Engineering - News & Events

Volume 11, Issue 2
August 27, 2008

• Fall Faculty Reception set for September 17
• Awards and honors in the Engineering Community
• Business minor for Engineering students
• New entrepreneurship program for students
  with innovative business ideas
• Guidelines for listing seminars in Info Update
• Guest speakers and seminars

Fall Faculty Reception set for September 17

Dear Engineering Faculty,

We cordially invite you and your guests to the College of Engineering's Fall Faculty Reception on Wednesday, September 17, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology at 159 Sapsucker Woods Road in Ithaca.

New faculty will be recognized. Family, guests, and children are welcome and encouraged to attend.

Dress is casual business attire and no RSVP is necessary. We look forward to seeing you there.

With warm regards,

Kent Fuchs
Dean of Engineering

Awards and honors in the Engineering Community

Assoc. Prof. Carla Gomes, CIS, and her team have been selected for one of four new $10 million "Expeditions in Computing" grants from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at NSF. Their winning proposal is titled "Computational sustainability: Computational methods for a sustainable environment, economy, and society." The interdisciplinary team working with Gomes includes Christopher Barrett (AEM), Antonio Bento (AEM), Francis DiSalvo (CCB), John Guckenheimer (math), John Hopcroft (CS), Natalie Mahowald (EAS), Bart Selman (CS), David Shmoys (ORIE), Ken Rosenberg (ornith), Steven Strogatz (TAM), and Larry Walker (BEE).

The Canadian Geotechnical Society has selected Prof. Fred Kulhawy, CEE, for receipt of the 2008 G. Geoffrey Meyerhof award. for outstanding and significant contributions to the art and science of foundation engineering. Kulhawy is being recognized for the major impact o f his work on several areas of engineering practice, and in particular, on the design of transmission tower foundations and drilled shaft foundations. The award will be presented during the Canadian Geotechnical Conference in Edmonton in September.

Business minor for Engineering students

As part of a collaboration with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the business minor is now open to engineering students (except for ORIE students) on a selective basis. It is a great opportunity for students to take courses in a top ranked undergraduate business program and obtain depth of knowledge in a related field. Students may apply starting at the beginning of their sophomore year. The fall deadline for applications is November 14, 2008. See more information online.

New entrepreneurship program for students
with innovative business ideas

Cornell Engineering students are full of great ideas, but commercializing them into successful solutions requires more than technical expertise. If you know undergrads with novel business ideas, point them to the Kessler Fellows Program. Established this year with support from alumnus Andrew J. Kessler '80 EE, the program gives selected students the business savvy they need to make a difference. Kessler Fellows get help finding well-paid summer internships at entrepreneurial startups and innovative companies, a $2,000 prize, and a substantial reduction in their loans during senior year for financial aid recipients. Juniors in Fall 2008 are eligible to apply. Details available online.

Guidelines for listing seminars in Info Update

Please note: Information Update does not maintain files of seminar listings for the semester. If you would like to have your seminars listed here, please be sure to submit listings for the upcoming two weeks by the biweekly Friday deadlines. If you have questions about deadlines and publication dates, please see the schedule online.

Guest speakers and seminars

28 Aug
Luc Vincent, director of engineering, Google Inc.: Street view: Taking Google Maps to street level

4 Sep
Asst. Prof. Andrew Ng, Stanford University: STAIR: The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot Project

3 Sep
Prof. Scott Samson, Syracuse University: Do sediments lie or are they just coy? The magmatic, tectonic, and paleogeographic importance of detrital mineral ages and chemical composition

10 Sep
Asst. Prof. Mike Brudzinski, Miami University of Ohio: Dancing with the plates: Do faults shimmy before they shake?

9 Sep
Prof. Mark L. Psiaki, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University: Development of integrity GPS (iGPS): Technical and programmatic opportunities and challenges

28 Aug
Prof. Chris G. Van de Walle, University of California, Santa Barbara: Oxides as semiconductors

4 Sep
Adam J. Ellison, Corning Inc.: The role of alkalis in silicate glasses

15 Sep
Assoc. Prof. Hanspeter Schaub, University of Colorado: Electrostatic spacecraft relative-control applications

3 Sep
Asst. Prof. Susan Daniel, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Cornell University: The motion of liquid drops on surfaces under the influence of vibration

4 Sep
(Special seminar, 4:00 p.m.; refreshments at 3:45 p.m.)
Asst. Prof. Ryan S. Elliott, Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota: Atomistic modeling of martensitic transformation in shape memory alloys: Theoretical and computational techniques

10 Sep
Asst. Prof. Spandan Maiti, Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, Michigan Technological University:
Materials design principles for toughness and strength: Lessons from biological threads

Submitting announcements to Information Update

Please send your news notes to engr_info_update@cornell.edu. Announcements will be published no more than twice and should be limited to about a hundred words or less. The next issue of Information Update, published biweekly during the academic year and monthly in the summer, will be May 29, 2013. The deadline for submissions to this next issue is Friday, May 24, 2013 at 5 p.m. Information received after the deadline will be published in a future issue if appropriate.