« Washington Engineer - August 2006
Atman scores triple engineering honors
- Cindy Atman, center, holder of the new Mitchell T. Bowie and Lella Blanche Bowie Endowed Chair, with members of the Bowie family.
• 2009 update: Best and Brightest profile of Cindy Atman
• Visit the CELT site
Three is this year’s lucky number for Cynthia Atman.
First, the professor of industrial engineering was elected a fellow of the world’s largest scientific organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Next, she became the first recipient of the new Mitchell T. Bowie and Lella Blanche Bowie Endowed Chair. Then, in recognition of her pioneering work in engineering education, she was made a fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education.
“This has been quite a year for me,” Atman said. “It's really a little overwhelming.”
It’s also well deserved, colleagues say.
“Cindy is a national leader in investigating how engineering students learn and how we can improve our educational methods to more effectively teach them,” said Mani Soma, UW acting dean of engineering. “Her work will revolutionize our world, not just in academics but in the world at large as better prepared students enter the work force.”
Other Stories...
- Materials Science scores big
- College names Diamond Award winners
- Five BioE students named NSF fellows
- Women win under Google Borg scholarship program
- Student gets Fulbright fellowship
- Prof in EE honored for public service
A banner year for Materials Science & Engineering
• Visit the department Web site
UW Engineering’s Department of Materials Science & Engineering, the oldest of the engineering disciplines on campus and a contributor to such high-profile projects as NASA’s Space Shuttle program, is reporting a banner year for research funding, having garnered nearly $18 million since last spring.
A string of recent grants to MSE faculty members by high-profile funding agencies show how quickly the department’s research star is rising, according to Chairman Alex Jen.
“Our people have always competed on the national stage with other leaders in the field,” Jen said. “These results show that we’re doing it at a greater volume with increasingly greater success.”
The department’s major grants over the past year totaled $17.7 million.
College names first round of Diamond Award winners
- Engineering’s first round of Diamond Award winners: Al DeAtley, Chumpol Na Lamlieng, Jeff Dean, and Jeremy Jaech. Dean Designate Matt O’Donnell is in the center.
• Read more about the award winners
• Find out more about the awards
Perhaps more than any other discipline, engineering shapes the world around us. But just as those changes are often taken for granted, so, too, are the engineers who work behind the scenes to make change possible.
With that in mind, the UW College of Engineering seeks to bring recognition to engineers who have made significant contributions. Hence the newly created Diamond Awards. The first round of awards went to a diverse group:
Chumpol Na Lamlieng, Distinguished Achievement. Na Lamlieng built a 30-year career at Siam Cement Public Co., the bluest of Thailand’s blue chips, with the royal family as major shareholders. Market capitalization of $7 billion and employment of 35,000 make Siam Cement the country’s biggest industrial conglomerate. Recently retired, Na Lamlieng chairs the board of SingTel Group and is a member of the Asia Pacific Advisory Committee to the New York Stock Exchange.
Jeremy Jaech, Entrepreneurial Excellence. In the past 20 years, Jaech has had a hand in the startups of Aldus (acquired by Adobe), Visio (acquired by Microsoft) and now Trumba. New ways of working have sprung from his revolutionary products: PageMaker ushered in desktop publishing and Visio was the first mass-market business drawing and diagramming software.
Al DeAtley, Distinguished Service. DeAtley became a state and national leader in the asphalt paving industry while remaining the “go-to guy” for Yakima Valley civic causes. He led the creation of a national foundation that has provided some 200 college scholarships for civil engineering students. He studied at the UW in the 1950s, and purchased Superior Asphalt Company from his father in 1974.
Jeffrey Dean, Early Career. Dean has helped to develop and implement three generations of Google’s Web crawling, indexing and query serving systems, covering two and three orders of magnitude growth in number of documents searched, number of queries handled per second, and frequency of updates to the system. He is now a Google Fellow in the systems infrastructure group.
Nominations are open until Sept. 30 for next year’s winners. Go to the Diamond Awards Web page to submit a nomination.
Five BioE students get NSF fellowships for coming academic year
- BioE’s new NSF fellows, from left: Lauren Shepherd, Kyung Park, Kristy Katzenmeyer, Ansanka Dewaraja, and Jackie Callihan.
Five students in the UW’s Department of Bioengineering have received Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation for the coming academic year.
Kyung Park, Kristy Katzenmeyer and Jackie Callihan in bioengineering Professor James Bryers’ lab; Ansanka Dewaraja in the lab of Kirk Beach, research professor in surgery; and Lauren Shepherd in the lab of Paul Yager, vice chair in bioengineering.
“It is a huge honor to receive these fellowships,” said Suzanne Ortega, graduate school dean. “Less than 10 percent of those who apply receive one. To have that many in one department is rare, and must be a sign of high quality students and ongoing research.”
Three UW students awarded prizes under Google Anita Borg Scholarship program
Read the press release on the Google Web site
A University of Washington graduate student in computer science has won $10,000 as a 2006 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship winner, while two other UW students received $1,000 as finalists.
Michele Banko was one of 19 $10,000 scholarship winners in this year’s competition. Among the finalists were UW students Annie Hsin-Wen Liu and Sunny Consolvo. The program is intended to honor the legacy of Anita Borg and her efforts to encourage women to pursue careers in computer science and technology.
Electrical engineering student selected for Fulbright fellowship
Tho Nguyen, a graduate student in electrical engineering has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to spend a year in Vietnam setting up a robotics lab at Can Tho University. The Fulbright Program, established in 1946 by Sen. J. William Fulbright and sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, provides funding for students, teachers, scholars and professionals to undertake graduate study, advanced research and teaching, usually in foreign countries.
Longtime EE professor, activist, wins UW public service award
Sinclair Yee, a longtime professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering who recently retired, has won a 2006 Outstanding Public Service Award from the University of Washington.
The award is intended to honor university employees for extensive public service at the local, national and international levels. For Yee, the award ties to his founding of the Chinese Information Service Center, a non-profit organization that helps immigrants make the often difficult transition to life in America.