GRADUATE/UNDERGRADUATE
 In the '08 Wing
Design, Build and Test Competition sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Material
and Process Engineering, all four Department of Aerospace Engineering entries—one individual
and three teams—placed in the top six: 2nd Place: Ben Woods, Ph.D. candidate; 3rd Place:
undergraduate students Jeffrey Pace, Peter Rohr, Pat O'Connor,
Brian Patrick, Roberto Semidey and Chris Schooler; 4th Place:
undergraduate students Nathaniel Brown, Brendan Geraghty,
Brandon Hall, Anish Sydney, Ian Higgins and
Emin Azariah; 6th Place: graduate students Frank Graham,
Ria Malhan, Ilmo Koo, Anand Saxena,
Lina Castano, Jay Sanchez and Byungseok Yoo.
The three project teams were from AE Professor Norman Wereley's "Mechanics
of Composite Structures" class.
 AE graduate students Joseph Conroy and Andrew
Hyslop (pictured right) earned 1st place in the UM Vid/Terp Competition in the
Engineering category. Vid/Terp is a campus competition for students to create a short video about
their current research interest at the University of Maryland. A group of Gemstone students,
including Clark School undergrads Megan Kuhn (Fischell Department of Bioengineering
[BIOE]) and Pratik Dave (AE), won second place for their video, "Team FastR."
Engineering students Michael Sweatt and Bobby Bruce (materials
science and engineering) also received honorable mentions in the category for their
entry, "Introduction to Plasma."
GRADUATE
 Mechanical engineering (ME) Ph.D.
candidate Rebecca Kokes is the recipient of the 2008 National Science Foundation Graduate
Research Fellowship Program award. The fellowship provides three years of support for graduate
study leading to research-based master's or doctoral degrees and is intended for students
who are in the early stages of their graduate study. Kokes's work will be in image-guided
robotics for breast biopsy and radio-frequency ablation, to be performed under continuous
magnetic resonance imaging. She is advised by Associate Professor Jaydev Desai (ME).
 AE Ph.D. candidate Supratik Datta received the Best Student
Paper Award at the SPIE International Symposium on Smart
Structures and Materials. His paper was titled "Magnetomechanical Coupling Factor
and Energy Density of Single Crystal Iron-Gallium Alloys." In addition, he received a
Jacob K. Goldhaber Travel Grant in the spring semester.
 Katrina Groth, a reliability
engineering Ph.D. candidate working with Professor Ali Mosleh, was recently named the
2008 Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Student of the Year
by the FAA Air Transportation Center of Excellence for Aircraft Airworthiness.
ME Ph.D. candidate Gayatri
Cuddalorepatta has received a renewal of her 2007-2008 Amelia Earhart International Award
in recognition of and support for her doctoral research that seeks to facilitate the
elimination of lead from electronics. Cuddalorepatta is advised by Professor Abijit
Dasgupta (ME).
AE graduate student Bradley Johnson
and Minta Martin Professor J. Gordon Leishman (AE) and were recently awarded the Best
Paper Award for the History Session at the Annual Forum of the American Helicopter
Society. Their paper was titled "Engineering Analysis of the 1907 Cornu Helicopter"
and focused on the design of the historic Paul Cornu tandem rotor machine.
Electrical and computer engineering
(ECE) graduate student Konrad Aschenbach recently won a BIO IT Coalition Scholarship
Award "for excellence in bioscience information technology studies." The $1,000 award is
sponsored by the Maryland Technology Development Corporation. Aschenbach is advised by ECE
Professor Mel Gomez.
Three Clark School students have
been awarded Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowships by the University of Maryland
Graduate School. They are: Kevin Galloway (ECE), Anshu
Rastogi (BIOE) and Steven Tjoa (ECE).
ECE graduate student Juanjuan
Xiang won the best student poster award in the neuroscience category at the University of
Maryland's BioScience Day. Xiang, an advisee of Professor Jonathan Z. Simon (ECE/Institute
for Systems Research/BIOE), won for her poster titled "Neural and behavioral correlates
of attention."
Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowships,
carrying a stipend of $10,000, were awarded to eight Clark School students by the University
of Maryland Graduate School. The recipients were Supratik Datta (AE),
Ahmed Abdelhafez (ME), Gulash Akar (civil and environmental engineering
[CEE]), Lu Jiang (biological resources engineering [BRE]), Rakesh Kumar
(chemical and biomolecular engineering [ChBE]), Yue Liu (CEE), Yuxiang
Liu (ME) and Ying Shi (reliability engineering).
AE graduate student Brandon Bush
won the 2008-2009 Flagship Fellowship award. The Flagship Fellowships Program is an
initiative of the University of Maryland Graduate School intended to help programs to
recruit and retain truly exceptional students. Bush’s doctoral research focuses on the
computational study of low Reynold’s number aerodynamics, such as in the flight of insects
and small birds.
BIOE graduate student and Clark
School alumnus Marc Dandin (B.S. '04, electrical engineering) was named the 2008
recipient of the Fischell Fellowship in Biomedical Engineering. Dandin's winning proposal, "Optoelectronic
Microsystems for Pathogen Detection," describes the design, testing and commercialization of a "lab on a
chip"-style biosensor capable of detecting dangerous pathogens present in quantities of only 10-50
cells, and analyzing and reporting results within minutes.
Twenty graduate students have been selected to participate
in the Clark School's Future Faculty Program. The students who will participate in the program are: Parag
Banerjee (MSE), Marina Chumakov (BIOE), Andrew Churchill (CEE),
Rudolf Egging (CEE), Timothy Fitzgerald (ME), Bradley Gordon
(ChBE), Masoumeh Haghpanah (ECE), Reza Kazemi-Tabriz (ME), Christina
Kyrtsos (BIOE), Yi Li (ECE), Yue Liu (CEE), Eric Maxeiner
(ME), Benedict Moble (AE), Masoud Rabiei (ME), David Sander
(ECE), Danial Shahmirzadi (BIOE), Deepak Sridharan (ECE), Steven
Tjoa (ECE), Sergiy Tkachuk (ECE) and Avinash Varna (ECE).
ME graduate student Philip Knowles was
chosen to receive the Best Teaching Assistant Award from Pi Tau Sigma (PTS) for fall 2007. Knowles was a teaching assistant
for ENME 331, Fluid Mechanics. PTS members cited his willingness to help students and his clear explanations of the
difficult subject matter.
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UNDERGRADUATE
 ME junior Phillip Hannam has
been awarded a Truman Scholarship from the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. Hannam
is one of 65 students from 55 U.S. colleges and universities selected on the basis of
leadership potential, intellectual ability and likelihood of "making a difference."
 ME junior Heather Bradshaw has earned
a 2008-2009 Goldwater Scholarship. The prestigious honor is awarded based on academic merit.
Bradshaw is the only recipient on the College Park campus. Her current research interest is
in developing the next generation of space suits, and she is working in the Space Systems
Lab mentored by Professor David Akin (AE).
 ECE undergraduate student Rose Faghih was awarded a National Science
Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship. The NSF Fellowship provides three years of support, including tuition
and a stipend, during graduate studies, and is awarded based on intellectual merit, broad impact and potential
contribution to research in science and engineering. Faghih, an ECE senior, was featured in a student profile
on "Engineer Girl," a National Academy of Engineering web site aimed at encouraging young women to
pursue career fields related to engineering. The profile highlights Faghih's thoughts on choosing engineering
as a major, her dreams and goals, her inspirations and her plans after graduation.
To support a robust space exploration
program, AE undergraduate student Laura Meyer traveled to Capitol Hill in
Washington, D.C., with 35 students and 111 other representatives on behalf of Citizens for Space
Exploration. The students’ goal is a Congressional investment in NASA set at one percent of the federal
budget. The Coalition for Space Exploration, in conjunction with the Bay Area Houston
Economic Partnership’s Aerospace Advisory Committee, sponsored Meyer.
The spring 2008 undergraduate "Space
Systems Design" class (ENAE 484) won first place in the NASA Revolutionary Advanced Systems Concepts - Academic
Liaison student design competition against nine other teams. The 34 students of the class were
represented by Madeline Kirk, Jason Laing, Joe Lisee,
Alek Nacev and David McLaren, who delivered a technical presentation
and poster display on Project TURTLE (Terrapin Undergraduate Rover for Terrestrial Lunar Exploration). The students were mentored by professors Dave Akin and Mary Bowden (both AE).
Clark School students swept the
undergraduate category of a technical paper competition at the 2008 Region I-MA American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Student Conference: first place: "Optimal
Stochastic Nonlinear Control of Spacecraft Angular Velocity," Jason Leggett (AE senior);
second place: "Effects of Braid Angle on Pneumatic Artificial Muscle Actuator Performance," Michael
Gentry (AE junior); third place: "Development of the Satellite Groundtrack Interactive
Display," Sara Fields (AE senior). On the basis of her paper, Fields was invited to give a
presentation at the 14th annual AIAA Improving Space Operations Workshop hosted by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
BIOE freshman Zachary Russ and junior
William Richbourg placed first and third, respectively, in the Institute of Biological
Engineering's annual bioethics essay contest. BIOE freshman Stevephen Hung and sophomore
Bryan Hofferbert, who were also selected as finalists, received honorable mentions.
ECE undergraduate Scott Watson and
Professor Gilmer Blankenship, and AE undergraduate Stephanie M.
Petillo and Professor Mary Bowden, were honored at a ceremony for the Philip Merrill Presidential
Scholars Program. Watson and Petillo were two of only 24 undergraduates campus-wide to be named
to the 2007-2008 Merrill Presidential Scholars list.
The University of Maryland's University
Honors Program chose senior Michael Levashov's (AE) submission as a Best Paper winner. The
title of his paper was "A Hardware Study of a Simple Force Reflecting Teleoperator."
Levashov's paper was also published in the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics journal.
ME student Bradley Eisenberg received
the Clark School's Dinah Berman Memorial Award, in recognition of academic excellence at the
end of the sophomore year combined with leadership or service to the college.
Jazalyn Dukes, CEE senior, received
the A. James Clark School of Engineering Leadership Award.
Michelle Morgan, a BRE senior who is
completing the minor in international engineering, received the A. James Clark School of
Engineering International Student Award. Morgan studied in Denmark and Australia, and
advocates for international studies.
ME junior Heather Bradshaw received
the Kim A. Borsavage and Pamela J. Stone Student Award for Outstanding Service.
Rachel Kerzner, ME senior, received
the A. James Clark School of Engineering Dean's Award. Kerzner has a GPA of 3.97 and has
appeared on the dean’s list for every semester of her college career.
Freshman William Guarino (ME) was
honored as a Young Innovator of the Year Award at the Governor's Celebration of Innovation ceremony in Phoenix,
Ariz. Guarino was recognized for his high school science project in which he created a lightweight, yet strong
metal that could be used as a connecting rod in a car engine.
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