Awards & Honors
Tonya Kuhl Named 2007 Outstanding AIChE Student Chapter Advisor
Tonya Kuhl, professor of chemical engineering and materials science, has been named 2007 Outstanding Student Chapter Advisor by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The national award recognizes outstanding service and leadership in guiding the student chapter's activities, particularly in creating enthusiasm and professionalism among the chapter members. Kuhl will receive a plaque and a $500 unrestricted grant for her department at the AIChE National Student Conference in Salt Lake City, NV, on November 4.
Posted: 11/5/07
Simon Cherry Recognized by Academy of Molecular Imaging
Simon Cherry, professor of biomedical engineering, has received the Distinguished Basic Scientist Award from the Academy of Molecular Imaging. The award was presented by Academy President Johannes Czernin at the 2007 Joint Molecular Imaging Conference held in Providence, R.I., on September 8. Cherry delivered an invited lecture on his research in developing high resolution in vivo imaging technologies and received a cash award in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of molecular imaging.
Posted: 11/5/07
ASME Honors MAE Professors Velinsky and Karnopp
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has bestowed high honors to two professors from the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering.
Steven A. Velinsky has been awarded the 2007 Machine Design Award for his research contributions in the mechanical design field and professional leadership within ASME's Design Engineering Division and Systems and Design Group. The award, established in 1958, recognizes eminent achievement or distinguished service in the field of machine design. Velinsky accepted the award at a ceremony during the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences, held in Las Vegas, NV, on September 6. Velinsky is co-director of the Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology Research Center at UC Davis. Through his research, Velinsky has made significant contributions in the areas of robotic systems design and analysis, and design of machine elements and systems. He and his colleagues have pioneered the application of robotics and automation specifically to highway maintenance and construction that have been used by the California Department of Transportation on the state's highways.
Dean Karnopp is the recipient of the 2007 Dynamic Systems and Control Division (DSCD) Yasundo Takahashi Education Award. The award is given biannually by the Dynamics and Control Division of ASME to a DSCD member for either excellent sustained contributions or for an outstanding major singular contribution to education in areas of interest to the DSCD. These areas can include classroom teaching, short courses and workshop development, course development, lab development, textbook publishing and software publishing. Karnopp will be recognized at an awards dinner banquet on November 12 at the 2007 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition in Seattle, WA.
Posted: 11/5/07
Professor Emeritus Izzat M. Idriss to deliver Ishihara Lecture
Professor Emeritus Izzat M. Idriss will deliver the esteemed Ishihara Lecture at the 4th International Conference on Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering (4ICEGE) in Greece in June 2007.
Munir Receives Top Teaching Prize
Professor Zuhair Munir, distinguished professor of chemical engineering and materials science at UC Davis, has received the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement.
Simon Cherry receives Edward Hoffman Award
Simon Cherry is the inaugural recipient of the Edward Hoffman Memorial Award for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Computer and Instrumentation in Nuclear Medicine from the Computer and Instrumentation Council. Dr. Cherry was mentored for many years by Dr. Edward Hoffman and was the unanimous choice to receive the premiere award after Dr. Hoffman's untimely death in 2004. He is being honored for his contributions in the field, particularly in small animal imaging. At the business meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine held in Toronto, Dr. Cherry accepted the award and shared some of his recollections from working with Dr. Hoffman as a postdoc fellow at UCLA. In his acceptance speech, Dr. Cherry paid homage to his mentor and friend of 15 years saying he had instilled principles to guide researchers daily: to enjoy what we do, work with integrity, and do it with an appropriate balance of inspiration and perspiration.
Dr. Hoffman's career spanned 30 years in the field of nuclear medicine.
Bruce Gates Honored by Council for Chemical Research
Bruce Gates, distinguished professor in the department of chemical engineering and materials science, has received the 2006 Malcolm E. Pruitt Award by the Council for Chemical Research. The award is given annually to recognize outstanding contributions to research progress in the chemical-based sciences and engineering through mutually beneficial interactions among the industrial, academic and government research worlds.
Posted: 3/21/06
Dewey Ryu receives Enzyme Engineering Award
Dr. Dewey Ryu has been awarded the 2005 Enzyme Engineering Award from the International Enzyme Engineering Conferences and the Engineering Foundation.
The Enzyme Engineering Award was established in 1982 to recognize exceptional achievements in enzyme engineering research and applications. It recognizes new discoveries, research, process or device developments in enzyme engineering, and outstanding contributions of a scientific or engineering nature in the design, operation, and management of facilities, processes, or devices based primarily on enzyme engineering.
Posted: 3/20/06
Choo Wins Council of Transportation Centers Award
Sangho Choo was honored by the Council of Transportation Centers (CUTC) for THE BEST PhD dissertation on transportation planning and policy in the US in 2004-05. The title of his dissertation was Aggregate Relationships between Telecommunications and Travel: Structural Equation Modeling of Time Series Data. His mentor was Pat Mokhtarian. Sangho was given the award at CUTC's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on January 21.
Posted: 3/20/06
Patrice Koehl receives 2006 Sloan Research Fellowship
Patrice Koehl, associate professor in the department of computer science, has received a 2006 Sloan Research Fellowship. Koehl's research focuses his research on understanding protein structures, characterizing their shapes and using that information to improve the understanding of their stability. He is involved in the development of new algorithms for predicting the structure of a protein. Koehl also is a faculty member in the Genome Center.
Sloan Research Fellowships are designed to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These highly competitive fellowships identify those researchers who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge. The funds are less restricted than many research project grants, giving talented researchers support for a wide variety of uses in pursuing the lines of inquiry that are most compelling and interesting to them.
Aside from the valuable financial support they provide, the Sloan Research Fellowships offer important intangible benefits, according to past recipients. The early recognition of distinguished performance that the fellowships confer, after years of arduous preparation, stimulates further personal and career development. Thirty-two Sloan Fellows have won Nobel Prizes later in their careers, and hundreds have received other honors.
Posted: 2/23/06
Rajeevan Amirtharajah Receives NSF CAREER Award
Rajeevan Amirtharajah, assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.
Amirtharajah's research focuses on powering electronic systems from environmental sources by harvesting energy from solar radiation or mechanical vibration. The goal is to reduce battery size and volume, decrease system maintenance costs and increase operating lifetime for portable or wearable electronics or wireless sensors.
The NSF Career Award supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
Research under the new grant will include the exploration of circuit styles and signal processing architectures for energy harvesting sensors, enabling a trade off between system performance and available power. It will open new possibilities in long-lifetime sensors for monitoring critical infrastructure, health care and security applications.
Posted: 2/23/06
Zhendong Su Receives 2005-2006 NSF Early Career Award
Zhendong Su, assistant professor in the department of computer science, has received the 2005-2006 National Science Foundation Career Award, based on his proposal for an analysis framework that would improve reliability and security of national information system infrastructures.
Database and web applications contain critical faults that undermine their security and reliability. Many of these errors occur because of complex, dynamic interactions with outside environments. No tool or technique currently exists to prevent the introduction of errors, leaving applications susceptible to serious failure and security threats.
Zhendong Su's proposal - "Reliability and Security of Database and Web Applications" - describes a novel systematic analysis framework that would address these database and web application vulnerabilities and have positive impact on both industry and academia.
The NSF Career Award supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.
Posted: 2/13/06
Munir Honored by Davis Academic Senate
Zuhair Munir, Distinguished Professor in the department of chemical engineering and materials science, has been awarded the Faculty Research Lectureship, the highest honor that the Davis Division of the Academic Senate accords its members.
The award recognizes Munir for the distinction of his research, for outstanding scholarship and as a recognized leader in his discipline, both nationally and internationally. Each year the Faculty Research Lecturer gives a public lecture under the auspices of the Chancellor and the Chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate.
Previous awardees include Joe Smith, professor emeriti and the founding chair of the department of chemical engineering and materials science.
Posted: 2/8/06
Harry A. Dwyer, Marshall Miller and College of Engeering Alumni Receive SAE Vincent Bendix Automotive Electronics Engineering Award
Harry Dwyer, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Marshal Miller, a senior development engineer at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS-Davis), along with four engineering professionals and UC Davis alumni, have received the SAE Vincent Bendix Automotive Electronics Engineering Award.
The award annually recognizes the author(s) of the best paper(s) relating to automotive electronics engineering presented at a meeting of the Society or any of its sections, or it may recognize an individual for distinguished accomplishment in automotive electronics engineering. Material or development forming the subject matter of the paper must be based on personal work. In the event of recognition of individual achievement, the individual may be requested to present a Vincent Bendix Memorial Lecture at a designated meeting of the Society.
In addition to Dwyer and Miller, the awardees include:
Dr. David J. Grupp, who works in research and product development at Altergy Systems, focusing on fuel cell systems design. He was recently granted his doctorate degree from the Institute of Transportation Studies at the UC Davis.
Dr. Christie-Joy Brodrick, assistant professor at James Madison University and co-director of the university's Alternative Fuels Program. Broderick also is a research engineer at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California-Davis. She earned a master's degree in environmental engineering and a doctorate degree in transportation technology and policy from the University of California-Davis.
Matthew E. Forrest, a senior mechanical engineer at DaimlerChrysler RTNA, Inc., working in the F-Cell vehicle development program. He received his master's degree in transportation technology and policy from the University of California-Davis.
Pippin G.L. Mader, an air resources engineer for the California Air Resources Board, received his bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California-Davis.
The six authors will be presented with the award during the SAE World Congress in Detroit, Mich., April 3-6, 2006.
http://www.sae.org
Posted: 2/8/06
M. Saif Islam Wins NSF 'Early Career' Award
M. Saif Islam, assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering, received the NSF award to study Nanomanufacturing of Nanowire Based Devices and Circuits.
For more: http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/news/
Posted: 1/31/06
Dan Chang Receives the Lyman A. Ripperton Environmental Educator Award
Dan Chang, Ray B. Krone Professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, received the Lyman A. Ripperton Environmental Educator Award from the Air & Waste Management Association in June. The Lyman A. Ripperton Award is awarded for distinguished achievement as an educator in some field of air pollution control. It is awarded to an individual, who by precept and example, has inspired students to achieve excellence in all their professional and social endeavors.
Posted: 1/31/06
Navrotsky Awarded Hess Medal
Dr. Alexandra Navrotsky, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science who holds the Edward Roessler Chair in Mathematical and Physical Sciences, recently was awarded the American Geophysical Union's 2006 Henry H. Hess Medal for outstanding achievements in research of the constitution and evolution of Earth and other planets. The presentation was made at an honors ceremony at the 2006 AGU Fall Meeting in December in San Francisco.
Navrotsky is the first woman to receive the Henry H. Hess Medal.
Posted: 1/9/06