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DEAN'S LETTER
This time of year is one of joy and happiness as well as an important time of transition. On June 18, the School of Engineering will hold its annual commencement exercises in Pauley Pavilion. As I prepare to publicly celebrate this day of recognition and achievement with our terrific students, I feel tremendous pride at how much our School has grown.

The School expects to award approximately 640 undergraduate degrees, along with 360 master’s degrees and 115 Ph.D.s this year. According to U.S. News and World Report, the School already is ranked number two in Ph.D. production per faculty – an impressive feat. An estimated 5,500 guests are expected to attend the School’s commencement-related activities to wish our graduates well. And the School’s alumni network continues to grow in scope and reach with an estimated 23,000-plus members across California, the nation, and the world.

As we take pride in all we have accomplished this year, we are already beginning to look at the year ahead. I’m happy to share with you the wonderful news that electrical engineering professor Eli Yablonovitch has been selected to hold the Northrop Grumman Opto-Electronics Chair in Electrical Engineering and computer science professor Deborah Estrin has been named to the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Networking. A number of our other faculty also have received honors and awards this month and throughout the year for their outstanding work. As you may have read in last month’s E-Bulletin, I’d like to reiterate that our Microelectromechanical Systems or MEMS team has been ranked number two in total publication cites by ISI Essential Science Indicators.

This month, I invite you to read about some other appointments and honors below, and also to take a look at the interesting research being done by materials science and engineering professor Eric Bescher to improve traffic congestion in Southern California and beyond.

As engineers and scientists, we continue to tackle the important challenges that face society, and to educate the next generation of great thinkers. I encourage you all to stay connected to your traditions, to your School, and to your UCLA family – new and old, together we are shaping the future.

Sincerely,

Vijay K. Dhir
Dean

FEATURE STORY
Sensor Technology to Help Ease Traffic Woes
As the warm summer months approach, motorists everywhere will brace themselves for a seasonal rite of passage: road construction. Repairing busy stretches of tarmac is particularly complicated in congested urban areas – but if an innovative UCLA researcher named Eric Bescher has his way, the length of closures due to road repairs could soon potentially be reduced by at least 20 percent, saving drivers and road construction crews time and a significant amount of money as well as countless problems. To read more, click here.

OTHER NEWS
Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration Awarded $2 Million From NIH
The Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration (CMISE) has been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop an automated, chip-based metabolic analysis tool. UCLA chemical engineering professor James Liao, along with a team of researchers, will use the NIH Roadmap grant to develop a practical tool to aid in more easily extracting and measuring the metabolites, the substance produced by the metabolism, in cells. The goal of Liao’s work is to find a general technical platform that will enable health professionals to study the metabolic pathways of cells in a shorter amount of time, in a more efficient manner and without a lot of complex machinery. To read more, click here.

Dean Announces New Chairs
Dean Vijay K. Dhir has announced that electrical engineering Professor Eli Yablonovitch has been chosen to hold the Northrop Grumman Opto-Electronics Chair in Electrical Engineering, and computer science Professor Deborah Estrin will hold the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Networking. To read more, click here.

SINAM Launches Pilot Educational Program
SINAM (Center for Scalable and Integrated Nanomanufacturing) will be holding a ceremony this month to celebrate the initiation of a collaborative educational pilot program between SINAM and community college LA TradeTech. Faculty at the two schools will collaborate to offer a course in nanotechnology to the LA TradeTech students taught at both TradeTech and UCLA. The goal behind the program is to increase the nanotechnology workforce. Given the demographics of the US, and California in particular, it is critical that communities that are currently underrepresented in engineering are attracted into this field, and community colleges typically boast a higher minority population. By working with community colleges, SINAM can increase the transfer of underrepresented minorities into four-year institutions. If this pilot program is successful, UCLA will make the course materials available to instructors at other community colleges as well. For more information, contact Adrienne Lavine at lavine@seas.ucla.edu.

Engineering Faculty Win Honors, Awards
A number of engineering faculty have garnered awards and honors this month. Among them, Warren Grundfest, professor of bioengineering and electrical engineering, has received an appointment through the Independent Physician Associate program to serve as a Bioengineering Consultant and Advisor to the Director of TATRC – the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, located in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Grundfest will assist the Army in identifying biomedical technologies for healthcare. To read more about Grundfest, click here.

Electrical engineering Chair Yahya Rahmat-Samii been elected to serve as Vice Chair/Chair-Elect for the United States National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science. Rahmat-Samii will hold the post for three years. To read more about Rahmat-Samii, click here.

Chemical engineering professor Yoram Cohen has been elected to the Board of Directors of the North American Membrane Society (NAMS), for a three-year term beginning this month. Cohen is a long time active NAMS member. To read more about Cohen, click here.

Professor Oddvar Bendiksen, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has won the Kenneth Harris James Prize for his paper "Modern Developments in Computational Aeroelasticity." The prize was presented to Bendiksen by the Aerospace Industries Divisional Board of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, UK. To read more about Bendiksen, click here.

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Lecturer Shahram Sharafat has been selected as one of two recipients of the UCLA Faculty/Staff Partnership Award this year. The award honors faculty who show a commitment to actively develop and encourage collaborations between faculty and staff. Visit the MAE homepage by clicking here.

Computer Science professor David Smallberg has been chosen Professor of the Year by the Engineering Society of the University of California. To visit the ESUC page, click here.

SOS Project Receives Best Demonstration Award at ACM/IEEE International Symposium
A research demonstration on SOS, a new operating system for sensor networks with dynamic module reconfiguration capabilities, was declared co-winner of the Best Demonstration Award at the ACM/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks. The demonstration was presented by graduate students Simon Han, Ram Kumar and Roy Shea from the UCLA Networked and Embedded Systems Laboratory, which is associated with the Electrical Engineering Department and the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. More details on SOS, including downloadable source code and detailed technical documentation, are available at the SOS project website http://nesl.ee.ucla.edu/projects/sos.

MEDIA WATCH: UCLA ENGINEERING IN THE NEWS
ABC News, Science Central
Micro Muscle-Bots
Starting with the upcoming launch of space shuttle Discovery, our sights are set on traveling further into space than ever before. As this Science Central News video reports, UCLA scientists have developed incredibly tiny, self-assembling machines that could one day help keep spacecraft on course during extended missions.

The Daily Bruin
Booting up computer smarts
Computers are permanent fixtures in the niches – cubicles, dorm rooms – of everyday life. Social networks, workplace operations, even individual identities have gone to the wires. But few of the computer-dependent even understand what makes the hardware tick or the mouse click. Students at Dorsey High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District had the opportunity to learn just that through an after-school program coordinated by the UCLA chapter of Engineers Without Borders.

The Daily Bruin
Student engineers develop program for online class discussions
Students wishing to avoid crammed office hour sessions and having to scour Powell to find a room for their study group to meet will soon have a convenient alternative. A small group of students in UCLA's chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery are developing CourseChat, an instant messaging service to be incorporated in the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science's course Web site system in fall quarter 2005.

RFID Journal
Group Studies RFID to Stop Digital Piracy
Professor Rajit Gadh and his team at UCLA are working on a new RFID application that would provide consumers a means of watching DVDs of movies as soon as they hit the theaters. It could also be used to address one of Hollywood's biggest concerns: piracy of digital content.

The Daily Bruin
Innovative Instruction
Electrical engineering professor William Kaiser has developed a free software program that connects students to their professors via laptops equipped with wireless Internet connections. Using the software, students solve problems and are also able to ask the professor questions, while the professor is able to monitor students' keystrokes in real time.

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Read more UCLA Engineering news at http://www.engineer.ucla.edu.

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