Five Hajim School faculty members received the National Science Foundation’s most esteemed recognition for early-career faculty members. The Faculty Early Career Development Award provides recipients with five years of funding to help lay the foundation for their future research.

Congratulations to: 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; and Andrea Pickel and Jessica Shang, both assistant professors of mechanical engineering.

“This is an amazing indication of the outstanding quality of our junior faculty,” says Hajim School Dean Wendi Heinzelman. She also congratulated Cindy Gary, the school’s assistant dean of grants and contracts, whose annual summer CAREER boot camp has provided junior engineering and computer science faculty members with valuable background about the award and tips for submitting strong proposals. Learn more.

Thanks to a $12 million challenge fund from one of its most distinguished alumni, The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester will have an opportunity to increase its faculty by 50 percent as it prepares to enter its second century.

The challenge is endowed by University life trustee James C. Wyant ’67 MS ’69 PhD and his wife, Tammy, who will provide 60 percent of the $1.5 million required for a professorship and $2 million required for a distinguished professorship.

This will allow the Institute to increase the number of its full-time faculty members from 20 to 30. Learn more.

For more information on the Wyant Optics Challenge and how you can support The Institute of Optics, contact Tyrone Jimmison, executive director of Hajim Advancement.

This is an exciting time at the Hajim School. Our five NSF CAREER award recipients have embarked on research paths of great potential to make the world better. The extraordinary gift by Jim and Tammy Wyant gives our venerable Institute of Optics an opportunity to achieve new heights and help meet an increasing demand, both in the Rochester area and nationwide, for trained optics graduates.

As you scan through this newsletter, you’ll learn about the cutting edge research at our school; the award-winning achievements by our faculty, students, staff, and alumni; and several newly arrived faculty members who bring with them exceptional research and teaching skills.

And that’s not all. Read on for a closer look at why I see great things in our future.

INSTANT BIOPSIES AND OCEAN CURRENTS

A novel two-photon fluorescence microscopy imaging system developed by Michael Giacomelli, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, demonstrated remarkable accuracy in detecting—in two minutes—nonmelanoma skin cancer in biopsy tissue samples, as reported in JAMA Dermatology. This would enable a surgeon to immediately determine whether the lesion is cancerous and, if so, to “treat the patient during the same visit instead of stretching it out over the next month and multiple visits,” Giacomelli says. Learn more.

For the first time, researchers led by Hussein Aluie, associate professor of mechanical engineering, have quantified the energy of ocean currents larger than 1,000 kilometers. In the process, they have discovered that the most energetic is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, some 9,000 kilometers in diameter. A coarse-graining technique developed by Aluie’s lab gives researchers an opportunity to better understand how ocean currents function as a key moderator of the Earth’s climate system. Learn more.

BRAIN CLEANSING AND SUPERCONDUCTIVE CHIPS

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. Kelley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, is leading two projects, and Hajim faculty members  Jiebo Luo, Jack Thomas, and Mujdat Cetin are also playing key roles as part of a $12.2 million grant from the BRAIN Initiative to better understand how the cleansing system operates. Learn more.

Eby Friedman, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and three of his ECE colleagues—Mark Bocko, Selcuk Kose, and Roman Sobolewski—are key partners in an ambitious $15 million project led by the University of Southern California to develop next-generation, superconductive integrated circuits. The circuits would be at least 100 times more energy efficient and operate more than 10 times faster than the CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology currently used. Learn more.

NANOSCALE HOTSPOTS AND DETECTING PARKINSON’S

Andrea Pickel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Dinesh Bommidi, a PhD student in her lab, have discovered exciting new applications for diamonds that are not only incredibly small but have a unique defect. The method, described in Applied Physics Letters, gives researchers a less complicated, more accurate tool for using nitrogen vacancy centers to measure the temperature of nanoscale-sized materials. Learn more.

The lab of Ehsan Hoque, associate professor of computer science, in collaboration with Ray Dorsey, the David M. Levy Professor of Neurology at the Medical Center, has developed computer vision software that can detect a symptom of Parkinson’s Disease from the “selfies” people take. In addition, a simple, five-part test of facial expressions, finger movements, and spoken passages developed by the collaborators can be administered to patients sitting in front of their computer webcams hundreds of miles away and similarly analyzed.  Learn more.

NOVEL WAYS TO DETECT MONOLAYERS AND LEUKEMIA

Jesús Sánchez Juárez, a PhD student in the lab of Jaime Cardenas, assistant professor of optics, has made it much easier for research labs and companies to detect monolayers—two-dimensional materials less than 1/100,000^th the width of a human hair that are highly sought for use in electronics, photonics, and optoelectronic devices. Learn more.

Azmeer Sharipol, a biomedical engineering PhD student, is first author of a paper in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology describing a remarkable modular bone-marrow-on-chip device that can reliably model changes in the marrow as leukemia takes root and spreads. Created in the lab of Ben Frisch, the device could quickly evaluate how human leukemia cells respond to drug treatment. Learn more.

The Hajim School just marked the fifth year of its participation in the national Grand Challenges Scholars Program. The program has also attracted students from 15 majors outside of engineering, including biological sciences, business, and music. Of the 51 students who have successfully completed the program, more than half (27) are women, and more than half (29) are international students.

GCS alumnus Beauclaire Mbanya ‘20, a Rhodes Scholar, says the required competencies equip students with a “multifaceted solution-oriented mindset” to not only address 21st century challenges but to “contribute to the good of humanity.” Learn more.

Ellen Meyer ’23, one of two juniors who showed the highest academic performance in core courses at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, spent two summers interning at an aerospace company plant in her hometown of Simsbury, CT, and interned at Sandia National Laboratories this summer. Meyer was recently chosen for the University’s unique Take Five Scholars Program to explore the connections between literature and history. Learn more.

When Nicholas Achuthan ’23 is not taking piano lessons from a renowned Eastman School of Music faculty member and winning a River Campus concerto competition, he is teaching other students and doing research in the lab of Jaime Cardenas, assistant professor of optics, as Achuthan pursues his major at The Institute of Optics. Learn more.

Danielle Getz ’23 decided in high school that she wanted to dedicate herself to mitigating climate change. This summer she worked in the research group of Marc Porosoff, assistant professor of chemical engineering, on cutting edge research aimed at addressing the problem. She’s also pursuing a minor in Environmental Humanities. A Grand Challenges Scholar, Getz encourages young girls to pursue STEM careers as a member of the Society of Women Engineers. Learn more.

Nikola Raitsevits ’23, a mechanical engineering major from Serbia and Greece, is pursuing his newfound passion for robotics in the best possible place—the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Thomas Howard, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Raitsevits is a recipient of a Tau Beta Pi Scholarship and the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s Kuichling Prize. Like his namesake, Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor, Raitsevits wants to “make a meaningful change in this world.” Learn more.

Kelsey Lee ’23 is pursuing one of the hardest degree combinations imaginable–and is excelling in both. The Eastman School of Music dual degree program student, majoring in piano performance and optical engineering, was recently recognized as a Presser Undergraduate Scholar. In the lab of Jaime Cardenas, assistant professor of optics, Lee applies electrical signals to micro ring resonators to change the frequency of light after it is emitted by a laser. Though she foresees a career in optics, piano will remain an important part of her life, Lee says. Learn more.

“I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember,” says Valerie Battista ’23. And thanks to our University’s open curriculum, Battista is pursuing majors in both computer science and music. She sings with the University Chamber Singers and the Treble Chorus, and also performs on the University of Rochester’s historic Hopeman Carillon. Battista received the Suzanne J. O’Brien Book Award, which recognizes students who excel academically and in leadership roles in their first year at the College and is a good predictor of students who will make the most of their opportunities here. Learn more.

Andrew Rojnuckarin ’23, a chemical engineering major, began pursuing undergraduate research experiences his first year on campus. This summer he worked as an Eisenberg Summer Research Fellow in the lab of David Foster, associate professor of chemical engineering. Rojnuckarin received the department’s Donald F. Othmer Sophomore Academic Excellence Award and Albert K. Ackoff Award for academic achievement as a junior. He is also president of the Engineers Without Borders student chapter.  Learn more.

Anushika Athauda, an assistant professor of instruction in mechanical engineering, will teach Engineering Mechanics II: Dynamics and co-teach Engineering Computation and a new lab course, Fundamentals of Instrumentation and Measurements.

Tong (Tony) Geng, a tenure-track assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, will pursue new computer systems and architecture for emerging artificial intelligence methods through algorithm-architecture codesign.

Hangfeng He, a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science with a joint appointment in the Goergen Institute for Data Science, aims to create intelligent agents to assist humans, so that people and computers can communicate better.

Anson Kahng, a tenure-track assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Goergen Institute for Data Science, examines theoretical problems in computational social choice, such as leveraging tools from computer science in order to achieve fairness, representation, and efficiency.

Christopher Kanan, an associate professor of computer science and expert on artificial intelligence, aims to develop machine learning that can mimic the human brain in its ability to continually acquire, fine-tune, and transfer knowledge and skills.

Andrew Read-McFarland, an assistant professor of instruction in computer science, will teach Introduction to Programming, which he designed for nonmajors or students with less extensive backgrounds in math and science. He will also teach Introduction to Web Development.

Marisol Herrera Perez, a tenure-track assistant professor in biomedical engineering, specializes in generating tissue models and genetic tools to understand how cells communicate and organize to create multicellular structures.

Sobhit Singh, a tenure-track assistant professor of mechanical engineering, uses the laws of quantum mechanics and advanced high-performance supercomputers to create quantum materials for applications in data storage, quantum computing, energy harvesting and energy storage, and sensors.

Ajay Anand, deputy director and associate professor at the Goergen Institute for Data Science, received the University’s 2022 Goergen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Julie Bentley ’90 ‘92MS ’96 PhD, an instructional track professor at The Institute of Optics, received the 2022 Edmund A. Hajim Outstanding Faculty Award.

Carla Boff, lead administrator in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, received the 2022 Edmund A. Hajim Outstanding Staff Award.

Laurel Carney, the Marylou Ingram Professor of Biomedical Engineering, received the 2022 Hajim School Lifetime Achievement Award.

Brian McIntyre, director of operations at the University’s Integrated Nanosystems Center (URnano) and lecturer at The Institute of Optics, received the University’s 2022 Witmer Award for Distinguished Service.

Chris Muir, professor of instruction in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the University’s 2022 Goergen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Christine Pratt, senior technical associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the Hajim School’s 2022 Dottie Welch Student Enrichment Award.

Stephen Wu, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the University’s 2022 G. Graydon Curtis ’58 and Jane W. Curtis Award for Nontenured Faculty Teaching Excellence.

Learn more about other awards received this year by Hajim School faculty, students, and alumni.

Jim Alkins, a senior laboratory engineer and Fabrication Shop manager, is not one to draw attention to his achievements. However, they do not go unnoticed.

Alkins has mentored hundreds of students, at all skill levels, in the use of machine tools. And not just in the classes he teaches. Numerous student teams depend on him for guidance to get their projects to work.

Many of the incoming first generation, low income, and minority students who take his workshop as part of the University’s Early Connection Opportunity program credit Alkins for giving them the confidence to fully engage in their engineering studies.

And students in the Department of Mechanical Engineering routinely invite Alkins to their annual Faculty Roast. A student appreciation for Alkins is always part of the ceremony.

“He is very patient with the students, sometimes unbelievably so,” says Chris Muir, professor of mechanical engineering. “It is important to him that they not only learn but gain confidence in themselves and their abilities.” Learn more.