« Washington Engineer - May 2006

Mary Lidstrom appointed UW vice provost for research

Mary Lidstrom, new Vice Provost for Research at the UW.

• View Lidstrom’s UW home page
• Go to the Lidstrom Lab Web site

Mary Lidstrom, professor in chemical engineering and microbiology and former associate dean for new initiatives in the College of Engineering, has been tapped to lead research for the UW as a whole.

Lidstrom’s research focuses on genome sequencing. Her teaching delves into helping engineering students bridge the gap between engineering and biology.

She received her B.S. in microbiology from Oregon State University. After receiving her master’s and doctoral degrees in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin, Lidstrom conducted work as a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow in Microbiology at the University of Sheffield. She has previously held academic appointments in microbiology at the UW, in the Center for Great Lakes Studies in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in environmental engineering science at the California Institute of Technology. She currently is a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Bacteriology and FEMS Microbial Ecology.

Tricia Thompson tapped to lead UW marketing

Tricia Thompson, the UW’s new director of marketing.

Tricia Thompson, who has been the College of Engineering’s director of communications and marketing for the past three years, is taking her skills to a university-wide level as the UW’s new director of marketing. In engineering, Thompson led a yearlong study that delved into how the college is perceived, both internally and externally. Then, based on those results, she worked with college leaders to develop and implement a strategic plan to unify and manage the college’s image. As a result of that work, UW President Mark Emmert asked her to conduct a similar study across the university, which was completed last summer.

Specific to this publication, Thompson led the effort to create Washington Engineer in 2003 and has provided invaluable direction to the e-zine since. The Washington Engineer staff wish her the best in her new pursuits.

Hank Levy takes helm of Computer Science & Engineering

Henry Levy, new chair of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, atop the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Levy served as department liaison for design and construction of the building, which opened in 2003.

• Read the UW news release
• View Levy’s Web site

Henry M. Levy, a longtime University of Washington professor and expert in operating systems and computer architecture, has been appointed the next chair of the university’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering.

Levy joined the UW in 1983 and led several pioneering projects that helped lay the groundwork for modern object-oriented distributed systems and languages.

In the early 1990s, he helped develop new techniques for high-performance thread support, synchronization and communication that influenced a number of commercial operating systems. In the mid-1990s, Levy, along with UW professor Susan Eggers and their students, invented simultaneous multithreading, which allows modern processors to execute multiple instructions from multiple programs in a single computing cycle.

This technology is used in several microprocessors, including the Intel Pentium-4 and the IBM Power-5.

College appoints Eve Riskin as associate dean of organizational infrastructure

Eve Riskin, new associate dean of organizational infrastructure in the College of Engineering.

• View Riskin’s UW home page
• Go to the ADVANCE Web site
• Go to the Data Compression Lab Web site

Eve Riskin, professor in the UW Department of Electrical Engineering and director of the ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change, is the college’s new associate dean of organizational infrastructure.

Riskin’s research group in the UW Data Compression Laboratory is working in video and image compression. In collaboration with Richard Ladner in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, the group is compressing video of American Sign Language. In addition, the researchers are developing constant-quality rate control algorithms.

Riskin earned a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, and two master’s degrees and a doctorate from Stanford University. She joined the UW faculty in 1990.

Daniel Schwartz new acting associate dean of new initiatives

Daniel Schwartz, engineering’s new acting associate dean of new initiatives.

• View Schwartz’s UW home page

Daniel T. Schwartz, Boeing-Sutter Professor of Chemical Engineering and adjunct professor of Materials Science & Engineering, has been named acting associate dean of new initiatives for the College of Engineering.

Schwartz’s research interests include electrochemical and microsystem engineering and electrochemical Materials science. Along those lines, his group in the Electrochemical Materials and Interfaces Laboratory uses electrochemical engineering methods to grow and characterize functional films and surfaces under mild aqueous conditions.

The group’s work includes developing new computer-aided manufacturing schemes where microsystems are “printed” directly from a 3-D image drawn in software, basic research that could be used in the detection and clean-up of radioactive waste and participation in a nanotechnology effort at the UW aimed at the use of small polypeptides and proteins to facilitate the spontaneous growth of novel inorganic materials for electronic and magnetic applications.

Schwartz earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota in 1983 and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California Davis in 1985 and 1989. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1991.