Faculty Awards

Summer 2012

Margarita Herrera-Alonso, an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received an NSF CAREER award to support her work developing a better understanding of the structure and property relationships of new polymers inspired by nature. Her research will enable these building blocks to be used in the context of other bioinspired materials applications, such as drug carrier design.

Seth Guikema, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, received a CAREER award to support his efforts to provide an approach for assessing the economic, environmental, and social sustainability and reliability of interdependent power and water systems, particularly in areas susceptible to natural hazards, such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

Mounya Elhilali, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award for her project Active Listening: Closing the Loop Between Sensation, Perception and Behavior-research poised to tackle one of the major unsolved problems in neuroscience: how our brains are able to recognize sounds.

Mark Foster, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. Foster’s award will support research, focused on developing practical photonic techniques for the manipulation of signals on the fastest of time scales, from hundreds of picoseconds to a few femtoseconds

Presto! Mutated Gene Libraries

When medical researchers are designing new biological therapies to treat diseases such as cancer, they often have to test hundreds of thousands of DNA mutations in a gene to pick a single winning combination that produces a desired protein to fight an ailment. The problem? These gene libraries, which can include a million different mutations…

Restoring Health and Alleviating Pain

Neilesh Patel ’03 will never forget the day he cooked and served spaghetti at a homeless shelter at age 8, or the smile on the face of one of the menhe served. “That feeling really sparked my interest in public service,” says Patel, who majored in biomedical engineering at the Whiting School with a concentration…

Faculty Awards

David Gracias, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, was named the inaugural Russell Croft Faculty Scholar. This award recognizes a faculty member who demonstrates exceptional achievement and promise in his or her area of expertise. Gracias was recognized for his groundbreaking work in the fields of micro- and nanoengineering, and self-assembly….