January 13, 2020

Dear members of the Hajim School community,

Welcome back for the start of a new semester — and a new decade!

These photos, taken during the 2018-19 academic year, help reinforce why studying abroad can be such a memorable experience for our Hajim School students. They were among the winning entries in our University’s annual Education Abroad Photo Contest, which included a contest for photos of Rochester and other US locations taken by international students who are studying here.

Congratulations to:

  • Diwas Gautam ’20 of mechanical engineering whose photo at top left was taken during a hike in the Swiss Alps during his IES semester in Madrid in 2018. Diwas received honorable mention in the Physical World category.
  • Catherine Hauser ’20 of biomedical engineering whose photo at lower right was taken during her first backpacking trip on New Zealand’s South Island. Catherine received honorable mention in the Student Experience category.
  • Abdelrahman Nahar ’22 of mechanical engineering, an international student from Sudan whose photo of the Chase Building in downtown Rochester, middle of bottom row, won honorable mention in the Local Rochester Culture category.
  • Ashan Galabada Dewage, an optics PhD student from Sri Lanka, who was winner of the US Sightseeing category for his photo at upper right of climbing peaks at Minnewaska State Park, Hudson Valley, New York.
  • Martin Helmrich ’20 of computer science, an international student from Germany, who won honorable mention in the US Sightseeing Category for his photo at lower left of fireworks in New York City.

Click here for a closer look at these and other winning entries from students, including one showing Renato Perucchio, chair and professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Archaeology, Technology and Historical Structures Program, giving a lecture inside the Roman Colosseum.

Congratulations to:

  • Gilbert “Rip” Collins, who has been appointed as the Tracy Hyde Harris Professor in Arts, Sciences and Engineering. This is one of our University’s oldest professorships. The first recipient was Isaac Quinby (1870-84) a professor of calculus and science and West Point graduate who commanded Rochester’s first volunteer infantry regiment during the Civil War. Other holders of the Tracy Hyde Harris Professorship include Lee DuBridge (1934-46) who helped the physics department gain prominence by building one of the world’s first cyclotrons; Robert Marshak (1952-60), a physicist of international standing who organized a series of Rochester Conferences on High Energy Nuclear Physics; and most recently Richard Eisenberg (1996-2013) of chemistry, who made significant advances in organometallic and catalytic chemistry. Rip — a professor of mechanical engineering; the associate director for science, technology, and academics at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, and director of our exciting new high energy density physics program — fits in nicely with this distinguished company!
  • The Department of Computer Science, which has just been ranked No. 5 in the country by CSRankings for computer vision for the year 2019, trailing only Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, University of Central Florida, and University of California/Berkeley, with MIT and Cornell University right after. CSRankings is a metrics-based ranking of top computer science institutions around the world. This is very impressive given the department’s relatively small faculty size —  and the fact that computer vision is one of the most active areas in AI, notes Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science, who helped achieve this ranking with 10 computer vision papers last year.  “To stand out from such a huge crowd is really a testament of the tremendous hard work by our students,” Jiebo says.
  • And to Jiebo, who has been appointed editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering multimedia technology and applications, for the 3-year term of 2020-2022.

Amid growing concern about the accumulation of plastic waste in the environment, the labs of two of our faculty members — James McGrath in biomedical engineering and Wayne Knox in optics, both affiliated with the Materials Science Program — are collaborating with SiMPore Inc. to devise ways to quickly filter and identify 5 mm or smaller particles of plastic in drinking water samples. They will then test the ability of these particles to cross a microscale barrier that simulates the lining of a human intestine. This is important research for helping us better understand the prevalence of these particles and their potential impact on human health — and a great example of the kind of collaborations with industry that we need to pursue more vigorously. Read more here.

Have a great week!

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman

 

 

 
Hajim header