ti_eng_facultyupdate

January 2008

“Faculty”
  • Boon S. Ooi, an associate professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering renowned internationally for his work in semiconductor photonics, has recently been named a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. Ooi has also received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct research on broadband diode lasers. Ooi’s work was also featured earlier this year in Compound Semiconductor, a technical journal published by the Institute of Physics. An article titled “Dashes beat dots for high-power lasers” described Ooi’s collaboration with the Army Research Laboratory in Maryland and with IQE, a leading supplier of semiconductor wafer products.
  • Israel Wachs, the G. Whitney Snyder Professor of Chemical Engineering and a world-renowned expert in catalysis, has been chosen by the American Chemical Society to receive the George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry. The award will be presented by ACS’s Division of Petroleum Chemistry at the society’s spring 2008 national meeting in New Orleans. Wachs is the second consecutive member of the Lehigh faculty to win the Olah Award. Bruce Koel, professor of chemistry and vice provost for research, won the award in 2007.
“Students”
  • Three graduate students engaged in Lehigh’s Semantic Web and Agent Technologies (SWAT) Lab, directed by Jeff Heflin, associate professor of Computer Science & Engineering, recently gave presentations at prestigious events in their field. Ph.D. candidate Zhengxiang Pan attended the 6th International Conference on Ontologies, Databases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2007) conference in Algarve, Portugal. He presented "Hawkeye: A Practical Large Scale Demonstration of Semantic Web Integration." His colleagues Fabiana Prabhakar and Abir Qasem, Ph.D. candidate and master’s student, respectively, attended the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 07) in Busan, Korea. They presented "Efficient Selection and Integration of Data Sources for Answering Semantic Web Queries" and "Benchmarking Reasoners for Multi-Ontology Applications,” and gave a demonstration of the Hawkeye knowledge base in the poster and demo session. Hawkeye is a prototype of Semantic Web domain developed by Lehigh faculty and students that delves into e-academia and e-government.
“Programs”
  • The Lynn S. Beedle Award is named for the late professor of civil engineering at Lehigh and founder of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. This award, endowed by gifts from the Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty at Lehigh University in 2003, is given annually to honor a Lehigh Civil and Environmental Engineering graduate or faculty member for outstanding achievements in, and contributions to the advancement of the field in education, scholarship, professional leadership, or industrial achievement. This year, the award was presented to Professor Emeritus John W. Fisher for his innovative and internationally-recognized research in steel structures, structural connections, fatigue and fracture, and bridge engineering, and his 40 years of outstanding leadership of major research initiatives at Lehigh. Fisher is recognized as a founder of Center for Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATLSS).”