April 29, 2019

Dear members of the Hajim School community,

Forty-four Hajim School seniors and juniors are among this year’s new inductees of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious academic honor society. They are:

Audio and music engineering: Yiting Zhang

Biomedical engineering: Chang Gui, Chantelle Lim, Samantha Myers, Erik Patak, and Victor Zhang

Chemical engineering: Brendan Eder, Aaron Engel, Amanda Forti, William Funkenbusch, Daniel Krajovic ’20, Muhammad Miqdad, Paul Steve, and Jie Zhou

Computer science: Jackson Abascal, Claudia Sofia Carrillo Vazquez, Po Chun Chiu, Adam Kaplan, Ben King, and Yujie Liu,

Data science: Mackenzie Lee

Electrical and computer engineering: Wenxuan Cheng, Kelly Cheung, Donghwa Han, An Ho ’20, George Klimiashvili ’20, Jiangfeng Lu, and Tianyu Shou

Mechanical Engineering: Daniel Aronson, John Billings, Mira Bodek, Kathleen Desmond ’20, Eric Feirouz, Muhammad Hadi, Harleigh Kaczegowicz, Apoorva Khadilkar, Yuxin Liu, Benjamin Martell, Edna Toro Garza, and Haley Wohlever

Institute of Optics: Maximillian Bruggeman, Ankur Desai, Andrew Howard, and Evan Villafranca

Thirty-one Hajim School students participated in the Undergraduate Research Exposition, which also provided a showcase for our seven graduating Grand Challenges Scholars. Daniel Krajovic ‘20 of chemical engineering received a President’s Award for outstanding symposium presentation. Daniel Busaba ‘21 of computer science; Katherine Korslund ‘20 and Marcos dos Santos ‘20 of mechanical engineering; Samuel King ’20, a math and computer science major; Isaac Wong ’19, a computational biology and computer science major, and Emanuela Natali ‘21, a psychology and computer science major, received Deans’ Awards for their symposium presentations. Reem Mislati ‘19 of electrical and computer engineering received a Professors’ Choice Award for her poster presentation.

Thanks to Hajim School faculty members Jamie Cardenas of optics, Laura Slane of mechanical engineering, and Kanika Vats of biomedical engineering, for serving as judges.

Congratulations as well to:

George Ferguson, associate professor of computer science, who has been named Engineering Professor of the Year by the Student Association. Read more here, including the nomination from one of his students.
Michael Giacomelli, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, who has received a $558,558 K22 award from the National Institutes of Health to develop and clinically demonstrate novel microscopy technologies for performing surgical margin evaluation during Mohs surgery for cancer of the skin. This will help ensure complete removal of the cancer at the time of surgery, at less cost than existing technologies, thereby expanding access to image-guided surgical care.
Louis Jenkins, first-year PhD student in computer science, who has been awarded a prestigious US Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, the first such award in the department’s history. For his doctoral thesis Louis hopes to exploit emerging persistent memory technologies to enhance productivity and performance of fault-tolerance mechanisms in high performance computing. Read more here.
Samuel Triest ’20 of computer science, who was named the Gold Medalist of ACM’s Student Research Competition (SRC) at the 24th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS). The SRC offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences. Read more here.

Be sure to read “Women of Invention: How Rochester faculty find success as patent-holders.” Hajim School faculty members Danielle Benoit and Jannick Rolland are among the inventors profiled in this University Communications project that points out factors that help set Rochester apart as a fertile venue for invention and entrepreneurship.

Members of the newly formed Rochester Chapter of the Alliance for Diversity in Science and Engineering — including Marian Ackun-Farmmer, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering — did a great job describing how they would like to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in graduate programs and STEM fields in general on a recent WXXI Connections with Evan Dawson program. You can listen to the program here.

Reminder to seniors: By this Friday, May 3 be sure to resolve any discrepancies on your degree audit, including incomplete grades, cluster exceptions, transfer credit or missing courses. You will need to complete a Requirements Incomplete Form if you will not complete your degree requirements by May 20. Feel free to contact your undergraduate coordinator or anyone in the Hajim School Dean’s Office if you have any questions about your graduation status.

There’s lot going on this week! We’ll announce Art of Science Competition award winners at 1 p.m. Wednesday at Carlson Library. Nearly 90 teams will present their senior and CMTI master’s degree design projects from 1 to 3:30 p.m. Thursday at the Goergen Athletic Center, when our Dottie Welch Award winner will be announced. The finals of the Charles and Janet Forbes Entrepreneurial Competition will be held from 2 to 5 p.m. Friday in Schlegel 102, and our Visiting Committee will be meeting here that day.

Have a great week!

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman