 The Department of
Aerospace Engineering (AE) has been awarded a MAST Collaborative Technology Alliance Center
on "Microsystem Mechanics." The total amount of the initial award is $10 million over five
years with an option for another five years and $12.5 million. Ten faculty members and three
senior scientists at the Clark School will participate: Inderjit Chopra (AE, pictured left), Chris Cadou (AE), Roberto Celi (AE), James
Hubbard (AE), James Baeder, J. Sean Humbert (AE), Greg Jackson (mechanical engineering [ME]), J. Gordon Leishman (AE), Ben Shapiro (AE/Institute for Systems Research [ISR]), Elisabeth Smela (ME/electrical and
computer engineering [ECE]), and Norman Wereley (AE). Fifteen graduate students
and a number of undergraduates will be supported through this program.
 The Department of Defense has awarded
a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award on "Rotorcraft Brownout" to a team led by Minta Martin Professor J. Gordon Leishman (AE). The award
is worth $7.5 million over five years. The brownout phenomenon causes accidents during
helicopter landing and take-off operations in arid desert terrain. Other faculty participating
include AE professors Inderjit Chopra, Roberto Celi and James
Baeder, and ME professors Ken Kiger and Ugo Piomelli.
 A research team led by Minta Martin Professor Rama Chellappa (ECE) won a 2008
MURI
award for a proposal to develop face, gait, long-distance speech and other motion-based
human recognition algorithms tailored to the maritime domain. The grant is for $1.5 million
per year for three years with the potential for two additional years at $1.5 million
per year. The MURI program is a multi-agency Department of Defense initiative that supports
research teams whose efforts intersect with more than one traditional science and
engineering discipline, helping to hasten the transition of research findings to practical
application.
 Pamela Abshire (ECE/ISR), Benjamin
Shapiro (AE/ISR) and Elisabeth Smela (ME/ECE) are working on new
sensors that take
advantage of the sensory capabilities of biological cells. These tiny sensors, only a few
millimeters in size, could speed up and improve the detection of everything from explosive
materials to biological pathogens to spoiled food or impure water. This research is funded
in part by a $1.5 million grant from the National Consortium for MASINT Research (measurement and signals intelligence), a Defense Intelligence Agency program
that provides cutting-edge research to the intelligence community.
 Professor Jonathan Z. Simon (ECE/ISR/Biology) has been
awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health for his
research, titled "The Neural Basis of Perceptually-Relevant Auditory Modulations in Humans." The five-year grant is worth approximately $1.2 million. The goal of Simon's research program
is to understand how acoustic modulations, the building blocks of speech and other natural
sounds, are encoded in the auditory cortex of the brain.
  A research team that includes professors John Baras (ECE/ISR) and Anthony Ephremides (ECE/ISR)
has won a 2008 MURI award for their
proposal, titled "MAASCOM : Modeling, Analysis, and Algorithms for Stochastic Control of
Multi-Scale Networks." Baras and Ephremides will coordinate a $1 million portion of the
project, which deals with multiple time scales, traffic characteristics, and control of
communication networks.
Top of Page
|
