New Header Image
Feb. 5, 2014                                                                                                Vol. 16, No. 12
In This Issue

Engineering news

An aggressive new strategy for communicating the distinctive qualities of the College of Engineering to prospective students, faculty and alumni has a rallying cry: "Break the rules."  

 


Imagine holding music in your hands. That's what you can do with the Aura, a new electronic musical instrument conceived by Cornell engineering students.
Join Our Mailing List
Seed grants for sustainability research available

The Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future has issued its seventh  RFP for innovative, multidisciplinary research through its Academic Venture Fund. Letters of Intent may be submitted online and are due February 24. The fund is designed to stimulate new, original, multidisciplinary research at Cornell in sustainability science, emphasizing work having the potential to involve external partners such as industry, government, foundations, and other non-governmental organizations. Each year, the center seeks proposals from Cornell faculty across all colleges and schools and encompassing all disciplines contributing to sustainability.  

Engineering Library has new resources

The Engineering Library has two new electronic resources.

Engineering Case Studies by Alexander Street Press Includes more than 250 hours of streaming video and text covering 50 well-known case studies of engineering failures and successes. From nuclear disasters to oil spills, air and space disasters, structural collapses, and explosions, Engineering Case Studies Online includes documentaries, accident reports, experiments, visualizations, case studies, lectures, and interviews from leading engineering institutions around the world. Full-text access has been purchased for more than 470 titles in the MIT/IEEE eBooks collection, covering 1943 to the present. Topics covered include computer science, artificial intelligence, information technology, electrical engineering, and more. Questions can be directed to Jill Powell, or [email protected].

Energy Institute launches web site

The Cornell Energy Institute has  launched a new web site. The institute is Cornell Engineering's lead organization for technology-based research and education in energy. The Energy Institute is positioned to tackle the planet's most pressing and intractable challenges in the area of clean and sustainable energy technology discovery and development. While the Institute is based within the College of Engineering, collaborations across Cornell with faculty from a wide variety of social, physical, and natural sciences are essential to their mission.
Recyclemania 2014 starts this week

This week is the first week of Recyclemania. This nationwide competition for reducing waste, recycling, and composting involves hundreds of colleges. Think Big, Live Green campaign events will be hosted in the college over the next two months to highlight the competition.
Staffing update

Donald Friedricksen has joined the College of Engineering/Computing and Information Science (COE/CIS) Information Technology Service Group (ITSG) as an applications programmer. As part the ITSG team, he will provide administrative, faculty, and research IT assistance. He will also provide enterprise application and reporting services. Friedricksen was previously a database administrator III at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) where he was the Salesforce.com administrator, as well as the Activity Insight technical administrator for all of Cornell University. He holds a Bachelor of Science in physics from Syracuse University. His office will be in Carpenter Hall.

 

Adam Zawislak has joined the ITSG from a similar support role in Student and Academic Services. He is partnering with Hal Coghill to transition into the Carpenter Hall ITSG embedded team member role. Hal will be redeployed in support of other COE/CIS/NYC tech community members. IT requests should be emailed to [email protected] which will create a support "ticket" in the IT issue tracking system.

 

Anthony Escobar, a major gifts officer with Cornell Alumni Affairs and Development, will be joining the development team at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. In his new position as director of development, he will be responsible for raising support from patients by working with physicians, assigned board members, and other stakeholders. During his three years with AAD, Escobar has been a member of the Northeast Corridor Program team, focusing on major gifts fundraising in support for the College of Engineering and working closely with the AAD team there. His last day will be February 7.   

Awards and honors
 

Matt DeLisa, the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering, has been elected by peers to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows. It comprises the most accomplished and distinguished leaders in the fields of medical and biological engineering in academia, industry, and government. They have distinguished themselves through their contributions in research, industrial practice, and/or education. Fellows are nominated each year by their peers and represent the top two percent of the medical and biological engineering community. DeLisa's induction will be held at the National Academy of Sciences during AIMBE�s Annual Meeting on March 24.

 

The International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center has named minor planet No. 15358 after the late  Paul Kintner, professor of electrical and computer engineering, who served as head of the Cornell Global Positioning Systems Laboratory. Kintner died in 2010. The renaming of the planet now known as "Kintner," originally designated 1995 FM(8), was announced in the Jan. 16 Minor Planets Circular. The citation reads: "Paul Kintner ... made pioneering rocket measurements of auroral electric fields and conducted research on space weather and its effects on GPS signals. He promoted international cooperation in space weather research and operations."

  

Mark L. Psiaki, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was promoted to Fellow of the Institute of Navigation for contributions to GNSS signal processing, software receivers, ionospheric scintillation modeling, and for satellite orbit and attitude determination. Psiaki also recently received the institute's 2013 Tycho Brahe award for exceptional contributions to the theory and practice of spacecraft attitude and orbit determination and to the advancement of GNSS algorithms for satellite navigation.   

 

Yi Wang, professor of biomedical engineering and Faculty Distinguished Professor of Radiology of Cornell University, has been named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow. He is being recognized for contributions to cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) development and quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), which have been adopted in clinical practice and provides a biomarker for many major diseases including stroke and neurodegenerative diseases.

Information Update dates, deadlines, and subscription info
Information Update is published biweekly during the academic year and monthly over the summer and winter break. If you have information to be distributed to the college community, send it to Info Update. Announcements should be limited to about 100 words, perhaps by referencing a website for more information, and can be repeated in one subsequent issue on request.

The next issue will be distributed on Feb. 19; the deadline for submissions is Friday, Feb. 14, at 5 p.m. Information received after the deadline will be published in a future issue if appropriate.
 
Info Update's current issue, archives, and publishing schedule are online.
 Information Update is brought to you by the Office of Engineering Marketing and Communications
[email protected] * www.engineering.cornell.edu/news/updates/