COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING NEWS
Professor Ashfaq Khokhar honored as IEEE Fellow
Ashfaq Khokhar, Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been honored as a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions on “Multimedia Computing and Database Systems.”
This brings the total of Fellows of professional societies to 43 faculty members within the College.
Professor Steffen Mueller of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department was featured on Chicago Tonight Channel 11
Steffen Mueller provided funding to a project, “The Hunter Haven Diary Farm,” through their DCEO program of which was featured on Chicago Tonight Channel 11.
Video Title: Chicago Matters: Growing Forward, Transforming cow manure into electricity. Click here to view the video.
Alumni News – Reunions!
Engineering alumni gatherings are growing in popularity. Alumni from the Austin and San Antonio, Texas gathered on October 30, 2008 to meet Dean Peter Nelson at the Austin home of alumnus Glenn and Linda Neland.
"We hope this will be the first of many UIC engineering alumni meetings across Texas, occasions when our engineers can meet and talk about careers, ask questions about the progress of the college and share conversations about the future of engineering," said Dean Nelson.
Dean Nelson also met on November 10 with alumni donors in Palo Alto, California. The College is in contact with 355 alumni in Texas and 1,065 in California.
If you are interested in hosting a reunion on campus for your special group of engineering classmates, please contact Arnaud Buttin at abuttin@uic.edu.
Unger Scholars
Women in Engineering - With the start of the new term, thirteen first-year women students gathered to meet Dean Nelson and each other. Their point in common? All received generous scholarships designated to support women engineering students from the Dean's Advisory Board member, Bill Unger. Bill, an alumnus of the UIC College of Education, will meet with these scholars on a visit to campus on December 8.
Tech Center Program
The Tech Center Initiative introduced by the College of Engineering here at UIC was approved by the Board of Trustees about two years ago to support the primary goal of promoting practical industry experience for our graduate students. Several companies are now taking advantage of this program and are using our graduate students and faculty to supplement their short-term project needs. This is a very cost effective and flexible program where students can work up to 20hrs/wk on company site if needed and the faculty can work up to one day a week. To find our more about this program, please click here or email Ralph Pini, rpini@uic.edu to discuss the details of the program.
Nano Core Lab Manager Bob Lajos receives UIC Award of Merit
Bob Lajos is the recipient of the 2008 UIC Award of Merit for his outstanding work as Laboratory Manager at the COE Nano Core Facility.
Celebrating Our Long-Term Staff and Faculty
The College of Engineering celebrated its 2008 Employee Recognition week on November 3 – 7, 2008. Congratulations to faculty and staff for all their hard work and dedication throughout the years.
ERC gets DOE Extension for Midwest MAC Center
The DOE has renewed the ERC-based Midwest Combined Heat and Power Center for another year and will provide additional $150,000 in funding. This will allow ERC to continue to provide information and technical assistance for CHP development in a 12 State Midwest region.
Advertise Your Corporation in Engineering News
Engineering News, our alumni magazine, which reaches 18,000 alumni, is now accepting corporate advertisements. This is a great way to reach students and alumni! Please contact enginews@uic.edu for rates.
Click here for our latest issue.
College of Engineering Research Report 2007-2008
Now available.
Distinguished Research Fellow DT Lee was recently elected a new Member of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) 2008
Prof. Lee, a long-time friend of and collaborator with UIC's College of Engineering, is the Director of the Institute for Information Sciences, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), an institution he has been at for roughly a decade. His next visit to UIC COE is scheduled for this spring semester.
NEW RESEARCH GRANTS
Professor Pat Banerjee, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Pat Banerjee is the recipient of a new funded grant entitled, “Spinal Surgical Simulation Translational Research Using Collocated Virtual Reality and Haptics” and a grant entitled, “Practice makes perfect: Does practice on a virtual reality/haptics simulator improve resident’s ability to perform a ventriculostomy?”
Professor David Eddington, BioEngineering
David Eddington is the recipient of a new three-year grant entitled, “NSF-Collaborative Research: Microfluidics for Multiple Engineering Disciplines” (DUE-0814375) along with collaborators Ian Papautsky (University of Cincinnati), Bruce Gale (Georgia Tech), Jin-Woo Choi (Louisiana State University), and Catherine Maltbie (University of Cincinnati). This award will fund the development of a microfluidics course for various engineering disciplines, and a textbook will be written to facilitate similar course offerings in other engineering departments. The course is laboratory based and takes the students through theory, design, modeling, fabrication, and testing, using a microfluidic mixer, they design and optimize during the laboratory activities over the course of a semester. 
Professor Sudip Mazumder, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Sudip Mazumder is the recipient of a new three-year NSF grant offered by the Electronics, Photonics, and Device Technologies (EPDT) division. This is his second NSF grant in a short span of one year and overall the fourth including the career grant.
Professors Sohail Murad, Ludwig Nitsche and Lewis Wedgewood,
Chemical Engineering
Sohail Murad, Ludwig Nitsche, Lewis Wedgewood are the recipients of the National Science Foundation, “GILEE: Establishing a Graduate Interdisciplinary Liberal Engineering Ethics Curriculum” NSF grant.
Professor Sohail Murad receives additional NSF grants
Sohail Murad received NSF grant: UOP LLC, “Solubility of Gases.” Professor Murad and C. Jameson, Department of Energy, are also the recipients of a NSF grant entitled ”Observation and Simulations of Transport of Molecules and Ions Across Model Membranes.” 
Professor John Regalbuto, Chemical Engineering
John Regalbuto, is the recipient of a NSF grant/contract, Chevron Phillips
Chemical Company, "Fundamental studies of Bimetallic Catalyst Synthesis.”
Professor Tom Royston,
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Tom Royston received a NSF Major Research Instrumentation Grant: “Acquisition of a Scanning Laser Doppler Vibrometer.”
AWARDS & HONORS
Professor Uslenghi, Associate Dean of Engineering, was recently honored by the Institute 
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) with the establishment of a yearly award bearing his name
The "P.L.E. Uslenghi Best Letter Award" will be presented each year, beginning in 2009, to the author of the best letter published the prior year in the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters (AWPL). Professor Uslenghi was the Founding Editor and, for six years, the Editor-in-Chief of AWPL, the first fully online refereed journal published by the IEEE.
Professor Pat Banerjee, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Pat Banerjee is appointed Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.
Professor Bhaskar DasGupta, Computer Science
Bhaskar DasGupta is appointed Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Computational
Intelligence in Bioinformatics (JCIB). For more information, click here.
Professor Emeritus Krishna Gupta
Krishna Gupta was honored on August 5, 2008 with the 2008 Abbott Award of ASME Design Engineering Division at the International Design Engineering Technical Conference (DETC) in New York.
Professor and Dean Emeritus Lawrence Kennedy
Lawrence Kennedy is the recipient of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Heat Transfer Memorial Awards at the 2008 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition. The Heat Transfer Memorial Awards are the highest heat transfer awards given by ASME., click here.
Professor Constantine Megaridis, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering is one of four 2008 Engineering Achievement Award winners
J. B. Szczech, C. M. Megaridis, D. R. Gamota and J. Zhang, “Fine-Line Conductor Manufacturing Using Advanced Drop-On-Demand PZT Printing Technology,” IEEE Transactions on Electronics Packaging Manufacturing 25, 26-33 (2002) has been selected by the Illinois Engineering Council as one of its four 2008 Engineering Achievement Award winners.
Professor Krishna Reddy, Civil and Materials Engineering
Krishna Reddy was recognized by the Geo-Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers for outstanding performance as the chair of the successful conference titled “GeoCongress2008: The Challenge of Sustainability in the Geoenvironment,” held in New Orleans during March 9-12, 2008.
Professor Michael Stroscio, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Richard and Loan Hill Professor Michael Stroscio will serve a three-year term at the National Academies on the National Research Council's Board on Army Science and Technology. This group advises key officials in the Office of the Secretary of the Army. He has also has been appointed to a three-year term on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the IEEE.
Professor Dan Schonfeld, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Dan Schonfeld received an award on behalf of the IEEE Signal Processing Chicago Chapter, which was selected as one of the most active chapters by Region 4 of the IEEE. He is the Chair of the Chicago Chapter as well as the Representative from North America (Regions 1-6) to the IEEE Signal Processing Society Chapters
Committee. He was also invited to present a seminar on the operation of the IEEE Signal Processing Chicago Chapter to the IEEE Signal Processing Chapters Congress in April 2009. He has been appointed to serve as the Special Sections Area Editor in charge of Special Issues of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine effective January 2009. He will continue to serve as Associate Editor for video analysis of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and will serve as the Technical Chair of the IEEE Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics, (GENSIPS) to be held in June 2009. He is also serving as Co-chair of the IEEE Workshop on Video Mining held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, (ICDM) in Pisa, Italy, in December 2008.
Professor Tom Royston, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Tom Royston has been appointed Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Vibration and Acoustics.
Professor Emeritus Thomas C.T. Ting
Thomas Ting is the recipient of the Daniel C. Drucker Medal award.
For more details, click here.
Professor Daniela Tuninetti,
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Daniela Tuninetti has been nominated leading TPC co-chair for the Communications Theory Symposium (CTS) of ICC 2010 --one of the two flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society.
Alumna Dr. Dianne Chong receives a 2008 Managerial Leadership Award
Women of Color magazine, IBM Corporation, and the selection panel of the National Women of Color Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Conference is recognizing engineering alumna, Dr. Dianne Chong with the 2008 Managerial Leadership Award. Dr. Chong received three degrees from UIC, MS degrees in Physiology and in Civil Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Materials Engineering. In November 2006, she received an Outstanding Alumni Award from the College of Engineering. She is the Director of Material Process Technology for The Boeing Company, in Washington.
Nora Lin, Manager at Northrop Grumman Corporation receives a Career Achievement Award
Nora Lin, a long-time member of the COE Dean's Advisory Board and the Manager, Supportability Engineering of the Defense Systems Division at Northrop Grumman Corporation was honored with a Career Achievement Award. To celebrate the achievements of the 2008 winners, award recipients were honored at the National Women of Color Awards Gala, a high point of the 13th National Women of Color STEM Conference, held October 23-25, 2008 at Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas, TX. The honorees will be featured in the conference edition of Women of Color magazine.
Carlos Caicedo-Nunez receives a 2008 IEEE Best Student Paper Award
Carlos Caicedo-Nunez, an ECE Ph.D. student working with Professor Milos Zefran, received the best student paper award at the 2008 IEEE Multi-conference on “Systems and Control” for the paper "Performing Coverage on Nonconvex Domains," 
which was coauthored with Professor Zefran.
Dima Alfawakhiri receives SWE Scholarship
Dima Alfawakhiri, an undergraduate in the Department of Chemical Engineering received the Society of Women Engineers Scholarship award for $5000.
SEMINARS & EVENTS
Professor Mitra Dutta and Michael Stroscio present an invited paper at the University of Liege
ECE department Head Mitra Dutta and Richard and Loan Hill Professor, Michael Stroscio read an invited paper at the University of Liege that was co-authored by a number of former and present graduate students, including Dr. Takayuki Yamanaka, who is now at Northwestern University. The full citation for the invited paper is Milana Vasudev, Jianyong Yang, Hyeson Jung, Takayuki Yamanaka, Michael A. Stroscio, and Mitra Dutta, “Integrated Nanostructure-Semiconductor-THz Complexes: Spectral Studies of DNA," Electronic Recognition of Biomolecules-4, University of Liege, September 12, 2008.
Professor Dan Schonfeld, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Dan Schonfeld has been invited to present a seminar entitled: "MotionSearch: Content-Based Video Retrieval and Classification," (joint work with Xu Chen, Xiang Ma, and Ashfaq Khokhar) at the Joint Chapters of the IEEE in Rochester, New York, and as a distinguished speaker in the Joint College Colloquium Series at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He has also been invited to present a seminar entitled: "Evolution and Genomic Structure: A Signal Processing Perspective" (joint work with Liuling Gong and Nidhal Bouaynaya) at Columbia University, University of Rochester, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Krishna Reddy, Civil and Materials Engineering
Krishna Reddy delivered an invited lecture entitled: “Containment Wall Construction at DNAPL-Contaminated Site” at the Hong Kong Institute of Engineers-Environmental Division, HKIE Headquarter, Hong Kong in May 2008.
2008 Global Environmental Change Graduate Seminar
Professors Hormoz BassiriRad and Krishna Reddy of the Civil and Materials Engineering were organizers of the Summer 2008 Graduate Seminar Course “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Global Environmental Changes. For additional information click here.
Professor Sudip Mazumder, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Sudip Mazumder attended an IEEE PES Conference in July 2008 to present an invited NSF Panel paper.
OTHER NEWS
Web Browsing = Computer Science?
A high school parent recently went in to confront her son's computer teacher. "Why is my son failing computer class?" she asked. "He is an expert on computers at home, browsing and playing computer games." This illustrates a misperception of Computer Science as simply the ability to run a computer program.
UIC's CS Department has been taking steps to address this issue over the last 3 years, visiting area high school science, math, and computer classes, giving presentations to 600 students so far this fall. These efforts are having an effect. While the national CS enrollments between 2005 and 2007 declined 32%, the CS enrollments at UIC over that same time have gone up 31%. Area students and their parents are enjoying the CS Open House events offered four times a year, with an average of 45 attendees at each event.
SUPPORT YOUR COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
Giving - So, You Are 70-1/2 Years Old!
Federal financial legislation has reinstituted portions of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 that benefit the College of Engineering. People who are required to take a minimum withdrawal from an IRA can once again make a gift of up to $100,000 to the College of Engineering, as a direct transfer, without claiming that money as income. For details, see your financial advisor or call Nancy Cohen at 312-996-2168 for information.
Newsletter Editors, Nancy Cohen and Nancy Singer.
Please submit news items to Nancy Singer
COE Newsletter Archives