External Awards

Mechanical Engineering (ME) Professor James Wallace was named 2005 Maryland Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).

Professor Gottlieb S. Oehrlein (Materials Science and Engineering [MSE]), has been awarded the 2005 Prize in Plasma Science and Technology by the Plasma Science and Technology Division of the American Vacuum Society, "for groundbreaking contributions in the development of knowledge bases for plasma surface interactions in materials processing."

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor Virgil Gligor, one of the country's pioneering figures in computer security, is the winner of the 2006 National Information Systems Security Award. The award, generally considered to be the most prestigious in the field of information security, was presented by the National Security Agency and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Professor Howard Milchberg (ECE/Insitute for Physical Science and Technology) was the winner of the Excellence in Plasma Physics Award of the American Physical Society. Milchberg received the award "for the conception and first realization of hydrodynamic shock-formed plasma channels, and for the development of diagnostics for their characterization."

Associate Professor Hugh Bruck (ME) was recently granted the 2006 A.J. Durelli Award by the Society for Experimental Mechanics. Bruck is currently serving his tenure as a Fulbright Fellow in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Professor Bilal M. Ayyub (Civil and Environmental Engineering [CEE]) and director of the Center for Technology and Systems Management, received the American Society of Naval Engineers President’s Award for his service as the Naval Engineers Journal Committee Chairman from 2000 to 2005.

Mark Kaminskiy, the Chief Statistician at the Center for Technology and Systems Management, received a 2005 research and development recognition award from the Ford Motor Company for his outstanding contribution to research and development of the algorithm for Enhanced Identification of Reliability Concerns.

Assistant Professor Min Wu (ECE/Institute for Systems Research [ISR]/University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies [UMIACS]) was among 88 of the nation's brightest young engineers chosen by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to participate in the 11th annual Frontiers of Engineering symposium at the GE Global Research Center. Frontiers of Engineering was initiated by NAE to bring together outstanding engineers aged 30-45 who are engaged in pioneering technical work and research in a variety of disciplines.

A paper co-authored by Assistant Professor Min Wu (ECE/UMIACS/ISR), Professor K.J. Ray Liu (ECE/ISR), and University of Maryland researchers Wade Trappe and Jane Wang was awarded the European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing Journal on Applied Signal Processing Best Paper Award for 2004. The paper was titled “Group-Oriented Fingerprinting for Multimedia Forensics.”

Professor Eric Seagren (CEE) and his former M.S. student Tim Moore were awarded the 2005 Rudolph Hering Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) for their paper “Nonaqueous phase liquid pool dissolution as a function of average pore water velocity,” which was published in ASCE's Journal of Environmental Engineering in 2003. The medal is awarded to the author(s) of the paper that contains the most valuable contribution to the increase of knowledge in, and to the advancement of, the environmental branch of the engineering profession.

Professor Reinhard Radermacher (ME) was awarded the Exceptional Service Award from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers at the Society’s 2005 Annual Meeting.

Professor Mohamad Al-Sheikhly (MSE) has been elected the president of the Council of Ionizing Radiation Measurements and Standards established and sponsored by the NIST Physics Laboratory.

Associate Professor Shuvra Bhattacharyya (ECE/UMIACS) has been selected for a Fulbright Senior Specialists Grant in Information Technology at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. The grant will provide support for Bhattacharyya to teach a short course there on hardware and software design methodology for digital signal processing systems. As a Fulbright grant winner, Bhattacharyya joins the ranks of distinguished scholars and professionals worldwide who are leaders in the educational, political, economic, social and cultural development of their countries.

Associate Professor Andrew Baldwin (Biological Resources Engineering [BRE]) was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Society of Wetland Scientists to serve as Chair of the Society's Awards Committee.

University Awards

Professor Avram Bar-Cohen, ME chair and professor, has been appointed Distinguished University Professor in recognition of his work in the thermal management of electronic systems.

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor Edward Ott was awarded the Clark School Outstanding Faculty Research Award in recognition of his advancements in estimating the current state of the atmosphere and for his many contributions in developing the broad area of chaos and nonlinear dynamics.

Professor Ali Mosleh (ME), director of the Reliability Engineering Program, has been awarded the Nicole Jurie Kim Eminent Professorship in the Clark School. The appointment recognizes his sustained and influential scientific and scholarly work in reliability engineering.

Professor Rama Chellappa (ECE/UMIACS) was appointed as a Minta Martin Professor at the Clark School. Minta Martin Professorships recognize the contributions of senior faculty who have distinguished themselves through their high impact and outstanding research contributions, excellent and innovative education efforts, and influential leadership.

Assistant Professor Thomas Murphy (ECE and the Photonics Research Laboratory) received the George Corcoran Memorial Award for faculty, presented annually to a young faculty member who has shown exemplary contributions to teaching and educational leadership.

Editorships

Professor Hani Mahmassani (CEE) was selected by the Council of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science for a second three-year term as editor-in-chief of Transportation Science, widely regarded as the most prestigious scholarly publication in the transportation field.

Professor J. Gordon Leishman (Aerospace Engineering [AE]) became editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Helicopter Society.

Keynote Speakers and Conference Chairs

Professor William Bentley (Bioengineering [BioE]) delivered the keynote address at the European Federation of Biotechnology Conference in Austria. The address was titled “Analysis of Microbial Cells at the Single Cell Level.” Bentley also served as co-chair for the Engineering Conferences International Biochemical Engineering XIV: Frontiers and Advances in Biotechnology, Biological and Biomolecular Engineering held in British Columbia, Canada.

Professor Rama Chellappa (ECE) delivered the keynote address at the fourth annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Workshop on Automatic Identification Advanced Technologies (AutoID 2005) at the University at Buffalo. The talk, titled "Biometrics for Remote Surveillance: Recent Advances in Face and Gait-Based Person Identification," focused on methods of recognizing individuals from a surveillance camera.

Professor Tony Ephremides (ECE/ISR) gave the keynote address on “Making Sense out of Sensor Networks” at the IEEE SECON Conference in Santa Clara, Ca. Ephremides spoke about sensor networks from a perspective of wireless networking, discussing how sensor networks have become the ultimate catalysts for cross-layer network design.

Professor K.J. Ray Liu (ECE/ISR) delivered a keynote address on multimedia forensics at the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) in Shanghai, China. Dr. Liu’s talk, titled “Multimedia Forensics for Traitors Tracing,” offered a broad overview of the recent advances in multimedia forensics with a focus on multimedia fingerprinting for traitor tracing.

Professor Inderjit Chopra (AE) was invited to give the keynote lecture at the 2005 International Conference on Smart Structures in Bangalore, India, on “Review of the Status of Smart Structures and Integrated Systems”; the invited lecture at the 1st US-European Micro-Aerial Vehicle Technology Demonstration and Assessment in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, on “Development of Hovering MAVs”; and the keynote lecture at the Indo-US Workshop on Micro Air Vehicles, Bangalore, India, on “Integrated MAV Systems: Rotary-Wing and Flapping Wings.”

Professor Uzi Vishkin (ECE/UMIACS) was named Program Chair for the 18th annual Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures in Cambridge, Mass. Vishkin is an expert in parallel algorithms and architectures. His PRAM-on-chip work has encompassed the spectrum of parallel algorithmics, software and hardware.

New Fellows

Associate Professor Carol Espy-Wilson (ECE/ISR) has been named a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America "for contributions to speech communication and mentoring." She will receive her fellowship certificate in June 2006 at the 151st ASA Meeting in Providence, RI.

Professor Adel Shirmohammadi (BRE) was inducted as a fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineering.

Professor Armand Makowski (ECE/ISR) has been named an IEEE Fellow. In electing him to this highest level of IEEE membership, the IEEE Board of Directors cited Makowski for his contributions to traffic modeling and performance evaluation in communication and computer networks.

Professor William D. Dorland (Physics/Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics [IREAP]) and Daniel Lathrop (IREAP Acting Director/Physics) have been elected Fellows of the American Physical Society. Dr. Dorland was elected for "his contributions to the understanding of ion and electron temperature gradient driven turbulence in plasmas, and to the development of novel computational algorithms for exploring nonlinear plasma dynamics." Dr. Lathrop was elected for "his clever experiments and data analyses of turbulent flows and singularities in free surface flows, and for his highly innovative laboratory studies of magnetohydrodynamic flows."

Associate Professor Jungho Kim (ME) was recently elevated to Fellow status as a member of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Associate Professor Bongtae Han (ME) was recently elevated to Fellow status as a member of the Society for Experimental Mechanics.

Professor Allen Porter Davis (CEE), has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. This designation is considered one of the most esteemed honors that civil engineers can receive from their peers.

Media Presentations

Software by Associate Professor Jeffrey Herrmann (ME/ISR) that helps public health officials design mass dispensing and vaccination clinics was a featured story in several local, regional and national media outlets including USAToday, MSN and CNN in late November and early December.

The National Geographic Society filmed a portion of its program "Naked Science: Birth of the Earth" in Professor Daniel Lathrop's (IREAP Acting Director/Physics) geodynamo lab. The episode aired earlier this fall and again earlier this month on the National Geographic Channel.