In the News

Researcher to Make Supercomputers Even Faster
Professor Umit Catalyurek has earned one of NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards, which recognize a young researcher's dual commitment to scholarship and education. He will receive $400,000 in funding over five years for an ambitious project titled “Scalable combinatorial scientific computing.” Catalyurek will use the award to design efficient algorithms to enable increasingly large parallel computing systems to solve ever more complex scientific problems. Read the full article, by Holly Wagner. Professor Catalyurek is also a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will hold its third Grand Challenge Competition on Nov. 3, 2007. The DARPA Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles conducting simulated military supply missions in a mock urban area. The selection process for teams to enter the competition required that a 5-minute video of the status of developments on each car be
submitted. View the OSU-ACT video. As a result of the video, OSU-ACT was recently informed that they have been selected for a Site Visit in June and is one of only 53 remaining teams in the multi-stage selection process. The OSU-ACT team is led by Prof. Umit Ozguner.

Student Honors

Ms. Dongmin Liu (W. Lu, advisor) is one of the winners of the Presidential Fellowship Award. According to the Graduate School, "...these fellowships recognize the outstanding scholarly accomplishments and potential of graduate students entering the final phase of their dissertation research or terminal degree project..."

Congratulations to James Bontempo, M.S. (D. Kasten, advisor), who recently won the Graduate Associate Teaching Award (GATA). Out of approximately 2500 GTAs in the whole university, only 10 awards are given.

The MRS Entrepreneurship Challenge Competition grand prize of $3,000 was awarded to the team led by Ph.D. student Lee Mosbacker (M.S.E.E. '06, L. Brillson, advisor). The award-winning business plan is entitled: "0.3 to 1THz Array Sensor for Medical Imaging Based on a Spintronic Functional Polymer." The purpose of the competition is to show attendees how MRS members develop the entrepreneurial skills that get their ideas out of the lab and directly into the marketplace. The three finalist teams pitched their materials technology based business plans to a panel of seven judges from the venture capital community.

Alumni Announcements

Alum S. Fred Singer, Ph.D. (B.E.E. '43), President of the Science & Environmental Policy Project in Arlington, VA, has co-authored a new book which made it to the NY Times Best Seller List shortly after it was published. The technical book, titled "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years" is published by Rowman & Littlefield (2007).

The SNA CGOA is hosting a golf outing in honor of Lt. Matt Williams (B.S.E.C.E. '03) who passed away last year after a courageous battle with lymphoma. The outing will be at Reid North Golf Course on Friday, June 22, 12:30. Cost is $55/person and includes golf, cart, steak dinner, and prizes. Please RSVP to Lt. Bill Keichel or call (937) 656-5860. Payment is due on or before Fri, June 8.

OSU and the Ohio State Alumni Association offer the Lifetime E-mail Forwarding Service to all OSU alumni and retirees. The service allows e-mail sent to your OSU e-mail address to be forwarded to the e-mail account of your choice. See the e-mail Forwarding Service web site.

Engineering Career Services: If you have graduated in the last twelve months, you are still eligible for all ECS services. If you have graduated from the College of Engineering over one year ago, you are still eligible for some services, such as the Buckeye Alumni Job Board and NACElinkConnect.

Winter 2007 Ph.D. Dissertation Titles

Q. Chen, "Studies in Autonomous Ground Vehicle Control Systems," Advisor: U. Ozguner

J. Finke, "Stable Emergent Ideal Free Distributions," Advisor: K. Passino

Y. Lin, "Science and Applications of III-V Graded Anion Metamorphic Buffers on INP Substrates," Advisor: S. Ringel

Y. Liu, "Applications of Wireless Communication in Traffic Networks Using a Hierarchical Hybrid System Model," Advisor: U. Ozguner

W. Yan, "Multilevel Sliding Mode Control in Hybrid Power Systems," Advisor: V. Utkin

P. Zhang, "Circuit and System Design for Fully Integrated CMOS Direct-Conversion Multi-Band OFDM Ultra-Wideband Receivers," Advisor: M. El-Naggar