production. As part of this project, GW has been awarded $160,000 to develop innovative electrocatalytic membranes.
Media Mentions:
MediaPost quoted Prof. David Broniatowski (EMSE) in its May 24 article “Social Media Tracks Zika Misinformation.”
Publications:
Prof. David Broniatowski (EMSE) and his colleagues have published the following article: M. Dredze, D. A. Broniatowski, and K. M. Hilyard. “Zika vaccine misconceptions: A social media analysis,” Vaccine. A press release about the article was published in Science Daily on May 24.
Prof. Michael Keidar (MAE) recently published two papers: 1) I. Levchenko, I. I. Beilis, and M. Keidar. “Metamaterials: Nanoscaled Metamaterial as an Advanced Heat Pump and Cooling Media,” Advanced Materials Technologies (also featured on the cover of Advanced Materials Technologies); and 2) I. Levchenko, K. Ostrikov, J. Zheng, L. Xingguo, M. Keidar, and K. B. K. Teoe. “Scalable graphene production: perspectives and challenges of plasma applications,” Nanoscale (also featured on the cover of Nanoscale).
Dr. Matt Lumb (ECE research scientist) recently published the following article: M. P. Lumb, M. K. Yakes, M. González, M. F. Bennett, K. J. Schmieder, C. A. Affouda, M. Herrera, F. J. Delgado, S. I. Molina, and R. J. Walters. “Wide bandgap, strain-balanced quantum well tunnel junctions on InP substrates,” Journal of Applied Physics 119, 194503 (2016); doi: 10.1063/1.4948958.
Prof. Murray Snyder (MAE) has recently published two papers. With his colleagues, he published: A. Kumar, P. Ben-Tzvi, W. Saab, and M. R. Snyder. “Wireless Telemetry System for Real-Time Estimation of Ship Air Wakes with UAVs,”Mechatronics, 36, pp 18-26 (2016). With his postdoctoral scientist, Chen Friedman, and his colleagues, he published: H. S. Kang, M. R. Snyder, D. S. Miklosovic, and C. Friedman. “Comparisons of In Situ Ship Air Wakes with Wind Tunnel Measurements and CFD Simulations,” Journal of the American Helicopter Society, 61-2, pp 1-16 (2016).
Prof. Vesna Zderic (BME), along with her doctoral student Ivan Suarez Castellanos and undergraduate students Bogdan Balteanu and Tania Singh, have published the following review paper in IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering: I. Suarez Castellanos, B. Balteanu, T. Singh, and V. Zderic. “Therapeutic Modulation of Calcium Dynamics Using Ultrasound and Other Energy-based Techniques,” IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, 2016, Issue 99. DOI: 10.1109/RBME.2016.2555760.
Conferences & Presentations:
Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi (ECE) delivered a keynote address titled “Exploiting Hierarchical Locality for Productive Extreme Computing” at the Saudi National High-Performance Computing Conference, held in April 2016. Saudi Arabia has been a major player in HPC; its Shaheen II Supercomputer ranked number 7 in the world in 2015 and SNAM ranked number 2 in the top Green supercomputers in the world. Among the critical problems for which supercomputers are used in Saudi Arabia is oil reservoir modeling. Prof. El-Ghazawi’s visit was hosted by King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology, an organization with a mission similar to the National Science Foundation in the U.S.
EMSE faculty and students presented the following talks at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference, held May 22-24 in Anaheim, CA.
- “Design Team Decision Processes in Point of Dispensing Design” presented by Prof. Jeffrey Herrmann of UMD and co-authored by J. Herrmann, M. Morency, and E. Gralla
- “Establishing an Interdisciplinary Career in Engineering Systems” presented by Prof. Erica Gralla and co-authored by B. Heydari, M. Avnet, E. Gralla, and A. Salado
- “Flexibility Multipliers” presented by Prof. David Broniatowski
- “Humanitarian logistics supply chain setup decisions: The case of Haiti” presented by doctoral student Megan Peters (advised by Prof. Erica Gralla) and co-authored by M. Peters, L. Cusack, P. Graeter, and E. Gralla
- “Improving Expert Decision Making Processes on High Impact Low Probability Events” presented by doctoral student Hazan Deniz Marti and co-authored with Prof. Broniatowski
- “Integrating decomposition and decision sequence through representational uncertainty” presented by Prof. Erica Gralla and co-authored by E. Gralla and Z. Szajnfarber
- “Not All Networks are Equal: Empirical Analysis of Flexibility and Controllability in Software Systems” presented by master’s student Douglas Feitosa Tome and co-authored with Prof. Broniatowski
- “Reliability Growth Test and Evaluation for Multistage Systems” presented by doctoral student Valeriya Malobrodskaya (advised by Prof. Tom Mazzuchi)
Student News
Doctoral student Ivan Suarez Castellanos (BME), advised by Prof. Vesna Zderic (BME), has been awarded the 2015-16 Chateaubriand Fellowship for STEM and health fields. The Chateaubriand Fellowship is a yearly grant from the Embassy of France in the United States to give doctoral students enrolled in American universities the chance to conduct research in France for four to nine months. Ivan will spend the next five months doing research at the Laboratory of Thearapeutic Applications of Ultrasound (LabTAU), which is part of the “Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale” (INSERM, National Institute of Health and Medical Research) in Lyon, France.
Other News
The GW Nanofabrication and Imaging Center’s website has been launched and can be viewed at https://nic.gwu.edu. The website will be a tool to help us to attract users and promote this state-of-the-art facility.