UCLA Engineering: UCLA Engineer Fall 2004

2003-04 Best Paper Awards

Chemical engineering students Dong Ni, Yiming Lou, Lin Sha, and Sandy Lao and associate professors Panagiotis D. Christofides and Jane P. Chang received the 2003 O. Hugo Schuck Best (Application) Paper Award, one of the most prestigious and competitive Best Paper awards in the field of automatic control, for “A Method for Real-Time Control of Thin Film Composition Using OES and XPS.”

Of the ten Gold Graduate Student Awards made in April 2004 at the Materials Research Society meeting, two of the winners - Adamos Dalis and Ragesh Puthenkovilakam - were from UCLA, the only institution with more than one honoree. Dalis works with chemical engineering professor Sheldon Friedlander and Puthenkovilakam works with chemical engineering associate professor Jane Chang.

Materials science professor Mark Goorsky’s student Calin Miclaus won the best student paper/presentation award at the U.S. Workshop on the Physics and Chemistry of II-VI Materials for “Wafer Bonding of (211) Cd0.96Zn0.04Te on (001) Silicon.”

Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Ann Karagozian’s student Sevan Megerian won first place at the AIAA Region VI Student Conference (graduate division) for “Evolution of Shear Layer Instabilities in the Transverse Jet” in April 2004.

The International Society of Optical Engineering awarded the best paper award of 2003-04 to mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Ajit Mal, Frank Shih and Sauvik Banerjee for “Acoustic Emission Waveforms in Composite Laminates under Low-velocity Impact.” (Mal also won this award in 2002-03.) Mal also received a 2003 NDE Best Paper award for “Health Monitoring of Composite Structures Subject to Impact Damage.”

Jahoon Kim and electrical engineering professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii won the best paper award at the 2003 Antenna Measurements Techniques Association meeting held in November 2003 for “Implanted Antennas Inside a Human Body: Characterization and Performance Evaluation.”

Dr. Paolo Favaro, a postdoctoral researcher in the UCLA Vision Laboratory, and computer science associate professor Stefano Soatto won the Outstanding Poster Award at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2004.

Daniel Cremers, a computer science postdoctoral researcher in associate professor Stefano Soatto’s Vision Lab, received the Best Paper of the Year 2003 from the Pattern Recognition Society for “Shape Statistics in Kernel Space for Variational Image Segmentation,” Cremers, Kohlberger, Schnoerr.

Civil and environmental engineering professor and chair William Yeh’s student Brent Thomas received an Outstanding Student Paper Award from the Hydrology Section of the American Geophysical Union at the AGU fall meeting in December 2003 for “Identification of Complex Reactive Transport Processes in Groundwater Modeling.”