May 28, 2019

Dear members of the Hajim School Community,

I’m happy to announce that Mujdat Cetin, associate professor of electrical and computing engineering, has agreed to serve as interim director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science starting July 1. We are thrilled that Mujdat is taking on this position and know that you will all enjoy working with him in this capacity. He has a number of great ideas he would like to explore for GIDS in the next year.

I would like to also take this opportunity to thank Ehsan Hoque for the work he has done over the past 1.5 years serving as interim director. We are very grateful for his service and appreciate everything he has done to help GIDS move forward.

We have already started working on identifying candidates for the directorship (long-term) and the actual search will commence in earnest as we approach the Fall.

Congratulations to:

Danielle Benoit, associate professor of biomedical engineering, who is one of 22 female faculty members selected from 19 institutions across the U.S. and Canada to participate in Drexel University’s Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science (ELATES at Drexel) program. ELATES is a one-year, part time program that focuses on increasing personal and professional leadership effectiveness, leading and managing change initiatives within institutions, using strategic finance and resource management to enhance organizational missions, and creating a network of exceptional women who bring organizational perspectives and deep personal capacity to the institutions and society they serve.
Thomas Howard, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who has been selected as a 2019 Wilmot Assistant Professor. The two-year appointments, one in each of the four divisions of Arts, Sciences and Engineering, include an annual research fund of $5,000. Tom, who joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2015, is “hitting it out of the park in all aspects of his job performance,” says Mark Bocko, chair of the department. “He has built a fantastic experimental robotics laboratory, he has been a generous and effective research mentor to many students, from undergraduates to PhD students, and he clearly is highly respected by the robotics academic community with papers regularly accepted at international conferences and journals.” Read more here.
Second-year PhD student Andrew Read-McFarland of computer science, who was selected as one of the winners of the 2019 Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student. Andrew was recognized by faculty and students as consistently going above and beyond the expectations for a graduate TA. Lane Hemaspaandra, professor of computer science, says “Andrew was an exceptional TA. He showed true affinity for the material, and dedication to helping young minds not just learn the material, but also see its beauty and applicability. He was very generous with his time, he truly cared, and as a cherry on top he was strong even on the type of logistics that people think are boring yet actually are an important part of supporting the students.”
Third-year PhD student Parker Riley of computer science, who was awarded the Arts, Sciences and Engineering Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship in recognition of his strong research record, as well as his clear commitment to mentoring, outreach, and service to the department and field. Parker, who is supervised by Daniel Gildea, professor of computer science, is working on the problem of learning translation models between languages for which no parallel text (translated document pairs) are available. His work has already resulted in one journal article in Computational Linguistics, one first-author paper in the proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and another paper currently under review for ACL.
Yang Li, an electrical engineering PhD student in the lab of Gonzalo Mateos, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Yang received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) held in Brighton, UK earlier this month. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference focused on signal processing and its applications. Yang’s paper was selected among 3,700 submissions to this year’s conference. In the paper, co-authored with Gonzalo and entitled “Identifying structural brain networks from functional connectivity: A network deconvolution approach,” Yang addresses the problem of identifying structural brain networks from signals measured by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Two of our Hajim School student athletes — Harleigh Kaczegowicz ’19 of mechanical engineering, a member of the women’s varsity softball team, and Jake Hertz ’20 of electrical and computer engineering, a member of the men’s varsity baseball team — who were named to the Google Cloud Academic All-District III First Team in voting by the College Sports Information Directors of America. The honor recognizes students who not only lead on the ball field, but also excel in the classroom. Read more here.

You can read more about Donna Strickland’s visit to our campus during Commencement — and how it inspired our students — by clicking here.

Our Baja SAE off-road vehicle team experienced both high and low points in competition against 100 other university teams at Quail Canyon, California. They finished 4^th in the sales presentation and tied for 3^rd in the design presentation — the best the team has ever done in these static events. The team also did well in the acceleration, hill climb, and suspension and traction events, but sheared off the front suspension and bent a “shock” in the endurance race, and finished 57th in that event. “Plenty of things to work on,” says faculty advisor Chris Muir. “They are really stepping up their game and are energized for next year.”

Each summer Cindy Gary, our assistant dean for grants and contracts, runs a highly informative Hajim NSF CAREER Bootcamp, which provides tips and insights to help junior faculty apply for this prestigious award. This year’s bootcamp runs from 1-2:30 p.m. each Thursday, this week through June 27, in CSB 703. Please contact Cindy if you are interested or have any questions.

Have a great week!

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman