Winners: Prof follows college tradition
Strunz becomes college’s 33rd NSF CAREER recipient since 1995
In winning a 2003 NSF CAREER award, electrical engineering Assistant Professor Kai Strunz is carrying on a UW engineering tradition. Since 1995, when the CAREER award program replaced the National Young Investigator award, the College of Engineering has had 33 recipients.
“This speaks directly to the quality of our people,” said Dean Denice Denton. “They truly are among the best in the country.”
Strunz, who earned his doctoral degree from the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken, has been with the UW since April 2002. The award includes a five-year grant for his research project titled "Real Time Digital Simulation Methodology for Next-Generation Distributed Energy Systems."
Other Stories...
- Bush taps prof to lead commission
- EE students take top honors in international design contest
- HHMI grant helps prof cross boundaries
- 2003 Sloan winners are Computer Science & Engineering’s ninth and 10th
- National Academy of Engineering welcomes two UW affiliate professors
- Brains and bytes: researcher gets awards for work on biology/computer interface
UW’s Lazowska selected to lead President Bush’s IT advisory committee
President George W. Bush has selected a University of Washington computer scientist as co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, the White House announced last month.
Edward D. Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, will serve a two-year term on the committee, which provides the president with advice on maintaining U.S. leadership in advanced information technologies.
“Continued leadership in information technology is vital to the nation,” Lazowska said. “PITAC has played an important role in guiding federal policy in this arena, and I’m delighted to have been appointed to the committee.”
Lazowska has been a member of the UW faculty since 1977. In 1998, he was given the UW Outstanding Public Service Award. He chaired the UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the College of Engineering from 1993-2001, and in 2000 was named the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair.
EE students take top honors in international design contest
A team of four UW electrical engineering students has won top honors in the first phase of an international design competition sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corporation. The students, Dicle Ozis, Hossein Zarei, Xiaoyong Li, and Jeyanandh Paramesh, received $7,000 for their winning entry in the SRC SiGe Design Challenge, titled “Smart Antenna and Multiple-antenna RF front-end SiGe Circuit.” They also advanced to the second phase of the competition, in which they will fabricate their design. Submissions for that phase are due July 22.
EE Professor David Allstott was faculty adviser for the team. Co-sponsors include IBM Corporation, National Semiconductor Corporation, Cadence Design Systems Inc. and NurLogic Design Inc.
HHMI gives prof $1 million to teach at the engineering-biology boundary
By training, Mary Lidstrom is a biologist. By choice, she operates as an engineer. The advantages of combining both fields are just too great to pass up, she says.
It’s a message that Lidstrom, a biology and chemical engineering professor and associate dean for new initiatives in engineering, has been endeavoring to pass along to UW students for the past two years via a federally funded program to teach biology to engineering undergraduates. Now, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will give those efforts a major boost.
Lidstrom is one of 20 top researchers nationwide named in the institute’s first group of HHMI Professors. Each will receive a $1 million grant over the next four years to bring the creativity and expertise they have shown in the lab to the undergraduate classroom.
“We will also be providing opportunities for undergraduate research at the engineering-biology boundary,” she said. “The applications are tremendous, not only in the biomedical area, like genomics, but also in materials science, bioengineering, chemical engineering, computer science – almost every field is being touched.”
2003 Sloan winners are Computer Science & Engineering’s ninth and 10th
Pedro Domingos and Zoran Popovic, both assistant professors in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, have been named to the 2003 class of Sloan Research Fellows. The Sloan Research Fellowship program recognizes the nation's most outstanding young faculty members in the sciences. Winners receive $40,000 grants over two years, to be used to fund research.
Domingos’ research interests are in the fields of machine learning and data mining. Popovic’s research involves computer graphics, specifically character animation, motion editing and modeling or simulation of natural phenomena.
Domingos and Popovic are CSE's ninth and 10th Sloan recipients. Both joined the UW faculty in 1999, and both have been recognized previously with National Science Foundation CAREER Awards.
National Academy welcomes two College of Engineering affiliates
Computer Science & Engineering Affiliate Professors Phil Bernstein and Burton Smith have been elected to the "Class of 2003" of the National Academy of Engineering. Election to NAE is regarded as one of the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer. Bernstein, an expert in databases and transaction processing, is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Smith, an expert in high-performance computer architectures and a pioneer in the development of parallel computing, is chief scientist at Cray.
Brains and bytes: researcher gets national awards for work on biology/computer interface
Rajesh Rao, assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering, has been named one of 26 Office of Naval Research Young Investigators for 2003. The ONRYI winners come from all fields of science and engineering. This year, two were awarded nationally in the Mathematical, Computer and Information Sciences Division and two in the Cognitive, Neural, and Biomolecular Science and Technology Division.
Rao was also one of 20 scientists nationwide to recently receive grants from the Lucille and David Packard Foundation to advance his research in computational neuroscience, including work in brain-computer interfaces.