SEAS Wins GW Funding for Academic Excellence Proposals

Two SEAS initiatives recently won funding from the University in the latest round of competition for GW's areas of academic excellence. Schools across the university submitted proposals to the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs for funding; eight were selected as new signature academic programs. The two SEAS programs that won funding are the GW Center for Biomimetics and Bioinspired Engineering (COBRE) and for the Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies (IMPACT).

The goal of COBRE is to develop infrastructure for interdisciplinary research and education in the area of biomimetics and bioinspired engineering. Biomimetics is a field that attempts to create a paradigm to transfer or abstract Nature's technologies, design principles and solutions into our own designs to create small, multi-functional machines/technologies/devices.

Professor Rajat Mittal of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is the director of the Center, and several faculty from his department and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering currently are involved in the Center. Faculty from other SEAS departments and various science-related disciplines are expected to participate, as well. The Center will initially focus on developing research activity in bioinspired/biomimetic locomotion, control algorithms, materials and bio-metrology, and will also emphasize participation of undergraduates in research projects.

The second proposal-the high-performance computing proposal-brings together an interdisciplinary faculty team from six departments across SEAS and the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences to form a new institute called IMPACT, or the Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies. The team is led by the Institute director, Professor Tarek El-Ghazawi of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Using the university investment, IMPACT will carry out research, educational, and outreach programs in high-performance computing (HPC). HPC refers to the application of supercomputers in various fields and to the exploration of new technologies to develop better supercomputers. Supercomputers, or high-performance computers, are machines that are hundreds or thousands of times faster than a typical desktop computer and may have thousands of processors in one system.

The IMPACT team intends to take advantage of two remarkable advantages that GW has in being able to advance state-of-the-art HPC technology: GW's large number of faculty who are world class scientists in HPC and the critical applications that can benefit from HPC, and GW's unique location in close proximity to major government research laboratories that are the principal users of high-performance computers.

Those interested in learning more about the recent round of funding for GW's areas of academic excellence, may also read the GW press release.