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DEAN'S LETTER

A diverse and gifted faculty is essential for providing students with world-class instruction and research opportunities. To maintain a superior faculty for our students at the School of Engineering, we are taking several steps.

We have recently added 14 outstanding young researchers to our faculty, most of whom will begin their appointments in the fall or winter quarter. Each of them, through their exceptional skill and experience, brings added strength to our School, and I am very pleased to welcome them into our community.

In addition, we are committed to multidisciplinary research. We recognize that scientific innovation comes not from one field of study, but from the fusion of engineering, life sciences, medicine, and information studies. Each of our departments strives to capture this spirit of interdisciplinary research. For example, the department of Materials Science and Engineering has sought out and enlisted seven professors from the departments of chemistry, mathematics and mechanical and aerospace engineering to become joint appointment faculty. These appointments were approved in July.

Our strategy for building a multidisciplinary faculty includes a targeted use of endowed and term chairs. These chairs give the School the means to compete successfully with other universities to recruit, retain, and support the work of the world's top academicians. Such endowments help to strengthen the overall quality of the School's teaching and research programs by attracting diverse, gifted faculty who in turn attract the brightest and most promising students. While endowed chairs provide support to a faculty member for an indefinite period, term chairs offer resources for a set period, usually five years.

The School currently has 14 endowed and term chairs. Over the next several years, we intend to establish 10 new endowed chairs for senior faculty, and 20 term chairs to support the career development of promising younger faculty.

By focusing our efforts on aggressively recruiting and retaining top teachers and researchers we will meet our mission to be a leader in engineering research and instruction for many years to come.

Sincerely,

Vijay K. Dhir
Dean

FEATURE STORIES

Nano-engineered Surfaces: It's No Drag
Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor C.J. Kim has designed and manufactured a surface with significantly less drag for liquid flows. In fact, his team has reduced the amount of pressure needed to move liquids through channels by 30 to 40 percent. In a field where even a five percent reduction is significant, the breakthrough will enable entirely new applications in the field of microfluidics and elsewhere.
http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/magazine/nanoengineered.html

Fourteen Exceptional New Faculty Join Engineering School
The School of Engineering has recently added some impressive depth to its roster with a group of talented young men and women, who will join five of the School's seven departments. They bring a wide range of research and teaching experience in a number of emerging fields, including embedded systems, nanofabrication and biomechanics. Check out the new recruits!
http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/magazine/facultyf03.html

Ushering in the Next Generation of the Internet: Year One
For the past year, researchers at UCLA's Center for Embedded Networked Sensing have been applying the revolutionary technology of embedded systems to critical scientific and social applications. Now they're ready to tell us what they've discovered so far. The Center's first research review, set for October 10, includes keynote speaker David L. Tennenhouse, Vice President in the Corporate Technology Group and Director of Research for Intel Corporation.
http://www.cens.ucla.edu/Events/ResearchReview.htm

Nobody Said Penguins Could Fly
This month, five members of a UCLA engineering sorority will launch one of their own from the Santa Monica Pier into the salty waters of the Pacific Ocean. But it isn't some bizarre hazing ritual; the women are taking part in Flugtag, a popular contest where teams compete to build eye-catching human-powered flying machines and then launch them into nearby bodies of water.
http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/stories/2003/flugtag.htm

Materials Science Professor Receives Lectureship Award
Professor King-Ning Tu, chair of the materials science and engineering department, has received the 2004 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) Lectureship Award. He will spend a week at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Republic of China, in July 2004 to present a series of lectures. Tu is an authority on wafer-based and flux-driven materials science and he is the director of the Electronic This Film Lab. Learn more about Tu's work at http://www.seas.ucla.edu/eThinFilm/.

MEDIA WATCH: UCLA ENGINEERING IN THE NEWS

Privacy Advocates Call for RFID Regulation
Electrical engineering professor Gregory Pottie joined other technology and consumer privacy experts in testifying at a California Senate hearing in August regarding an emerging area of technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID).
http://news.com.com/2100-1020-5065388.html

Computer Scientist Deborah Estrin Makes Brilliant 10 List
Popular Science magazine has named Deborah Estrin, professor of computer science and director of UCLA's Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, to its list of researchers whose work is admired by colleagues and increasingly noticed by the public. According to the magazine, the scientists on their Brilliant List are absolutely absorbed in their work, "in the grip of an obsessive inquiry in the nature of the world - brainy, resourceful, gutsy - and not afraid to talk about it."
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,472942,00.html

Rocketdyne Study Leaves Questions
An article in the Los Angeles Times cites the results of a study headed by Yoram Cohen, professor of chemical engineering, regarding whether residents living near the Santa Susana Field Laboratory have been exposed to contaminants. The Ventura County Star and Los Angeles Daily News also reported this story. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-rocketdyne21aug21,1,2226024.story

Army of Extreme Thinkers
Computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock comments in a profile on the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, originally written for the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wxxi/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=533827

AINS Ain't Toy Airplanes
Professor Kleinrock was also quoted in a Tucson Citizen article that described UCLA's participation in a demonstration of self-controlled aerial vehicles at a Tucson airfield. The demonstration was part of a gathering of researchers specializing in autonomous intelligent networks and systems (AINS).
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=local&story_id=082103c1_drones

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