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E-BULLETIN
UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
November 8, 2006
DEAN'S
LETTER
This month, the School celebrates the remarkable accomplishments
of our alumni, students and faculty at our annual UCLA Engineering
Awards Dinner.
I say this often, but I truly believe that as
a public institution, our School has a responsibility to address
the critical engineering issues facing society. We strive to provide
an environment that is open to the discussion of complex ideas
and to build strong connections with our friends and colleagues
in Los Angeles and around the globe.
For me, the awards dinner and other public events
we hold throughout the year epitomize this culture – one
that engenders a sense of partnership, of achievement, and also
of celebration with respect to our many endeavors in research,
education, and service.
Not only are our alums valued members of a network
of more than 25,000 individuals who work and live across the US
and throughout the world, but their combined knowledge, experience,
and creativity provide invaluable contributions to fields as diverse
as medicine, business, education, art, and technology. They are
the knowledge movers of our society – our students take
what they learn here at UCLA Engineering and go out into the world
to share their important skills.
It is through the outstanding work of our alumni,
students, faculty, and staff that the School continues to succeed,
so it is only fitting that we honor them.
I encourage you all to take part in the numerous
opportunities for engagement with the School and its friends throughout
the year. Read the E-Bulletin, attend our many events, find a
way to give back that best suits you. Your involvement and support
are vital to the success of the School's mission.
Sincerely,
Vijay K. Dhir
Dean
FEATURE STORIES
 Today’s
Seawater is Tomorrow’s Drinking Water: UCLA Engineers Develop
Revolutionary Nanotech Water Desalination Membrane
Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and
Applied Science today announced they have developed a new reverse
osmosis (RO) membrane that promises to reduce the cost of seawater
desalination and wastewater reclamation. The new membrane, developed
by civil and environmental engineering assistant professor Eric
Hoek and his research team, uses a uniquely cross-linked matrix
of polymers and engineered nanoparticles designed to draw in water
ions but repel nearly all contaminants. To read more, click
here.
 New
National Institutes of Health Grant to Establish Nanomedicine
Development Center
An interdisciplinary team of scientists from the UCLA Henry Samueli
School of Engineering and Applied Science, the David Geffen School
of Medicine at UCLA, and UC Berkeley's College of Engineering
has secured a prestigious federal grant from the National Institutes
of Health Roadmap for Medical Research initiative aimed at improving
nanomedical research. Their discoveries could enhance methods
of curing diseases like cancer as well as viral infections at
the molecular scale. The nanomedicine grant, with a proposed budget
of $7 million, will support the new NIH Nanomedicine Development
Center for Cell Control, to be led by UCLA Engineering professor
Chih-Ming Ho. To read more, click
here.
 UCLA
Engineering Honors Contributions at Annual Awards Dinner
The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
celebrated the remarkable accomplishments of alumni, students,
and faculty at this year's annual awards dinner, held at the Regent
Beverly Wilshire Hotel ballroom. With more than 400 colleagues
and friends in attendance, awards were presented to 14 individuals,
including University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne Provost Linda
Katehi, honored as Alumnus of the Year. To read more, click
here.
OTHER NEWS
 UCLA
and JPL Form Partnership to Enhance Understanding of Regional
Climate Change and Support Future Space Missions
UCLA and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have formed a
research institute to better understand and predict regional environmental
and climate change and support future space missions. The Joint
Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering will
examine relationships between global climate change and Southern
California weather and climate patterns and the environment. The
effort combines UCLA's strength in climate modeling and remote
sensing and JPL's strength in data collection from satellites.
A number of UCLA Engineering faculty are involved in the new institute.
Among those who played significant roles in forming the joint
UCLA-JPL institute were Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei;
UCLA Engineering Dean Vijay K. Dhir, and Tony Chan, the former
dean of physical sciences now at the National Science Foundation.
Click here
to read more.
UCLA Engineering Joins International Team
to Develop Advanced Networks for Defense
Faculty and students from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering
and Applied Science are part of a multimillion dollar collaborative
research team exploring wireless and sensor networks for defense.
To read more, click
here.
 Engineering
Student Groups to Benefit from New Endowment
Engineering student organizations for generations to come will
benefit from the newly established Richard Gay Endowment Fund
for Student Projects. The fund honors three-time alumnus Richard
Gay (BS ’73, MS ’73, PhD ’76), a tireless supporter
of engineering student organizations at UCLA. Each year, dozens
of UCLA engineering groups receive financial support from the
Alumni Fund for Student Projects. This new fund will provide much-needed
supplementary support for engineering student activities and allow
additional students to gain hands-on engineering experience through
extracurricular activities. To read more, click
here.
Engineering Faculty Win Awards and Honors
Joint civil and environmental engineering professor and vice chair,
and mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Jiun-Shyan
"J.S." Chen has been elected a Fellow of the
International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM) which
has 32 affiliated scientific organizations in the field of Computational
Mechanics in 45 countries. The Fellows of IACM are elected worldwide
biannually. Chen was elected along with eight other researchers
from around the world.
Computer science, medicine, and biomedical engineering
professor Joe DiStefano has been elected by the
board of directors of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES)
as a 2005 BMES Senior Fellow.
Bioengineering professor Warren Grundfest
has been selected as President of the International Brain
Mapping and Intraoperative Surgical Planning Society (IBMISPS).
Civil and environmental engineering professor
Jiann-Wen "Woody" Ju has been appointed
as the editor of the International Journal of Damage Mechanics
(IJDM). The IJDM is referenced by all major citation indices and
scholarly search databases. Established in 1990, and JU has served
as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the IJDM since
its inception.
Chemical and biomolecular engineering professor and vice chair
James Liao has been chosen to receive the 2006
Merck Award in Metabolic Engineering at the Metabolic Engineering
Conference held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The award is given
every other year to recognize an outstanding contributor to the
field of Metabolic Engineering. Previous awardees include Greg
Stephanopoulos of MIT.
Computer science and engineering professor Rafail
Ostrovsky has been awarded a 2006 IBM Faculty Award in
recognition of his achievements.
Electrical engineering assistant professor Mihaela
van der Schaar has been chosen as a 2006 Okawa Foundation
Award recipient for her work on "Proactive Cross-layer Design
for Non-collaborative Multi-User Wireless Multimedia Resource
Management using game-theory." The Okawa Foundation Award
recognizes achievements in telecommunications research. Van
der Schaar was also recently awarded the IEEE Circuits
and Systems Best Paper Award together with her colleagues Beatrice
Pesquet-Popescu and Deepok Srinivas Turaga for the paper, "Complexity
Scalable Motion Compensated Wavelet Video Encoding.”
MEDIA WATCH:
UCLA ENGINEERING NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
Nature (UK)
Tiny
Hand With Tight Grip
Yen-Wen Lu and Chang-Jin Kim from
the University of California in Los Angeles have built a micromechanical
device on a submillimetre scale that imitates the functions of
a hand.
UCLA Today
'Smart'
Campus Building Reports Back To Researchers
The newest building on campus is not the typical brick-and-mortar
structure. True to the scientific mission of its researchers,
the 6,000-square-foot glass-enclosed facility built for UCLA Engineering's
Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) is itself an ongoing
research experiment.
Yahoo! News
Microscopic
Robot Lends Helping 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
microelectromechanical systems scientist Yen-Wen Lu at Rutgers
University and mechanical engineering professor Chang-Jin Kim
at UCLA Engineering.
AZoNano.com (Australia)
Nanotechnology
News: UCLA Awarded Nanomedicine Grant
An interdisciplinary team of scientists from the UCLA Henry Samueli
School of Engineering and Applied Science, the David Geffen School
of Medicine at UCLA and UC Berkeley's College of Engineering has
secured a prestigious federal grant from the National Institutes
of Health Roadmap for Medical Research initiative aimed at improving
nanomedical research. The grant, with a proposed budget of $7
million, will support the new NIH Nanomedicine Development Center
for Cell Control, to be led by UCLA Engineering professor Chih-Ming
Ho.
Fox News
Microscopic
Robot Hand Could Have Wide Application
A microscopic robot hand, made of silicon and plastic balloons,
could help perform surgery and defuse bombs. Designed by microelectromechanical
systems scientist Yen-Wen Lu at Rutgers University and mechanical
engineering professor Chang-Jin Kim at UCLA Engineering, 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.
Engineering News Record
UCLA
Courts Working Engineers with New Online Master's Program
Enrollment is now open for UCLA Engineering's first entirely internet-based
courses of study. Fully accredited and advertised as featuring
the same material and experience as regular students, the School
hopes to provide an option for working engineers to attain an
M.S. in Engineering.
Slashdot.com
World's
Smallest Robotic Hand
The world's smallest robotic hand has been built by Yen-Wen Lu
and Chang-Jin "CJ" Kim at UCLA's Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering Department. The microhand can make a fist that can
grasp objects smaller than a millimeter across.
The Engineer
Tech
News: In Living Memory
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
have developed a digital memory device by incorporating platinum
nanoparticles into the tobacco mosaic virus. They claim that the
result could be used to develop biocompatible electronic equipment.
'We have developed an electronic device, fabricated from the tobacco
mosaic virus conjugated with nanoparticles, which exhibits a unique
memory effect,' said Yang Yang, the group's lead researcher. 'This
device can be operated as an electrically bi-stable memory device
whose conductance states can be controlled by a bias voltage.
The states are non-volatile and can be digitally recognised.'
KTLA 5
Email Privacy and Security [Link unavailable]
How safe is your email? Adjunct professor of computer science
at UCLA Engineering Peter Reiher was interviewed on how easy it
is to delete or retrieve emails and instant messages on a personal
computer, UCLA engineering students also were interviewed.
United Press International (UPI wire)
Plant
Virus Used to Create Memory Device
A team of U.S. scientists at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of
Engineering and Applied Science says it has used a plant virus
to construct a memory device. The device, developed by professor
Yang Yang and colleagues, is based on the tobacco mosaic virus,
which is best known for infecting the leaves of tobacco plants.
The team coated the virus with a layer of platinum nanoparticles,
embedded that in a polymer and sandwiched the resulting nanostructure
between two electrodes. When a voltage was applied, the device
displayed an "on" state that remained stable until the
voltage fell below a certain value, resulting in an "off"
state.
New Scientist
Happy
Snaps From a Virus-Infested Chip
Giving your digital camera a virus may not sound very smart, but
a memory chip that incorporates millions of viruses may just be
the fastest thing around. By coating 30-nanometre-long chunks
of tobacco mosaic virus with platinum nanoparticles, it's possible
to create a transistor with very fast switching speed. Millions
of these transistors could eventually be used in a memory chip
to replace flash memory in mp3 players and digital cameras, for
example. A camera fitted with a virus chip would take a few microseconds
to display an image, compared with the milliseconds taken by existing
devices, says engineering professor Yang Yang of the University
of California, Los Angeles, whose team is working on the virus
chip.
Nanowerk
Novel
Method Simplifies Large-Scale Nanofabrication Process
As scientific interests and engineering applications delve down
to the nanometer scale, there is a strong need to fabricate nanostructures
with good regularity and controllability of their pattern, size,
and shape. Furthermore, the nanostructures are useful in many
applications only if they cover a relatively large sample area
and the manufacturing cost is reasonable. Researchers at UCLA
Engineering have now achieved a breakthrough by developing a simple
but efficient fabrication method to produce well-regulated silicon
nanostructures over a large sample area with excellent control
of their pattern, size, and shape.
UCLA Magazine
The Artful Engineer [Link unavailable]
If you travel from Los Angeles 5,960 miles
north-northwest, you will arrive in the Czech capital city of
Prague where you will find, within the courtyard of Prague Castle,
the cathedral of St. Vitus. There, above the three Gothic arches
of the south entrance known as the Golden Gate, you will see The
Last Judgment, a glorious, 14th-century mosaic of brilliantly
colored glass tesserae, tiny pebbles and gold leaf that is the
largest and most important artwork of its kind north of the Alps.
Until recently, however, it wasn’t so glorious. The reason
it is today is because of the work of a UCLA materials science
and engineering professor named Eric Bescher and his partnership
with the Getty Conservation Institute.
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The E-Bulletin is produced by the Office of External
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