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E-BULLETIN
UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
February 14, 2007
DEAN'S
LETTER
Our willingness to partner with researchers across the campus
has long been a hallmark of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering
and Applied Science. From our early collaborations with medicine
on artificial limbs and biotechnology, to more recent partnerships
with education, the arts and the School of Theater, Film and Television,
advances in engineering increasingly are based on teamwork by
researchers with a variety of expertise.
This significant shift is being driven by the
need to address progressively more complex problems that cut across
traditional disciplines, and the capacity of new technologies
to not only transform existing fields, but to generate new ones.
In this month’s E-Bulletin, you will read
about a UCLA engineer collaborating with a UCLA neuroscientist
to develop a new medical monitoring device that could improve
the lives of people who suffer from neuromotor injuries. It is
this kind of joint work that personifies a new approach to our
profession.
Many of the school’s faculty are involved
in critical research that stretches into other disciplines across
campus, across the country, and around the world. We are truly
a school on the move – one that is always striving to meet
its mission of education and research, one that is forging strong
links with the community, raising public awareness of the school’s
important research, and making our school an accessible and inviting
place with the good work we accomplish.
Our ongoing efforts to look together at society’s
challenges with a fresh perspective, to imagine novel answers,
and to reach out in a variety of important ways are representative
of our continuing commitment to teaching, research, professional
service, and community – and also what continues to make
us one of the top engineering schools in the country.
Sincerely,
Vijay K. Dhir
Dean
FEATURE
STORIES
 New
Research Offers Baby Boomers Round-the-Clock Health Care –
with a Cyber Twist
A new medical monitoring device named “CustoMed,”
developed by UCLA Engineering faculty Majid Sarrafzedah in conjunction
with noted UCLA neuroscientist Reggie Edgerton, promises patients
with neuromotor injuries the ease and affordability of substantially
shortening their therapy and recovery time, and being able to
complete the therapy at home while still under the watchful supervision
of their doctor. To read more, click
here.
OTHER NEWS
 Engineering
Earthquake Safety for Hospitals
Civil and environmental professor John Wallace and his research
group are developing and implementing innovative engineering approaches
to the seismic rehabilitation of hospitals. The project team is
working closely with hospital owners and the California Office
of Statewide Health Planning and Development to develop a viable
strategy for reducing costs and the uncertainty associated with
predicting the performance of buildings in an earthquake. Click
here to read more.
UCLA Electrical Engineering Department
to Hold Research Review
The UCLA Electrical Engineering Department will hold its 2007
Annual Research Review on Friday, February 16. The review is a
forum in which graduate students present their latest research
results and answer questions from industrial and government sponsors.
Registration is free but seats are limited. Click
here to find out more.
Engineering Annual Fund Update
Thank you to all of our alumni and friends who have made pledges
to the Engineering Annual Fund through our current call campaign.
To date, our total pledged is near $60K! Click
here to read more.
Engineering Faculty Win Awards and Honors
A paper published by materials science and engineering professor
Bruce Dunn and chemistry professor Jeff
Zink, entitled "Continuous Formation Of Supported
Cubic And Hexagonal Mesoporous Films By Sol Gel Dip-Coating,"
is listed among the top 20-most cited papers in materials science
over the past decade. The paper was ranked at 17 with more than
500 citations. One of the paper collaborators was Yunfeng
Lu, who has recently joined UCLA as a chemical engineering
professor. An additional collaborator on the work, Rahul Ganguli,
is now a graduate student in Dunn's group.
Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor
Rajit Gadh has recently joined the Pan Indian
Institute of Technology Academic Research Council. Established
in 1950, IIT's have become synonymous with excellence in technology
and engineering education in India.
Civil and environmental engineering professor
Jiann-Wen "Woody" Ju has been elected
to receive the USACM Fellow Award from the U.S. Association for
Computational Mechanics.
Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor
Ann Karagozian is one of nine invited alumni
speakers for the upcoming Caltech Mechanical Engineering Centennial
Celebration, to take place in March. Karagozian will talk about
"Fundamental Research and the Future of Energy and Propulsion
Systems." She also recently gave the I.T. Distinguished Seminar
in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of
Minnesota, and an invited lecture in the Pratt & Whitney/Rocketdyne
Knowledge Management Distinguished Seminar Series.
Electrical engineering professor Yahya
Rahmat-Samii recently published a paper entitled "A
Novel Lightweight Dual-Frequency Dual-Polarized Sixteen Element
Stacked Patch Microstrip Array Antenna for Soil-Moisture and Sea-Surface
Salinity Missions" in the December 2006 issue of IEEE Antennas
and Propagation Magazine.
Electrical engineering assistant professor Mihaela
Van der Schaar received a prestigious "Most Cited
Paper Award" from the European Association for Signal Processing's
Journal Signal Processing: Image Communication, for the paper
"In-band Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering." Signal
Processing: Image Communication, an international journal for
the development of the theory and practice of image communication.
MEDIA
WATCH: UCLA ENGINEERING NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
USA Today
Wireless
Sensors Extend Reach of Internet into the Real World
To the untrained eye, the sleek, airy building constructed
atop a decommissioned nuclear reactor at the University of California
at Los Angeles could pass for high-tech office space. A closer
inspection of the glass-and-steel facade reveals dozens of miniature,
low-resolution cameras and sensors. They're wirelessly linked
to computers throughout the 6,000-square-foot space, keeping tabs
on traffic flow in public areas and monitoring temperature, humidity
and acoustics. "I see this as the next wave of extending
the Internet into the physical world," said computer scientist
Deborah Estrin, who heads the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing,
a UCLA-Engineering based consortium of six schools.
The New York Times
From
Tech Workers to Nurses, an Employee's Market
For college graduates in general, the job outlook is also good.
But that doesn't mean finding a job is effortless. Jonathan G.
Sugar, who later this year will be graduating from a master's
program in mechanical engineering at UCLA Henry Samueli School
of Engineering and Applied Science, said that pounding the pavement
or, perhaps more aptly in 2007, hitting the job boards, was still
crucial for graduating college students.
The Los Angeles Times - Special Education
Supplement [Link unavailable]
Computing the Secrets of Life
Bioinformatics, a comparatively new field that blends the study
of biology with the use of computers to catalogue and store the
wealth of information uncovered, has been responsible for breakthroughs
in combating genetically-based diseases. At UCLA, graduate study
in bioinformatics consists of two tracks: biology and computation.
Chemical and biomolecular engineering professor James Liao from
the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
explains that students pursuing this discipline are interested
in both of its biological and computational components.
MIT Technology Review
A Tiny
Robotic Hand
A microscopic robot hand, made of silicon and plastic balloons,
could help perform surgery and defuse bombs. The "microhand"
is so tiny that when clenched into a fist it measures a little
over one millimeter across, or roughly as thick as a dime. It's
made using silicon finger bones and balloons for joints that inflate
and deflate to flex the fingers. The robot hand was designed by
mechanical engineering professor Chang-Jin Kim at UCLA Engineering.
The New York Times
Another
Perspective, or Jihad TV?
After losing his son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl,
to an act of terrorism in early 2002, UCLA Engineering professor
Judea Pearl has concerns about the impact of extremist propagandizing
of terrorist agenda by Al Jazeera news network on Muslim youth.
Pearl warns that the ideologies of radical leaders is gaining
wider acceptance among Muslim youths in the west.
SciFiTech
Tiny
Robot Hand to Make Subtle Surgery Easier
A microscopic robot hand, made of silicon and plastic balloons,
could help perform surgery and defuse bombs. The "microhand"
is so tiny that when clenched into a fist it measures a little
over one millimeter across, or roughly as thick as a dime. It's
made using silicon finger bones and balloons for joints that inflate
and deflate to flex the fingers. The robot hand was designed by
mechanical engineering professor Chang-Jin Kim at UCLA Engineering.
---
The E-Bulletin is produced by the Office of External
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Science, and distributed on the second Wednesday of each month.
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