COE News
New Research Grants and Gifts
Awards and Honors
Industry Activities
Seminars and Events
COE News
New Research Grants and Gifts
Awards and Honors
Industry Activities
Seminars and Events
I would like to welcome all students, faculty and staff to the College of Engineering in the new academic year, 2007-08. Classes started Monday, August 27, 2007. We had a wonderful Freshman Convocation Ceremony on Sunday, August 26, at the UIC Pavilion where all the freshman students and their parents and friends from all colleges at UIC (including Engineering) were welcomed to campus by the Chancellor, the Provost, and the Deans of the 15 Colleges. They also were introduced to our UIC Flames Athletics teams and our cheerleaders. The freshman students in Engineering were introduced to the Chancellor with a large applause from the floor; they are quite a noisy and energetic group of students!
We are delighted to welcome 317 new freshman students from various high schools and 165 new transfer students from community colleges into our undergraduate student family of 1710 students. Of the 317 freshman students, 11% are women, 21.1% are Asians, 6.3% are African American, and 15.8% are Hispanic. This past year, we were very active in our recruiting efforts from high schools. I am delighted to report that through our strong efforts, we have been able to increase our undergraduate enrollment from 1624 in Fall 2006 to 1710 in Fall 2007 while increasing our average ACT scores and maintaining the diversity of our students.
In Fall 2007, we are also pleased to welcome 274 new graduate students (into our M.S. and Ph.D. programs) from various universities in the world into our graduate student family of 948 students.
In addition I wish to welcome our 1,208 continuing undergraduate students and 675 continuing graduate students back to campus.
Have a great academic year.
Peter C. Nelson
Interim Dean, College of Engineering
Bridge Safety and Monitoring 
Farhad Ansari, Professor and Head of Civil and Materials Engineering,
was quoted as an expert on the topic of bridge safety and monitoring.
The links are the following:
ABC Channel 7 News (television interview):
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=local&id=4822485 (click "Illinois Governor Orders Bridges Inspected")
ABC Channel 7 News (print website article):
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=local&id=5538359
Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-web_howsafe_aug03,0,149661.story
Daily Herald:
http://www.dailyherald.com/search/searchstory.asp?id=336873
Congratulations to Professor Ansari for the great press quotations and television interviews!
Recent Publications
"The breakdown of the fingerprinting of vortices by hysteresis loops in circular multilayer ring arrays" 
by V. Rose, K.S. Buchanan, V. Metlushko, B. Ilic, X.M. Chen, D.J. Keavney, and J. W. Freeland will be on the cover of a September Applied Physics Letters issue.
This work is a result of collaboration between the Center for Nanoscale Materials of Argonne National Laboratory (CNM ANL), Advanced Photon Source of Argonne National Laboratory (APS ANL), Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF) and the Nanotechnology Core Facility (NCF UIC).
This is the second time this team was featured on the cover page this year - the article "Manipulation of the vortex motion in nanostructured ferromagnetic/superconductor hybrids," was selected for the cover of 30 April 2007, Applied Physics Letters Vol.90, No.18
Dan Schonfeld speaks on Ineractive Vision
Dan Schonfeld presented a seminar titled “Ineractive Vision: Distributed Image and Video Processing Intellectual Property Technical Lecture Series at McAndrews, Held & Malloy, Ltd. in Chicago Illinois on July 24, 2007.
Pixel Club Seminar Series
On August 21, 2007, Dan Schonfeld was the speaker at a seminar titled: Distributed Image and Video Processing: Directed Graphs, Bayesian Estimation, and Hidden Markov Models, a Pixel Club Seminar Series in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
Professors Khokhar, Mazumder, Ouksel, Schonfeld and Zhu of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department received NSF Grant
Professors Ashfaq Khokhar and Dan Schonfeld of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department received NSF grant International Supplement. “MotionSearch: Motion Trajectory-Based Object Activity Retrieval and Recognition in Video and Sensor Databases”
PIs: Ashfaq Khokhar and Dan Schonfeld
Award Duration: September 1, 2007 – August 31, 2010
Award Amount: $72,000
The above award is being matched by the Government of Pakistan with a funding of $250,000 to our International Collaborators at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.
Professor Dan Schonfeld also received the following NSF Grants:
D. Schonfeld
MobilePlenoptics: Panoramic Video Communications in Mobile Devices
Motorola, Inc.
$22,000
August 2007 - May 2008
D. Schonfeld
Machine Learning and Event Detection in Biological Systems
VG Bioinformatics, Inc.
$40,000
August 2007 - May 2008
D. Schonfeld
InteractiveVision: Collaborative Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output Inverse Problems
with Application in Image and Video Processing
National Science Foundation (NSF)
$232,496
August 2007 - August 2010
Professor Sudip K. Mazumder received a new NSF Grant for a SiC based fuel cell inverter. “Hybrid-modulation based High-power High-frequency and Scalable SiC Polyphase Fuel-cell Inverter for Power Quality and Distributed Generation”
PI: Sudip K. Mazumder
Award Duration: August 15, 2007 - July 31, 2010
Award Amount: $270,000
Zhichun Zhu received a recent NSF Grant, “Collaborative Research: CSR --- SMA: Thermal Modeling, Simulation and Management of Memory Subsystems for Multi-Core Systems”
PI: Zhichun Zhu
Award Duration: August 2007 – July 2008
Award Amount: $40,000
Professors Aris Ouksel and Ashfaq Khokhar received NSF grant titled: “Reliable Information Dissemination and Resource Discovery in Mobile Environments”
PIs: Aris Ouksel and Ashfaq Khokhar
Award Duration: September 1, 2007 – August 31, 2009
Award Amount: $160,000
Professors Meyer, Murad, Jameson, Regalbuto, Wedgewood and Nitsche of the Department of Chemical Engineering received new Research Grants
Randall Meyer (NSF) received a research grant for: Development of New
Heterogeneous Catalysts for NOx
Storage and Reduction
(NSR); $158272
Sohail Murad/Cynthia Jameson (NSF) are the recipients
of the following research grants:
Molecular Modeling of Ion Transport and Separation in Nanochannels;
$270,000
John Regalbuto (DOE) received a new research grant:
Non-Platinum Bimetalllic Cathode Electrocatalysts;
$400,000
Lewis Wedgewood/Ludwig Nitsche received a grant for: Argonne, Evaluation of Three Related
Forms of Copper-Chlorine Thermochemical Cycle for Hydrogen Production,
$70,000
Professors Megaridis and Royston of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department are the recipients of NSF Grants
Professor Constantine Megaridis of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department recently received a NSF grant for the following:
"NER: Regulating Drug Delivery with Polymeric Nanofibers." PI: R. A. Gemeinhart,
Co-Principal Investigators: Constantine Megaridis and Alexander Yarin.
Source: National Science Foundation,
Amount $100,000, Period: 7/2007-6/2008.
Professor Thomas Royston of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department received the following NSF Grant:
Title: The Audible Human Project
Source: NIH
Amount: $146,869
Duration: 9/5/2007 - 8/31/2009
PI: Thomas J. Royston
Professors Shatz, Moher and Berger of the Computer Science Department received NSF Grants
Sol Shatz, Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, College of Engineering received an NSF Grant:
Title: Collaborative Research: CT-ISG: Agent-Based Trust Management for Trust Re-Evaluation in Online Auctions
Source: NSF
Amount: $120,000
Duration: Aug. 1, 2007 - July 31, 2010
PI: Sol Shatz
Tom Moher, Professor of the Computer Science Department received the following grant:
Proposal Title: Collaborative Research: Supporting whole-class science investigations with spatial simulations
Received by NSF: 04/25/2007
Proposal Number: 0735569
Principal Investigator: Thomas Moher
Co-PI(s): Jennifer Wiley, Joel Brown
Award Amount: $683,670.00
Award Duration: 36 months
Tanya Berger-Wolf, Professor of the Computer Science Department received an NSF grant
:
"Computational Methods for Understanding Social Interactions in Animal Populations."
The interdisciplinary three-year project, lead by UIC,
is a collaboration with Daniel Rubenstein, a behavioral
ecologist from Princeton University, and Jared Saia,
a computer scientist from University of New Mexico.
Total award $899,017 (UIC portion $245,955). Duration 8/1/2007 - 7/31/2010
Professors Ansari, Indacochea, Reddy and Wang of the Civil and Materials Engineering Department received NSF Grants and Awards
Ernesto Indacochea, Professor of the Department of Civil and Materials Engineering Department received the following grants:
National Science Foundation Development of Nanostructured-based Sensor for Reliable Detection of Improvised Explosive Devices. Period: 09/01/2007 08/31/2010; $ 546,456.
DOE-University Consortia for Nuclear Energy Research and Development (with Texas A&M and Purdue University) Real Time Detection Methods to Monitor TRU Compositions in UREX+ Process Streams. Period: 10/01/2007 09/31-2010; $ 2,100,000 / $ 449,961
DOE Argonne National Laboratory Study of Glass and Steel Interfaces in Phosphate Cement Composites. Period: 09/01/2007 -08/31/2008; $43,662.44.
Professor Krishna Reddy of the Civil and Materials Engineering Department received the following new NSF grant recently, which started on August 15, 2007:
PI: Krishna Reddy and Co-PI: Amid Khodadoust
Title: Remediation of Contaminated Subsurface Using Nanoscale Iron Particles
Source: National Science Foundation
Amount: $169,830.
Duration: August 2007 to July 2009
Professor Krishna Reddy is also the recipient of the 2007 UIC Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has delivered an invited presentation on “Technical Challenges to In-Situ Remediation of Polluted Sites” at the First Sri Lanka Geotechnical Society International Conference on Soil and Rock Engineering, Colombo, Sri Lanka, on August 9, 2007.
Professor Ming L. Wang received an NSF Grant titled: Collaborative Reserch: Sensor Fusion For Comprehensive Health Monitoring of Complex Infrastructure Systems -An Internatinal Testbed Opportunity
Funding Agency: NSF
Total Amount $130,000
Duration: Sep. 2007-Aug. 2010
Professor Farhad Ansari, Department Head in Civil and Materials Engineering received notice for the following award from the National Science Foundation for a grant with a beginning date of 9/5/2007 for a period of five years:
PIRE: US-Asia Network of Centers for Intelligent Structural Health Management of Safety-Critical Structures,"
Awarded 09/05/2007
Amount $2,496,711.00 Grant number: 0730259
Co-PIs from Northwestern University, Krishnaswamy and Achenbach
Professor Farhad Ansari also received the new contract from IDOT for $55,000.00 from 8/15/2007 for one year, title: “Simple Cost Effective Bridge Scour Sensor”
Professor Liang of BioEngineering Department received NIH and NSF Grants:
Professor Jie Liang received about $2 million funding from NIH and NSF this year.
2007-2008 University Scholars
President Joseph B. White has selected the following three College of Engineering professors as
2007-08 University Scholars:
Professor Gyungho Lee, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Professor Krishna Reddy, Department of Civil and Materials Engineering
Professor Sol Shatz, Department of Computer Science
Professor Mansoori of the BioEngineering and Chemical Engineering Department receives his diploma from IACE:
Professor G. Ali Mansoori has been elected by the Presidium as a full member (academician) of the International Academy of Creative Endeavors (IACE). http://www.endeav.org/?id=12&ctg=8
The College of Engineering held its Advisory Board meeting on Friday, September 7, 2007 on UIC campus. The topic for this session was on Materials and Nanotechnologies. Excellent presentations were given by department heads, and faculty stimulating several discussions, and strong interest by board members.
Photos of the event here
The next Advisory Board meeting will be held on April 18, 2008.
DATE: Friday, August 31st, 2007
COE Welcome Back Picnic
Friday, August 31st, 2007
Photos of the event here
DATE: Thursday, September 20, 2007
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Seminar
TIME: 2:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room 1000 SEO
TITLE: “DNA: Not Merely the Secret of Life”
SPEAKER: Professor Nadrian C. Seeman
DATE: Thursday, September 20, 2007
The College of Engineering Faculty meeting is Thursday, September 20, 2007.
TIME: 3:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room 1043 ERF
DATE: Thursday, September 27, 2007
Department of Computer Science welcomes 2007-2008 Distinguished Lecturer
PLACE: Room 1000 SEO
TITLE: “Learning to Think about the World”
SPEAKER: Leslie Pack Kaelbling, MIT
DATE: Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Navy recruiters will be on campus to talk with engineering students. They have a special presentation planned for engineering faculty from 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. in Room 1047 ERF.
Newsletter Editors, Carolyn Griffith and Nancy Singer
Please submit news items to cgriffi@uic.edu