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Friends of School Honored at UCLA Engineering Awards Dinner
Date: November 17, 2003
Contact: Chris Sutton ( chris@ea.ucla.edu )
Phone: 310-206-0540
Nine tremendous contributors to the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science were honored November 7 with awards marking their outstanding achievements and dedication. Honorees included alumni, students and faculty.
Vint Cerf, Alumnus of the Year
The Alumnus of the Year award recognizes an accomplished alumnus who has established
a standard of excellence within the engineering profession.
Vint Cerf (left) and Dean Vijay Dhir.
(Photo by Rich Schmitt.) |
Cerf received his Master's in 1970 and his PhD in 1972 from the UCLA. He is currently senior vice president of technology strategy for MCI, where he is responsible for helping guide the company's development strategies from a technical perspective. Previously, as senior vice president of architecture and technology, he led a team of architects and engineers who designed advanced networking frameworks for business and consumer use. While vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982 to 1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial e-mail service connected to the Internet.
Cerf is widely known, along with UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock, as one of the Fathers of the Internet, and has had an enormous influence on the networking field. In the early 1970s, with Bob Kahn, Cerf designed the universally adapted TCP/IP protocols. While at DARPA, he played a key role in leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet and security technologies. He currently serves as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Vint also was the founder and president of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1995.
Vijay Dhir, dean of the School of Engineering, presented Cerf with the alumnus of the year award.
"Like our other honorees this evening, Vint enjoys the formulation and solution of difficult problems and has displayed a lively sense of curiosity and discovery throughout his career," said Dhir. "A great engineer never stops learning, and Vint is such a man."
Richard Gay, Engineering Alumni Association Service Award
The service award honors a person who has generously given time and talent to
the School or community at large.
Bob Green (left) and Richard Gay.
(Photo by Rich Schmitt.) |
Dr. Richard Gay has many ties to the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering
and Applied Science. He is a three-time alumnus, earning his Bachelor's, Master's,
and PhD from the School in 1973 and 1976, respectively.
He has remained actively involved with the School. He was a member of the Dean's
Council from 1983 to 1998 and, more recently, as member of the Engineering Alumni
Association's Governing Board. He was chair of the Alumni-Student Networking
Committee, and has taken a dynamic role in shaping the Governing Board's mission.
Gay is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Chemical Society, and Sigma Xi. He was a program manager at Rocketdyne, and an active researcher - he holds thirteen patents.
He has championed new ventures in the School, including the Entrepreneurship in Engineering program - a collaborative venture with the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Gay is also tremendously committed to engineering student groups, generously giving them his time, advice and financial assistance. Bob Green, President of the UCLA Engineering Alumni Association, presented Gay with the service award.
"Rich is very approachable, and sets a hard-to-match example for his fellow alums," said Green. "His passion for the student projects stems, in part, from his experiences at UCLA and a strong belief in the value of hands-on engineering experience."
William Van Vorst, Lifetime Achievement Award
The Lifetime Achievement Award honors someone whose contributions to the field of engineering merit special acknowledgment.
Professor William Van Vorst (left) and Dean Vijay Dhir.
(Photo by Rich Schmitt.) |
Professor William Van Vorst has championed the School's mission of education,
research and service for more than 50 years.
As a member of the Chemical Engineering department, Van Vorst has taught many courses in and outside his area of specialty, and has shaped the curriculum over the years. Under his leadership, UCLA was one of the first to offer a basic course in engineering thermodynamics that was relevant to all branches of engineering.
He is also a well-recognized pioneer in using hydrogen for internal combustion engines. His research in the early 1970s led to the successful conversion of several automobiles able to run on hydrogen, a much cleaner-burning source of energy. His colleagues around the world attribute much of the current interest in hydrogen-powered vehicles to his early contributions in the field. In 1998, he co-authored a paper exonerating hydrogen as the cause of the Hindenburg disaster.
Bill is a founding member of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy, and the recipient of the 2002 IAHE Jules Verne Award, honoring his many contributions to the field.
He has also filled several critical administration roles at UCLA during his career, including as a representative to the Board of Admissions, the Graduate Council, the Privilege and Tenure Committee, and the Grievance Committee.
He has also served as an educational ambassador to developing nations. He was the leading UCLA professor in charge of an outreach effort to Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia, later going to the country to help establish a program in Chemical Engineering. The curriculum at the University still reflects his early influence, and many of the graduates have gone on to successful careers. Van Vorst also was involved with programs in the Philippines, Thailand, and Turkey, helping shape their educational programs. Professor Gregory Pottie, associate dean at the School of Engineering, presented Van Vorst with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
"His informed, courteous, and natural diplomacy has helped him resolve difficult issues with his colleagues around the world," said Pottie. "His consistent efforts - in the classroom, the research labs, and in the global community - are truly notable."
Emily Guglielmo and Robert Lobbia, Edward K. Rice Outstanding Undergraduate Student Awards
Associate Dean Stephen Jacobsen (left), Emily Guglielmo and Robert Lobbia.
(Photo by Rich Schmitt.) |
This is the first year the Edward K. Rice Outstanding Student Awards have been
presented. Edward Rice is a long-time supporter of the School, and last year's
recipient of the Engineering Alumni Association Service. The two student award
winners have demonstrated academic excellence and provided outstanding service
to the School or community.
Emily Guglielmo completed her undergraduate studies with a GPA of close to 4.0, while also serving as the Special Olympics Director at UCLA, and vice president of the UCLA chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers and Chi Epsilon. As area director for the Special Olympics, she increased volunteer and athlete retention by more than 20 percent.
In her junior year, she began working with Professor Jonathan Stewart in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department as a research assistant on a soil liquefaction project analyzing ground failure incidents in Taiwan. She first designed and implemented a web site for the project, before beginning to analyze test data. She went on to perform data collection in Taiwan, working with the team's local collaborators.
In his letter of support for her nomination, Professor Stewart wrote, "There are very few students who I would feel comfortable sending to a foreign country to perform important research, and Emily is that rare student."
Guglielmo is continuing her studies at UC Berkeley.
Robert Lobbia completed a double major in aerospace engineering and physics at UCLA. He also led the AIAA hybrid rocket space projects group, visited local schools with other students to engender an interest in science, and completed graduate-level lab work in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department.
Beginning his freshman year, Robert worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Combustion Research Laboratory, headed by Professors Ann Karagozian and Owen Smith. His first project was programming in C to control a small-scale, onboard computer in a NASA flight test experiment, going on to develop software to control droplet combustion in microgravity conditions. Most recently, he developed and tested feedback and feedforward controllers for an actuation system on a project studying acoustically excited, controlled gaseous jet in crossflow.
Professor Karagozian has described Lobbia as "a true scientist, engineer, and scholar all rolled into one."
Lobbia has gone on to graduate school at the University of Michigan.
Jeremy Elson and Arthur Torosyan, Edward K. Rice Outstanding Graduate Student Awards
Recipients of the outstanding graduate student awards are honored for setting
new standards for excellence in research, and making considerable contributions
to their respective fields.
Associate Dean Stephen Jacobsen (left), Jeremy Elson and Arthur Torosyan.
(Photo by Rich Schmitt.) |
Dr. Jeremy Elson's research in the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing has led
to networked-self-organization protocols that ultimately enabled a multihop ad-hoc
network system with an unprecedented combination of rapid assembly and robust
operation on the scale of 100 nodes.
He also has made significant contributions to timing synchronization in wireless sensor networks. Elson's novel insight to use the broadcast nature of wireless links to create a new type of on-demand receiver-receiver approach has already enabled theoretical sensor signal processing researchers in the School to realize their algorithms. His synchronization method is also becoming a key piece of the CENS research infrastructure and that of the larger research community.
Elson's contributions to the field and the School go well beyond his research. He is an emissary, making presentations to small lab groups and at international conferences. He is a popular guest lecturer at both the graduate and undergraduate level and serves as a mentor to other students in the lab.
Dr. Arthur Torosyan has what his advisor, Dr. Alan Willson, calls an "insatiable appetite for research," as his four pending patents can attest. (Two of those patents came from work done for his Master's thesis.)
Torosyan has also built an impressive record in the area of Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizers (DDS). DDS is a mature field and extensive research has been done in the area over the last 20 years, yet Torosyan was able to make truly significant advances in the analysis and design of these systems.
Torosyan's theory - for the first time - provides an exact assessment of the two design parameters by which DDS performance quality is assessed - spurious frequency content (or spurs) and signal-to noise ratio (SNR). His theory also shows how to eliminate half to three-quarters of all the spurs a DDS might produce. His complete analysis of the SNR of any given DDS also accounts for all sources of errors. His research results will have considerable impact on future research - both at UCLA and in the larger community.
Jonathan Stewart and C.K. Ken Yang, Northrop Grumman Teaching Awards
Each year, Northrop Grumman selects UCLA engineering faculty members who have
demonstrated their outstanding teaching capabilities both inside and outside
the classroom.
Professors Stewart and Yang are ranked very highly by the students in their courses - including those taking some of the most challenging classes in the School. They work very hard to ensure the material they present is both relevant and up-to-date. They reach out to their students, and continue teaching well beyond the classroom. Both faculty members serve as advisors to UCLA engineering student organizations - Yang is the faculty advisor to IEEE and Stewart to ASCE.
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