News & Events

03-11-19

Melany Hunt, Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been honored as the 2019 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program dedicatee. The SURF Administrative Committee selects the dedicatee based on their record of extraordinary impact to the program, Caltech students, and the Institute. In the words of Professor Katherine Faber, SURF Board Member who introduced this year’s dedicatee, “Professor Melany Hunt fits the bill in all three of these categories. She has mentored over 50 SURF students since 1991. In the classroom, she has twice received the Associated Students of the California Institute of Technology (ASCIT) award for excellence in teaching. She has inspired students in courses on Thermal Science, Thermodynamics, Heat and Mass Transport and Multidisciplinary Systems Engineering.” In regard to Professor Hunt’s extraordinary impact on Caltech Professor Faber mentioned the Giving Voice program which uses recorded vignettes to “guide discussions on unconscious bias and provides concrete suggestions on how to start workplace climate conversations.” [Giving Voice] [SURF Program]

Tags: honors MCE SURF Melany Hunt Katherine Faber

03-06-19

Kavya Sreedhar, a senior double majoring in electrical engineering and business, economics, and management, has been named to this year's class of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, a graduate-level scholarship program founded by Stanford University. The program aims to develop a community of future global leaders to address complex challenges through collaboration and innovation. Sreedhar will receive a scholarship providing full tuition, room and board, and a living stipend while she pursues a PhD in electrical engineering. Her graduate work will be focused on circuits and hardware research for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. She is joined by 67 other students chosen from a pool of 4,424 applicants for the program's 2019 cohort. [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors alumni Kavya Sreedhar

03-01-19

Caltech has recognized alumnus William Dally (PhD ’86, Computer Science) with the Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor regularly bestowed by the Institute. Dally was recognized “for his significant contributions to the architecture of interconnection networks. He developed much of the technology found in modern interconnection networks including wormhole routing, virtual-channel flow control, global adaptive routing, modern network topology, deadlock analysis, performance analysis, fault-tolerance methods, and equalized high-speed signaling.” [Caltech story] [Distinguished Lecture at Caltech]

Tags: EE honors CMS alumni William Dally

02-20-19

Junior undergraduate student Lewis Jones, studying mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering, has been awarded a Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship. The fellowship recognizes exceptional college juniors, seniors, and graduate students pursuing aerospace careers and includes a paid internship at a commercial space company based in the United States. Lewis will be interning at Millennium Space Systems. At Caltech Lewis founded and is the current president of the rocketry club (Parsec) which is developing a methane-oxygen rocket. [2019 class of fellows]

Tags: honors GALCIT MCE Lewis Jones

02-19-19

Alireza Marandi, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics, has been awarded the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, "Quadratically Nonlinear Micro-Resonators: Enabling Next Generation Photonic Devices and Systems". The CAREER program is NSF's most prestigious awards for junior faculty members. The level and 5-year duration of the awards are designed to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars. Awardees are chosen because they exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Tags: APhMS EE honors NSF CAREER NSF Alireza Marandi

02-14-19

Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering; Co-Director, Space-Based Solar Power Project, has won the 2019 Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Caltech's most prestigious teaching honor, the prize was established in 1993 "to honor annually a professor who demonstrates, in the broadest sense, unusual ability, creativity, and innovation in undergraduate and graduate classroom or laboratory teaching." [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors Ali Hajimiri

02-12-19

Mechanical engineering graduate student, and Resnick fellow Ying Shi Teh, advised by Professor Kaushik Bhattacharya, has won first place for her poster presentation at the Fundamental Physics of Ferroelectrics and related materials workshop (Ferro2019). Her poster featured her work on modeling the photovoltaic effect in multi-domain ferroelectric perovskite oxides. The Ferro2019 is the 30th in the series of workshops that has gathered the world’s leading theorists and experimentalists working in the field of ferroelectrics and related materials every year since 1990. [List of award recipients]

Tags: honors MCE Kaushik Bhattacharya Ying Shi Teh

02-07-19

P. P. Vaidyanathan, Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Electrical Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Professor Vaidyanathan was elected for “contributions to digital filter bank theory and design.” Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature," and to the "pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." [NAE release] [Caltech story]

Tags: EE honors National Academy of Engineering P. P. Vaidyanathan

02-06-19

Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering; Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist; Co-Director, Space-Based Solar Power Project, has been named the inaugural Michael M. Byram Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Colorado (CU) Boulder’s Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department. The professorship brings internationally-renowned external researchers for one or two semesters each year to CU to teach classes, host seminars, and collaborate with the faculty, further amplifying the research impact of the department. [CU Researchpalooza]

Tags: honors GALCIT Sergio Pellegrino

02-01-19

Julia Greer, Professor of Materials Science, Mechanics and Medical Engineering, and colleagues have determined that the failure of architected materials—the point at which they break when compressed or stretched—can be described using classical continuum mechanics, which models the behavior of a material as a continuous mass rather than as individual (or "discrete") particles. This finding implies a duality to the nature of these materials—in that they can be thought of both as individual particles and also as a single collective. [Caltech story]

Tags: APhMS research highlights MCE Julia Greer