For the eighth consecutive year, Aerospace Engineering (AE) graduate students from the Clark School’s Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center have won the American Helicopter Society/Sikorsky Student Design Competition: First Place Graduate Award. Our team consisted of Ben Hein, Tim Beasman, Anne Brindejonc, Anirban Chaudhary, Eric Parsons, Nicholas Rosenfeld, Eric Shroeder and Eric Silberg. This year's challenge was to develop the conceptual design of a modern military Heavy-Lift VTOL aircraft capable of operating from existing naval ships and transporting a 20-ton combat-ready vehicle.

Mechanical Engineering (ME) undergraduate student Jennifer Thompson was awarded a prestigious National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Ernest F. Hollings scholarship. Thompson was one of four UM students to win the award, granted to only 100 students in the United States each year.

Five Clark School doctoral students have received $15,000 scholarships from the American Rewards for College Scientists Foundation (ARCS): Nicholas Rosenfeld (AE), whose scholarship was sponsored by Booz/Allen/Hamilton; Stacy Eisenman (Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Maryland Transportation Initiative); Brian Morgan (Electrical Engineering); Daniel Fitzgerald (ME); and Patrick Downey (AE). The awards were presented by Supreme Court Justice Kennedy at the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C.

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) doctoral student Nathan Moody received the Directed Energy Professional Society's 2005-2006 Graduate Scholarship in recognition of his work towards developing robust, efficient photocathodes. Such cathodes are used to produce high quality electron beams and have immediate application in the particle accelerator community and in next-generation light sources, such as free electron lasers. The work was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Joint Technology Office. Moody is affiliated with the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP) and is advised by ECE Chair and Professor Patrick O'Shea.

Om Deshmukh, a doctoral student supervised by Associate Professor Carol Espy-Wilson (ECE and Institute for Systems Research [ISR]), won the Royster Student Scholarship Award for best poster presentation at the joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America's North Carolina and Washington, D.C. chapters. The poster was titled "Speech Enhancement Using Modified Phase Opponency Model." Deshmukh's research involves developing algorithms for speech enhancement and robust speech recognition using auditorily motivated models.

ECE graduate student Sylvia Helena Florez won the Best Poster Award at the 50th Annual Meeting on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials in November. Her poster, titled "Effects of artificial domain wall traps in pulsed current induced domain wall motion in a spin valve device,” described how spin polarized current interacts with local atomic moments in a multilayer metallic nanostructure.

Graduate student Tarun Pruthi (ECE) won the Best Student Paper Award at this year's meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Pruthi’s research topic was the automatic detection of vowel nasalization using knowledge-based acoustic parameters, and the title of his award-winning paper was “Simulating and understanding the effects of velar coupling area on nasalized vowel spectra.” Pruthi is advised by Associate Professor Carol Espy-Wilson (ECE/ISR).

ECE doctoral student Heba Yuksel, who is advised by ECE Professor Christopher Davis, presented two papers at the International Society of Optical Engineers (SPIE) Optics and Photonics Meeting this summer. For her efforts, Yuksel received a Research Excellence Award. The award was presented by Newport Spectra-Physics (a division of Newport Corporation) and SPIE.

Daniel Fitzgerald (ISR), a graduate student advised by Associate Professor Jeffrey Herrmann (ME/ISR) and Associate Professor Linda Schmidt (ME/ISR), is one of the winners of the 2005 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)/National Science Foundation Design Essay Competition. He presented a poster and was honored at the 2005 ASME Design Technical Conference this fall. Earlier this year, Fitzgerald won a 2005-2006 ARCS Scholarship.

At the Engineering Conferences International Biochemical Engineering XIV: “Frontiers and Advances in Biotechnology, Biological and Biomolecular Engineering,” Clark School Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering graduate student Angela Lewandowski received the overall best poster award. Her poster described signal-directed assembly of proteins on microfabricated devices that preserve biological function.

Student summer research project winners were announced at the Maryland Engineering Research Internship Teams (MERIT) annual fair. In the Power and Energy Electronics Research category, the first place winner was Clark School ECE student Victor Huang (left photo), who worked with Michael Fuhrer and Alma Wickenden at Army Research Laboratories on “The Role of Metals in Achieving n-Type Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors." In the Research Internship in Telecommunications category, the first place winner was Clark School ECE student Amon Ducao (right photo), who worked with Rama Chellappa (ECE/UMIACS) on "Recognition Through 3D Face Models.” MERIT is an 11-week summer program that offers top undergraduate engineering students from around the country the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge, team-based, cross-disciplinary research projects at the Clark School.