Faculty News
Research:
GW's Institute for Biomedical Engineering recently awarded its Interdisciplinary Research Award to the following SEAS faculty:
- Prof. Grace Zhang (MAE) for "Integrating 3D Bioprinting and Biofluid Velocimetry to Build an Innovative 3D Perfused Vascular Network for Tissue/Organ Regeneration"
- Profs. Zhenyu Li, Mona Zaghloul, and Can Korman (all of ECE) for "Real-time Insulin Sensing in Serum Using a Wearable 'Lab-on-a-patch'"
Media Mentions:
Prof. Lorena Barba's (MAE) research appeared in Wired on October 31. It also appeared on the same date on the Nvidia blogs.
Prof. Rachelle Heller (CS) was interviewed recently for the New York City FIRST Girls in Tech blog. Her interview was published on October 28. FIRST is dedicated to inspiring youth to choose careers in STEM fields.
Prof. Lance Hoffman (CS) was featured in an October 31 Voice of America interview about the newest NSA revelations.
Conferences & Presentations:
Prof. Megan Leftwich (MAE) recently gave the following invited talks: 1) "The hydrodynamics of swimming: from sperm to Michael Phelps (but mostly lampreys)," presented October 8 at the William Maxwell Reed Seminar at the University of Kentucky's Department of Mechanical Engineering; and 2) "The fluid dynamics of human birth," presented October 22 at the Center for Computational Science at Tulane University.
Student News
MAE students Elizabeth Hubler, Megan Glasheen, and Alexa Baumer presented the following posters at the 2013 Southeast & Mid-Atlantic Biomedical Engineering Regional Career Conference, held October 25 in Washington, DC:
- Hubler, E.; Weiland, K. S.; Hancock, A. B.; Apostoli, A. G.; and Plesniak, M. W. (2013). "Evaluation of Synthetic Self-Oscillating Models of the Vocal Folds."
- Glasheen, M. M.; Apostoli, A. G.; and Plesniak, M. W. (2013). "Characterization of Material Properties Used in Synthetic Vocal Fold Models"
- Baumer, A.; Lehn, A.; and Leftwich, M. C. (2013) "The Role of Amniotic Fluid in Force Transfer During Human Birth."
Alexa works with Prof. Megan Leftwich; Elizabeth and Megan Glasheen work with Prof. Michael Plesniak.
GW's Institute for Biomedical Engineering recently awarded its Undergraduate Research Fellowship to the followings SEAS students:
- Aditi Shenoy and Richard Smith will share one award for "Capture and Enumeration of CD4+ T-Leukocytes from Whole Blood by Microfluidic Processing." Mentor: Prof. Zhenyu Li (ECE)
- Abel Rodriguez for "Therapeutic Ultrasound for Treatment of River Blindness." Mentor: Prof. Vesna Zderic (ECE)
Guest Vignette
GW, with strong support from government and industry, has played a critical role in advancing the high-performance computing field. In 1995, Professor Tarek El-Ghazawi and his students participated in the Beowulf project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; they also played a pioneering role in establishing the area of high-performance reconfigurable computing; and they conceived and specified the Unified Parallel C programming language (UPC), for which El-Ghazawi was a major author.
More recently, the group has completed and published several works on how using the locality awareness properties of parallel languages like UPC, a computer system can automatically detect appropriate times when data is not yet available at processors and scale down the clock frequency of those processors to reduce power. In addition, the group is currently researching hardware addressing solutions to reduce the performance overhead associated with managing shared memory operations in parallel computer languages with partitioned global address spaces (PGAS). The investigated hardware solutions will also manage the co-location of processing and data in future generation supercomputers, which will be characterized with extremely deep hierarchies of memory and processing.
In order to do this work, GW's High-Performance Computing Lab (HPCL) maintains a state-of-the-art data center at the Virginia Campus. The lab's cutting-edge hardware includes a Cray XK7 supercomputer named “George” that has approximately 2000 CPU cores (in addition to 32 Kepler Graphical Processing Units or GPUs) and is capable of performing 52 trillion calculations per second (52 TeraFLOPS). The center also includes a number of other clusters and parallel computers, many of which are accelerated by GPUs or reconfigurable hardware chips (Field Programmable Gate Arrays or FPGAs), or by Sony Play Stations. Some of those are from leading vendors and some have been built by our own students, who continue to maintain the facility and gain additional practical insights into the field. In addition to the many post-docs and graduate research assistants, opportunities are often available for undergraduate students to conduct research at the HPCL. (Provided courtesy of Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering)
SEAS Events
MAE Seminar: “Mechanical Forces Drive (and Regulate?) Organogenesis”
Speaker: Larry A. Taber, Washington University
Thursday, November 7
11:00 am
736 Phillips Hall
MAE Seminar: "The Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR)"
Speaker: Dr. Hans Gougar, Idaho National Laboratory
Monday, November 11
11:30 am
736 Phillips Hall
ECE Colloquium: “Development of Micro-Devices for Intra-Cellular Recordings in Awake Active Brains”
Speaker: Dr. Mladen Barbic, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Farm Research Campus
Monday, November 11
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Clark Engineering Scholars Program sponsored event: Cyber Security Presentation
Speaker: Ms. Paige Atkins, Vice President for Cyber and Information Technology Research at the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation
Tuesday, November 12
6:00 - 7:15 pm
Ms. Atkins is also a former director for strategic planning and information at the Defense Information Systems Agency, as well as a SEAS alumna.
MAE Seminar: "Engineering Pressure-sensitive Particles for Biomedical Ultrasound Applications"
Speaker: Prof. Tyrone Porter, Center for Nanoscience & Nanobiotechnology, Boston University
Wednesday, November 20
2:00 pm
302 Marvin Center
MAE Seminar: “Modeling Inelastic Behavior of Metals at Multiple Scales for Multiple Purposes”
Speaker, David L. McDowell, Georgia Institute of Technology
Monday, November 25
736 Phillips Hall
Other Events
Center for Career Services: Site Visit to Sirius XM
Wednesday, November 6
9:30 am - 1:00 pm
During the site visit, we will learn more about opportunities at Sirius XM, take a tour of the office, and connect with Sirius XM employees during a panel and breakout roundtable discussions. We will meet in the 5th floor lobby of Marvin Center and take the Metro to the SiriusXM Radio Office. Space is limited. RSVP today!
GW Alumni Networking Night
Tuesday, November 12
6:00 pm: Pre-event Workshop; 6:30 pm: Networking Reception
Marvin Center Grand Ballroom
This university-wide event is open to GW alumni and graduate students.
Entrepreneurship Events
Without Their Permission: A Night with Reddit.com Co-founder Alexis Ohanian
Tuesday, November 5
8:00 - 10:30 pm
353 Duques Hall
Pitch George Information Session
Wednesday, November 6
6:00 - 7:00 pm
353 Duques Hall
SEAS-LTV Entrepreneur Panel
Presenters: Imre Eszenyi (Orchestra Finance LLP), Martin Dunphy (Marlin Financial Group Inc), and Leo Fox (Tenacity Solutions Inc.)
Wednesday, November 6
6:40 - 8:40 pm
201 Tompkins Hall
Lean Startup Workshop: Topic 8
Friday, November 8
1:00 - 2:00 pm
526 Marvin Center
Entrepreneur Office Hour
Friday, November 8
2:30 - 3:30 pm
2033 K Street, NW, Suite 750
Dissertation Defenses
Name of Student Defending: Jinho Hwang
Title of Dissertation: “Improving and Repurposing Data Center Resource Usage with Virtualization”
Advisor: Prof. Tim Wood (CS)
Tuesday, November 12
10:00 am – 12:00 pm
736 Phillips Hall