August 3, 2020

Rooted in the University’s Meliora Values, the Covid-19 Community Commitment for students asks them to commit to helping keep the community safe by following University requirements on testing and monitoring, wearing a mask, social distancing, and other precautions. A similar commitment is in the works for faculty, staff, and postdocs.

Dear members of the Hajim School community,

To our new and returning students, a very warm welcome! Some of you have already arrived to begin quarantine.

We have missed being with our students who had to finish the spring semester learning remotely. We’ve been working around the clock to create hybrid instructional plans and safe classroom and dorm occupancy limits so we can be back on campus this fall. We’ve come up with carefully considered requirements for social distancing, wearing of masks, and health monitoring that aim to keep us all safe and protected from COVID-19 — as long as ALL of us carefully adhere to those requirements.

So, to our students, I want to be very candid about what’s at stake. Whether our campus is able to remain open is as much in your hands as anyone else’s. Please be diligent in following precautions. Remember, it might take only one lapse — only one party on or off campus where safeguards are not observed, for example — to set in motion a chain of COVID transmissions that will force us to once again close the campus. That’s why it is important for all of you to read — and take to heart — this commitment developed in consultation with student leaders. Similar commitments will be forthcoming for our faculty, staff, and postdocs to read and take to heart. We are all in this together!

We can all keep up on the latest developments at the University’s Coronavirus Update website. Visit the University FAQ webpage for answers to commonly asked questions about our reopening, or submit a question of your own.

Caroline Cardinale ’21 of mechanical engineering.

In a research lab, the problems are open ended. The answers are not known. And it may not even be clear what methods should be used to find those answers. While some students flounder in this sea of uncertainty, other students such as Caroline Cardinale ’21 of mechanical engineering — this month’s outstanding student — take to research like a duck to water. Caroline, an Astronaut Scholarship recipient, “is an ideal research assistant in the lab, a self-starter, intuitive, independent, and assertive – she knows her own mind,” says Jessica Shang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Caroline also excels in the classroom, maintaining nearly perfect grades. This is particularly impressive considering that Caroline overcame dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) as a middle school student. Read more here.

Congratulations to:

Riccardo Betti and Wolfgang Theobald, who are among the recipients of this year’s Lev D. Landau and Lyman Spitzer Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to Plasma Physics. This award, presented every two years by the respective plasma physics divisions of the American and European Physical Societies, recognizes researchers who not only advance their scientific field, but also promote collaboration and unity between US and European scientists. Riccardo, the chief scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) and the Robert L. McCrory Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Wolfgang, a senior scientist at LLE, are being recognized “for major advancements of the shock ignition concept through collaborative experimental and simulation efforts in inertial confinement fusion research.” Read more here.
Gonzalo Mateos, associate professor of electrical and computer science, who has been appointed the Asaro Biggar Family Fellow in Data Science. Considered a rising star in his field, Gonzalo pursues research interests in statistical learning from big data, network science, optimization, and signal processing, work that has applications for networked systems, including the internet, power grids, the brain, and social networks. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a national recognition of promise for a young researcher. In 2016, he received pilot funding from the University’s Goergen Institute for Data Science in collaboration with Alex Paciorkowski, assistant professor of neurology, to develop software to help predict which treatments are likely to have the best outcomes for epilepsy patients. Read more here.

Here’s more exciting research from our faculty and students:

In work published in Physical Review Letters, William Renninger, an assistant professor of optics, along with members of his lab, describe a new device, called the “stretched-pulse soliton Kerr resonator,” that enhances the performance of ultrafast laser pulses. The work has important implications for a range of engineering and biomedical applications, including spectroscopy, frequency synthesis, distance ranging, pulse generation, and others. The device creates an ultrafast laser pulse—on the order of femtoseconds, or one quadrillionth of a second. The pulse is freed from the physical limits endemic to sources of laser light—what laser scientists call laser gain—and the limits of the sources’ wavelengths. “Simply put, this is the shortest pulse ever from a gain-free fiber source,” William says. Read more here.

The research group of Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science, has continued to mine Twitter to understand how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting public attitudes and behaviors. One of the group’s initial studies was on the use and implications of controversial terms like “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus,” which was published by the IEEE Transactions on Big Data and featured by IEEE Spectrum. The group has also compared how college students responded differently to the pandemic, monitored increasing feelings of depression as COVID-19 spread, and studied consumer hoarding behaviors resulting from the pandemic. Their findings were shared recently in a lightning presentation for chairs of computer science PhD-granting departments and heads of major industrial research labs at the Computing Research Association (CRA) Virtual Conference in July. Read more here.

Have a great week!

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman