KUDOS!

SEAS Faculty

Prof. Shahrokh Ahmadi has been selected as a recipient of a 2007 Bender Teaching Award. The Bender Awards are presented annually to GW faculty who are selected by a committee of their peers in recognition of their efforts as teachers.

Along with co-authors George Lauder and Peter Madden of Harvard University, Prof. Rajat Mittal and doctoral students Haibo Dong and Meliha Bozkurttas recently published an article in the research journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. Entitled "Locomotion with Flexible Propulsors: I. Experimental Analysis of pectoral fin swimming in sunfish."

Science Spectrum Magazine selected Jose-Luis Hernandez-Rebollar, a former SEAS doctoral student and visiting assistant professor, for a 2006 Science Spectrum Trailblazers Award. The awards are given annually to oustanding Hispanic, Asian American, Native American, and Black professionals in the science arena whose leadership and innovative thinking on the job and in the community extend throughout and beyond their industry.

The IEEE Computer Society publications board has approved Prof. Tarek El Ghazawi's nomination as an Associate Editor of the Transactions on Computers. The appointment is for two years, effective immediately

Prof. Charles Garris received the 2006 Thomas A. Edison Patent Award "for the invention of a pressure exchanging ejector that pioneers a novel energy transfer process with the potential to save energy and reduce the environmental impact of a wide range of energy-intensive technologies." The Thomas A. Edison Patent Award was established in 1997, and is bestowed in recognition of a patented device or process that has the potential to significantly enhance some aspect of mechanical engineering.

Prof. Rajat Mittal received the 2006 ASME Fluids Engineering Division, Moody Award for a paper he co-authored entitled "Vortex Dynamics and Mechanisms for Viscous Losses in the Tip-Clearance Flow - FEDSM2005-77175." Professor Mittal co-authored the paper with Professors Moin, Wang, and You, all of Stanford University. The Award will be presented at the 2006 ASME Fluids Engineering Summer Conference this coming July.

SEAS Students

Congratulations to Esam El-Araby, Mohamed Taher, Mohamed Abouellail, and Gregory Newby. Their paper-"Comparative Analysis of High Level Programming for Reconfigurable Computers: Methodology and Empirical Study"-won the "Synplicity Best Paper Award" at the IEEE Southern Conference on Programmable Logic (SPL2007), held in late February in Mar del Plata, Argentina. All are graduate students of Professor Tarek El-Ghazawi of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The Engineering Mechanics Division 2007 Conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers selected SEAS graduate student Ashish Bhargava to present his abstract "Performance of FEM Compared to a Closed-Form Solution of a Classic Plate Vibration Problem" at the Engineering Mechanics Division Conference in June 2007.

Bhargava describes his research and the paper that he will present at the conference. "A civil engineer, like all engineers, needs to find the best tools for performing a design, as well as testing and validating that design. To test strength, reliability, service life, and other performance measures, structural engineers often rely on commercial software packages. These software tools must also undergo thorough testing, to be sure that what is computationally modeled matches what is physically designed. Two well-known software packages are ANSYS and LS-DYNA. The first has been used successfully for a long time in civil engineering. The second is newer to the civil engineering field, having been brought over from the automotive industry where its use is well established. To test the reliability of each package in dynamic analysis, a benchmark problem was devised. My paper demonstrates that one of the software packages consistently produced incorrect results. These errors would have ramifications for designs of structures such as airport runways, storage tank bases, and foundations for buildings and heavy machinery. Through a detailed investigation of the software's algorithm, which might never have been undertaken without this particular benchmark problem, an alternate algorithm was derived and validated."

The Washington, D.C. chapter of Women in Transportation has selected SEAS graduate student Elham Esfahani to receive a graduate scholarship. Congratulations to Elham.

Congratulations to undergraduate Sarah Prisley and graduate student Mike Wakid, both of the Department of Computer Science, who were recently selected to serve as student representatives on the university's Research and Information Technology Committee (RITC). Both Sarah and Mike will serve as RITC voting members.