November 4, 2019

Dear members of the Hajim School community,

If you have the opportunity, please join us at 3 p.m. Thursday in the Feldman Ballroom to celebrate the installation of Diane Dalecki as the Kevin J. Parker Distinguished Professor in Biomedical Engineering. University President Sarah Mangelsdorf and Donald Hall, the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences & Engineering, will participate in the installation. RSVP to Carla Boff at Carla.Boff@rochester.edu if you plan to attend.

This will be a great opportunity to acknowledge Diane’s many contributions as a researcher and educator, as director of the Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound, and as someone who has played a major role in helping create and build the department she now chairs.

It is appropriate that the professorship is named in honor of Kevin, the William F. May Professor of Engineering and dean emeritus of engineering and applied sciences, in recognition of his longstanding contributions to medical imaging, image processing, and scanning techniques. One of those contributions, the invention of Blue Noise Mask by Kevin and his former PhD student, Theophana Mitsa (’91 PhD), was licensed by more than a dozen companies. This and four other endowed professorships were established with royalties from the invention.

The installation ceremony is part of the second annual Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound Symposium Day, which begins in the Feldman Ballroom at 8 a.m. and will also include lectures, trainee presentations, and a poster session. Read more here.

If you haven’t been to one of our pumpkin launch competitions, be sure to watch Matt Mann’s video of this year’s contest on the Eastman Quad. And be sure to turn out next year!

Good news for sophomores interested in the tech industry: Thanks to a generous gift, the Greene Center for Career Education and Connections is once again offering a Tech Industry Road Trip to Silicon Valley on January 7-9. This is a wonderful way for students to meet and network with alumni while touring various tech sector companies — large and small. It is not unusual for students to return from this trip with interviews lined up for internships and jobs. Space is limited to 25 students. The deadline to apply at Handshake is Thursday, November 14. Read more here.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers and Mock Trial student chapters are hosting a great session on “Patent Law: Protecting your Ideas and Inventions” from 12:30 to 3 p.m. this Saturday, November 9, in the Hawkins-Carlson Room. This will include a panel of patent attorneys talking about the patenting process, how to become a patent attorney, and their own experiences. First, however, there will be a half hour for students and faculty to meet and greet panel members over hors-d’oeuvres. After the panel there will be time for questions and answers and more networking. Thanks to the Ain Center and Greene Center for their support. Read more and register here.

Reminder: Students interested in applying for the Grand Challenges Scholars Program can attend an application workshop and information session from noon to 1 p.m., tomorrow, November 5 in the iZone.

Continuing our look at some recent grants our faculty have received for exciting research projects:

Just as diffraction causes a light beam to spread over distance, dispersion causes a pulse of light to spread over time. The underlying mathematics are identical. And just as a lens can focus a light beam over distance, a phase modulator can act as a time lens and compress pulsed light.

Govind Agrawal, the James C. Wyant Professor of Optics, and co-PI William Donaldson, senior scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, have applied these aspects of “space-time duality” to simulate novel ways to “control light with light” in photonic devices – in theory. Now, with a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, they will see if they can verify these theoretical possibilities in actual experiments.

Imagine, for example, being able to “trap” one or more pulses of light inside a more powerful pulse by means of a temporal wave guide as they travel through an optical fiber.

As Govind and William note in their summary of this project, “The proposed research will further advance our understanding in the field of ultra fast optics and provide us new tools for pulse manipulation and shaping. Such devices are likely to find applications in a variety of technical areas ranging from telecommunications to biomedical engineering.”

This is exciting not only for the novel science and applications involved, but as an example of the exciting research opportunities that occur when our faculty collaborate with scientists at LLE.

Finally, here’s another example of a Hajim student who manages to excel in a demanding engineering major, yet still finds time to pursue outside interests at the highest level. Nils Kingston ’21 of mechanical engineering finished in the top 10 in the two events he entered last month in a collegiate national mountain bike championship in California. Earlier this year, for the second time, he won a collegiate national skiing championship in dual slalom. Congratulation Nils! You can read more about his achievements here.

Have a great week!

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman