September 6, 2022
Left to right, top to bottom, our five Hajim School NSF CAREER award recipients this year: Thomas Howard, Ross Maddox, Sreepathi Pai, Andrea Pickel, and Jessica Shang, and, at lower right, Cindy Gary, who played a major supporting role.
Dear members of the Hajim School community,
I am thrilled to report we have a record number of National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award recipients this year.
Please join me in congratulating:
- Thomas Howard, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
- Ross Maddox, associate professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience.
- Sreepathi Pai, assistant professor of computer science.
- Andrea Pickel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.
- Jessica Shang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.
The CAREER award is the NSF’s most esteemed recognition for early-career faculty members. This is an amazing indication of the outstanding quality of our junior faculty.
Special thanks to Cindy Gary, our assistant dean of grants and contracts, whose annual summer CAREER boot camp, launched in 2016, has provided junior engineering and computer science faculty members with valuable background about the award and tips for submitting strong proposals. Thanks as well to all our previous recipients who have shared their CAREER experiences and successful applications as part of the boot camps.
Even prospective faculty members who visit our campus for interviews are excited to hear that we offer this.
Learn more here about the exciting research that this year’s recipients will pursue with their CAREER awards, and how the boot camp helped them prepare their submissions.
DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION
It was my pleasure recently to officially welcome the 362 first-year students who arrived on campus intending to major in engineering or computer science. There is so much potential in these bright, talented students to make the world ever better!
However, we must continue to work hard to broaden the representation of students coming to us. Of this year’s incoming first-year students, 33.7 percent are women and 11.9 percent are underrepresented minorities. Both percentages are up from last year, but are still not representative of their overall populations.
I’m very proud of the work being done by our departments in support of our Hajim School diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. All have established diversity committees—and really effective committees at that. They’ve updated their websites with great information and resources, they have been intentional about broadening the pipelines for recruiting faculty, staff, and students, and they have invited speakers from diverse backgrounds to enrich our community.
As we continue our efforts, let’s not forget we have an important partner in the Institutional Office of Equity and Inclusion (IOEI), which is dedicated to cultivating an equitable, respectful, and welcoming culture at our University. To learn more about the resources it provides, check out the IOEI website at www.rochester.edu/diversity and sign up for the monthly newsletter Encompass here.
RESEARCH NEWS
Particle tracking conducted in the lab of Douglas Kelley, associate professor of mechanical engineering, shows the flow of the glymphatic system of the brain in the perivascular space surrounding an artery.
One of the most exciting of our many Hajim School/Medical Center collaborations involves the work Douglas Kelley’s Mixing Lab is doing in collaboration with Maiken Nedergaard’s groundbreaking research on the glymphatic system that cleanses the brain of wastes. A better understanding of this system could shed new light on the causes of Alzheimer’s and other diseases. A new initiative, which also involves researchers from Penn State University, Boston University, and the University of Copenhagen, has just been awarded a $12.2 million grant from The BRAIN Initiative, supported by NIH and other federal research agencies to fill gaps in our knowledge of the brain’s organization and function.
The goal of this grant is to develop a more detailed, mechanistic understanding of the movement of the cleansing cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) during sleep and wakefulness and the neural processes that control it. Hajim School researchers will play leading roles.
Doug, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, is leading one of the four main projects—doing numerical modeling to show how arterial dilation, mediated by neural activity, drives the flow of CSF in surrounding perivascular spaces. Jack Thomas, emeritus professor of mechanical and aerospace sciences, is co-principal investigator. Postdocs and a PhD student will be recruited for this project.
Doug is also leading one of the three “cores” that will support the four projects, specifically a data science core to provide innovative methods for storing, organizing, processing, analyzing and internally sharing the enormous, multi-modal data sets that will be generated by MRI, two-photon imaging, simulation results, and EEG, among others. Mujdat Cetin, the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Jiebo Luo, professor of computer science, are co-PI’s for the data core. A data scientist and PhD students will be recruited for this part of the project.
This work is exciting, not only for the far-reaching impact it could have in making our lives better, but for the opportunities it creates for our students to participate in cutting-edge research.
NEW INSTRUCTIONAL TRAVEL GRANTS
How can we at the Hajim School best combine our experience with online learning and technology with the experiential, in-person hands-on education that is at the core of the University of Rochester experience? And how do we do so in ways that support students coming from diverse backgrounds?
We are fortunate to have remarkably talented faculty and staff members whose creative ideas will be an essential part of meeting this challenge.
Our new Hajim Instructional Conference and Travel (HICAT) grants provide support for faculty and staff to attend professional conferences with the goals of promoting professional development and stimulating curricular innovation. Conferences sponsored by any professional organization are eligible (for example, ASEE, IEEE, AICHE). However, the grantee’s attendance should have a primarily educational focus and cannot be based on externally funded work (for example, a research grant). Applications are made using an online form and may be submitted at any time.
For additional information contact Associate Dean Paul Funkenbusch at pfunken2@ur.rochester.edu. Learn more about other instructional resources for Hajim faculty and staff, including Sykes Awards, at our new webpage.
EVERYONE: CONFERENCE NETWORKING SKILLS
Here’s a great opportunity for students to learn the networking skills they’ll need when they attend professional or academic conferences this year—and for faculty, staff, alumni, and employers to help our students practice those skills.
Students: Register here for the Greene Center’s first annual Rock Your Next Conference: Fall 2022 Mock Mini-Conference for students in STEM fields, which will start at 5 p.m. September 15 in the Feldman Ballroom. You’ll be able to choose among concurrent sessions presented by employers and alumni who can help you with resumes, networking, and talking about your research.
Faculty, staff, alumni, employers: RSVP here by September 12 to join the networking session of this conference from 6:15 to 7 p.m. Your role will be to mingle with the students and help them practice their networking skills––no preparation needed. Light refreshments provided.
Let’s have a good turnout for what promises to be a great learning experience for our students!
STUDENTS: WITNESS SUSTAINABILITY EXPERIMENT
First-year and sophomore students interested in sustainability—and anyone else for that matter—are invited to witness a classroom experiment to determine the efficiency of heating water with solar energy. The experiment will be conducted from 9-10:15 a.m., this Friday, September 9 in Wegmans 1400 as part of CHE 150: Introduction to Sustainable Energy, taught by Marc Porosoff, assistant professor of chemical engineering. A battery charged by a photovoltaic array will be used to heat water, while calculating the associated efficiencies. Are there more efficient methods of heating water? Can you design something better?
Have a great week,
Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman
