Engineering Spotlight Spotlight

"College is what you make of it. You can do anything you want, from working all day to just having fun, but an even balance is what is best in the end."

- Brian Gerard ‘07
materials science and engineering major

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February 2007

  • Hector Munoz-Avila, assistant professor of Computer Science & Engineering, has received a 2006 CAREER award from the NSF for “A Unified Architecture for Learning of, and reasoning with, Task Models: Theory and Applications." Some of the broader impacts of this work include potential applications that are amenable to hierarchical modeling, including project management for public events, software engineering project planning, and developing strategies for automated players in computer games.

  • James Hwang, professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Herman Nied, professor and department chair of Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics, and Richard Vinci, associate professor of Materials Science & Engineering, have partnered with the University of Illinois, Purdue University and Georgia Institute of Technologies to win a DARPA grant for fundamental research in nano-/micro- electromechanical systems. With an optional extension of three years beyond the initial three years, plus cost sharing from industry and universities, the total grant is potentially valued at $10 million.

  • Mohamed S. El-Aasser, provost, vice president for academic affairs, and professor of Chemical Engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE).The award is the second top honor that El-Aasser has received in five years from PMSE. In 2002, he was chosen to receive the division’s Roy W. Tess Award in Coatings.

  • Tiffany Jing Li, assistant professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, has received a grant from the NSF in the area of "Unifying Source, Channel and Network Coding Technology." In this project, Tiffany seeks to discover practical approaches in software or hardware implementation to support the emerging areas of network information theory, distributed signal processing and cooperative communications.

  • John Spletzer, assistant professor of Computer Science & Engineering, leads a team of Lehigh faculty and students collaborating with colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania and Lockheed Martin in pursuit of DARPA’s “Urban Challenge” competition for autonomous ground vehicles. DARPA's mission in sponsoring the Urban Challenge – and its $3.5-million prize chest for first, second, and third place – is to promote the development of autonomous vehicle that can operate safely in urban environments. Thales Communications, led by CEO Mitch Herberts ’79, is helping to support the Lehigh contribution to the Lehigh-Penn-Lockheed team, which revolves around the sensor technologies necessary to allow unoccupied vehicles maneuver around obstacles.