September 10, 2018

Dear members of the Hajim School community,

Kilean Lucas concedes that it was “a little bit intimidating” standing in front of a 13-member panel of judges, including a Nobel laureate, at the international Falling Walls Lab competition last November. But the PhD student in biomedical engineering says the trip to Berlin — and all the preparation that went into it — was definitely worthwhile.

“There were some really, really big names there,” says Kilean, a member of Professor James McGrath’s lab. “It was a great way to do networking. And by talking to people from around the world, and not just in a university setting, you have a better sense of global needs.” The conference, which commemorates the fall of the Berlin Wall, gives young researchers, entrepreneurs, and inventors from around the world a forum to express ideas about how to “break down walls” to deal with big challenges confronting science and society. Kilean earned his all-expenses paid trip and $500 prize by winning the University’s qualifying round. Competitors are each allowed three minutes and three slides to summarize their groundbreaking ideas.

The deadline to apply for this year’s competition is next Monday, Sept. 17. The qualifying round will be held October 2 in the Feldman Ballroom. I strongly urge Hajim School faculty (whose PhDs do not date back more than five years) and students to consider entering. As Kilean notes: “Even if you don’t win, in all honesty, the preparation for the competition is incredibly beneficial. Trying to summarize your research in three minutes, improving your communication that way — that’s really, really beneficial. No matter what field you’re in.” Click here to register. You can also contact Adele Coelho, faculty outreach coordinator, at adele.coelho@rochester.edu for additional information.

Our faculty have done an outstanding job this year of applying for — and securing — external funding for their research projects. Recent examples include:

A $488,000 National Science Foundation grant to support a novel collaborative project by Andrew White, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Chenliang Xu, assistant professor of computer science. They will apply advances in computer vision to improve models of multiscale systems in chemistry in which processes occur on many different time and spatial scales — for example during DNA transcription or peptide aggregation. “In both the computer processing of videos and the modeling of multiscale chemical systems, reducing complexity via removing extraneous details is essential,” they note. “Video segmentation is the process of identifying foreground, background, and objects in a video. Surprisingly, the same mathematical structure can be applied to chemical systems.” Read more here.
A $245,000 NSF grant to support a project by Gonzalo Mateos, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, to develop a graph signal processing approach to help understand complex networks. The emphasis is on “modeling, identification, and controllability of distributed network processes – often conceptualized as signals defined on the vertices of a graph,” Gonzalo notes. He will use graph filters to “develop novel theory and algorithms for the challenging problem of localizing sources of network diffusion given an observed (output) graph signal, for example, a spatial temperature profile measured by a wireless sensor network, an opinion profile in a social network, or the neural activity in different regions of the brain. Read more here.

This has been quite a year for both Andrew and Gonzalo; both have also received NSF CAREER awards.

Congratulations as well to Sean Regan, senior scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, who has been selected as a recipient of the Fusion Power Associates (FPA) 2018 Leadership Award. This prestigious award is presented to individuals demonstrating outstanding leadership qualities in accelerating the development of fusion. Sean is being recognized for his scientific contributions to the experimental program on the Omega Laser Facility and his leadership role in the national fusion program as co-chair of the National Implosion Stagnation Physics Working Group. Sean will receive his award at FPA’s Annual Meeting and Symposium in December.

In a recent Words from Wallis Hall, President Feldman addresses the importance of entrepreneurism as part of the University’s mission to help make the world a better place. Among the University’s entrepreneurial strengths he cites the Hajim School and the Technical Entrepreneurship and Management (TEAM) master’s programs, including a new one geared to biomanufacturing and therapeutic development. He also mentions optics alumnae Cristina Canavesi ’13 (MS), ’14 (PhD), ’15S (MBA) who “used what she learned at Simon Business School and in the Technical Entrepreneurship and Management (TEAM) program” to help co-found bioimaging company LightTopTech with her PhD advisor, Jannick Rolland.

Here’s a program to help researchers learn entrepreneurial skills: The NSF I-Corps Upstate New York (UNY) Node is offering a short course program for researchers interested in exploring the market potential of their work and learning entrepreneurial skills. Short courses—geared toward faculty, doctoral candidates, and postdocs—are offered at no cost to participants and consist of both in-person and remote meetings over a two-week period. Short course graduates receive National Science Foundation (NSF) lineage and are able to apply to other NSF grant awards, including the National I-Corps Teams program, which carries a grant award up to $50,000. Previous NSF funding is not required to apply. The Ain Center for Entrepreneurship will host its next short course starting Friday, October 26. Meals are provided to participants. The program is limited to eight teams. Apply online. Contact Matthew Spielmann with questions or to learn more.

Have a great week!

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman