FACULTY NEWS
The UW Board of Regents awarded
named professorships to three Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty.
These privately endowed awards are granted to faculty in recognition
of achievement and support of research goals.
Lynn H. Matthias Professor in Engineering II:
Robert
H. Blick—Blick oversees the Laboratory for Molecular
Scale Engineering, which focuses on developing tools and methods for
nanotechnology. He is particularly interested in micro- and nanoscale
electro-mechanical structures, information processing in quantum and
biofunctionalized circuits, and single electron, single spin circuits
and devices.
Lynn H. Matthias Professor
in Engineering I: Franco
Cerrina—Holder of 11 patents, Cerrina also directs the UW-Madison
Center for NanoTechnology (CNTech). His current research focuses on
manufacturing and biological problems, especially in nano- and biotechnology,
including techniques for semiconductor nanofabrication.
McFarland-Bascom Professor in Engineering: Robert
D. Nowak—Nowak has wide research interests, including statistical
signal and image processing, wavelets and multiscale analysis, and machine
learning, but his current focus is developing theory and protocol for
wireless sensor networks. He directs the information sciences laboratory
and is a faculty member of the communications and signal processing
group.
With colleagues at the University of Minnesota and
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Associate Professor Susan
Hagness is developing a three-dimensional sensing system that leverages
recent advances in electromagnetic imaging and sensing for materials,
environmental, and civil infrastructure research. Under a three-year
$381,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the team will create
a system enabling the tracking of localized material movement by recording
displacement and rotation of passive radar targets (retroreflectors)
within materials of interest.
The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year,
$300,000 grant to a team of UW-Madison researchers to develop a system
to aid clinical diagnosis of botulism. Led by Assistant Professor Hongrui
Jiang, Chemical and Biological Engineering John T. and Magdalen
L. Sobota Professor Nicholas L. Abbott, Biomedical Engineering Professor
David J. Beebe and Food Microbiology and Toxicology Professor Eric A.
Johnson will interface membranes susceptible to botulism with liquid
crystals and integrate them into a microfluidic sensing system to detect
very low levels of botulinum neurotoxins. They also will develop a coherent
interdisciplinary program integrating high quality teaching and outreach
activities with research.
Thanks to technology invented by Professor Emeritus
Robert
Lasseter, large electricity customers across the country could soon
enhance their power quality while lowering their energy cost. The Consortium
for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions (CERTS) and American Electric
Power, one of America’s largest electricity producers, recently
signed a memorandum of understanding to work cooperatively on research,
development and demonstration of Lasseter’s microgrid concept,
which allows a business to switch between generating its own power and
pulling power from the utility’s vast network of power lines known
as “the grid.”
Assistant Professor Zhenqiang
(Jack) Ma and Materials Science & Engineering Professor Max
G. Lagally have been awarded a three-year $780,000 grant from Air Force
Office of Scientific Research (Nano Initiative) to investigate “Multispectral
Photodetector Arrays and Nanophotonics using Si/Ge Nanomembranes and
Nanomembrane Stacks.” The work by Ma and Lagally will focus on
the materials science and processing of Si- and Ge-based nanomembranes
(SiNMs and GeNMs) and on nanomembrane photonic applications—in
particular multispectral imaging arrays and photonic crystals.
A study published recently by postdoctoral researcher
Hua Qin in the all-electronic
New Journal of Physics, “Formation of microtubes from strained
SiGe/Si heterostructures,” was in the top ten percent of articles
downloaded from the Institute of Physics for the last quarter of 2005.
The other authors of the study are N. Shaji, N.E. Merrill, H.S. Kim,
and R.C. Toonen of the Laboratory of Molecular-scale Engineering in
ECE; M.M. Roberts and Associate Scientist Don Savage of Materials Science
and Engineering; Erwin W. Mueller Professor and Bascom Professor of
Surface Science Max Lagally; and G. Celler of SOITEC USA.
The National Institutes of Health awarded a grant
of $1.4 million for the four-year project, “Development of a multi-probe
radiofrequency ablation,” a method to locally destroy cancer cells
in the liver, kidney, bone and lung. Professor Dan
van der Weide is working on the project as part of a team led by
Radiology Professor Fred Lee Jr.
IN THE NEWS
A June 1 story, “Utility researching microgrid
interconnections,” in Consulting-Specifying
Engineer mentioned control technology
developed by Professor Emeritus Robert
Lasseter. Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric
Power installed the technology, which enables peer-to-peer and
plug-and-play connections for microgrid components, at a research
facility this summer. Scientists at AEP and the Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions
are investigating microgrids as an approach for minimizing the
effect of system-wide outages.
In a September 24 article about the
security of wireless networks, the Janesville
Gazette quoted Assistant Professor
Seapahn
Megerian. Megerian explained that encrypted sites, such
as retailers or banks, are difficult to hack because the information
will not make sense unless the hacker can break the encryption.
“But there are a number of other ways a malicious wardriver
can get access to your information or try to figure out certain
things about you,” he said.
A September 29 story about the applications
of nanotechnology in the Chippewa
Valley Leader-Telegram cited Lynn
H. Matthias Professor and Director of the UW-Madison Center
for Nanotechnology Franco
Cerrina. One example involved chips for testing DNA and
how it is damaged by diseases like cancer. “These chips
can be used to see how well your DNA is working,” Cerrina
said.
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