Engineering Spotlight Spotlight

"I’ve always considered medicine as a possible career path. Back home, students interested in science go into medicine or electrical engineering. My interests crossed disciplinary boundaries, so I wanted to find a place where this type of thinking was encouraged."

-Kwame Atsina
bioengineering major

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ti_eng_facultyupdate

July 2007

“Faculty”
  • Mayuresh Kothare of Chemical Engineering has been named the winner of the 2007 Outstanding Young Researcher Award of the AIChE CAST Division (Computing and Systems Technology). The Award is a major national award that recognizes an individual under the age of 40 for outstanding contributions to the chemical engineering computing and systems technology literature.
  • Dan Frangopol, professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and holder of the Fazlur Rahman Khan Endowed Chair, and colleagues have been named as recipients of the Outstanding Paper (OPAC) Award from the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE). Dan is the first American in 15 years to receive this award -- remitted each year to the author(s) of the most outstanding paper published in the preceding year's issues of the IABSE journal, Structural Engineering International. Frangopol shares the award with Professors Fabio Biondini and Giorgio Malerba of Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. Their paper is entitled “Time-Variant Structural Performance of the Certosa Cable-Stayed Bridge.”
  • In early June, assistant professor James Gilchrist of Chemical Engineering was named winner of the 2007 North American Mixing Foundation Startup Grant for his research in “Mixing of Polydisperse Suspensions in 3D MicroChannel Flows.” Later in the month, Gilchrist was invited as a keynote speaker at the 5th International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels and Minichannels, held at the Universidad De Las Americas in Puebla, Mexico. Rounding out his busy month with the American Chemical Society Colloids and Surface Science meeting at the University of Delaware, two of Gilchrist's students presented on different facets of his research -- one of which is an exciting collaboration with assistant professor Nelson Tansu of Electrical & Computer Engineering. In this research, Gilchrist and Tansu are exploring novel ways to increase the effectiveness of Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) that could one day represent dramatic improvement in the efficiency of current illumination and signage techniques across a variety of applications.
“Programs”
  • Lehigh has received its second major grant in four years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help area middle- and high-school students prepare for college. The new project, called Launch-Information Technology, or Launch-IT, is also aimed at attracting more underrepresented minorities and more women to the study of computer science. Through Launch-IT, about 70 students in grades 7-12 in the Lehigh Valley come to Lehigh one Saturday each month and for three weeks during the summer to learn about computer programming, software, robotics and other information-technology subjects. The first summer session will begin July 23.
  • Lehigh’s NSF-supported International Materials Institute for New Functionalities in Glass (IMI) recently joined with five other U.S. universities to offer an experimental Web-based course called Formation and Structure of Glass. A total of 28 seniors and graduate students from seven schools signed up for the course, attending 90-minute lectures twice a week for 13 weeks by logging on to the Internet. For their final assignment, students formed nine long-distance teams and collaborated by e-mail, phone and videoconferencing to produce posters describing the results of their research projects.
“Students”
  • Leonidas Bleris ‘06G, who recently earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering with Mayuresh Kothare of Chemical Engineering, was co-author of a paper published recently in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The paper, entitled “A universal RNAi-based logic evaluator that operates in mammalian cells,” describes how tiny biological computers can be implanted in human cells to monitor activities and properties. Upon earning his doctorate at Lehigh, Bleris took a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University.
  • Yang Wang, a Ph.D. student in Lehigh’s Center for Optical Technologies, recently received one prestigious award from the Chinese government and another from SPIE—The International Society for Optical Engineering. Wang, who enrolled at Lehigh in 2003 as a graduate student in electrical engineering, received the 2006 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad and the 2007 SPIE Educational Scholarship.