Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University




JHU Department of Mechanical Engineering

Seminars, News and Events
Seminars, News & Events


People
Research
Seminars, News, and Events

Undergraduate Programs
Graduate Programs
Student Groups
Campus Life

Home > News, Seminars & Events > News, Awards & Honors Archive

Previous News, Awards & Honors

2007
•12/11/07: Professor Charles Meneveau's new wind energy project has been featured in a JHU news release entitled "Wind Turbines Produce 'Green' Energy and Airflow Mysteries"; a video of the project is also available.

12/3/07: Read an article in the Baltimore Sun highlighting the "Ready Set Design!" program ran by Professor Lester Su.

11/16/07: An article titled "Making Machines That Make Others of Their Kind" published in Science Magazine features the work of Professor Greg Chirikjian.

•11/18/07: Graduate student Emily Huskins has been selected by the Executive Committee of the Applied Mechanics Division of ASME to receive the Robert and Mary Haythronthwaite Foundation travel award for students presenting at the ASME Congress 2007.

•11/9/07: Professor Andrea Prosperetti will become the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Multiphase Flow.

•11/6/07: Graduate student Sarthak Misra was awarded a fellowship to attend a week-long workshop on "Scientific Computing Applications in Surgical Simulation of Soft Tissues" at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM).

•11/1/07: A paper by Ph.D. student Robert Webster and his advisors Professor Allison Okamura and Professor Noah Cowan was selected as one of the top five papers (out of approximately 700) at last year's the Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference in Beijing, China. The award was presented at the 2007 IROS conference in San Diego.

•10/26/07: The National Science Foundation's Division of Geosciences has published a news release about holographic microscopy research by scientists including Professor Joseph M. Katz have identified swimming and attack patterns of two deadly microbes linked to fish kills.

•10/11/07: Graduate student Ganhui Lan and Professor Sean Sun's paper "Z-ring force and cell shape during division in rod-like bacteria" just appeared in the Proceeding of National Academy of Sciences. More information can be found here.

•10/9/07: Prof. Allison Okamura has been appointed the Gilbert Decker Faculty Scholar. This three-year scholarship was established by alumnus Gil Decker, Class of 1958, to support scholarly and teaching activities.

•10/1/07: Professor Sean Sun's graduate student, Ganhui Lan, was awarded a BMES (Biomedical Engineering Society) student travel award for 2007 to support his participation at the 2007 BMES Annual Fall Meeting in Los Angeles, CA.

•9/6/07: Professor Andrea Prosperetti has been honored as a Fellow of the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo for his distinguished service in research and education.

• 2/9/07 Prof. Noah Cowan's recent paper in the Journal of Neuroscience was rated as a "Must Read" by two members of the Faculty of 1000. The paper, coauthored with Neuroscientist Eric Fortune, was a recent feature in the JHU Gazette, and is part of an ongoing NSF-funded collaboration.

• 1/29/07 Top Ten: JHU Mechanical Engineering has been ranked #7 in the Academic Analytics Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index of U.S. doctoral programs in Mechanical Engineering.

• 1/28/07 The American Geophysical Union has awarded graduate student Saikiran Rapaka an Outstanding Student Poster Award for his presentation, titled "Critical Times for the Onset of Density-Driven Convection in Anisotropic Porous Media" at the AGU Fall meeting in December 2006.

• 1/2/07 The American Academy of Mechanics has elected Professor Charles Meneveau as Fellow in recognition of outstanding contributions to research and leadership in Mechanics.

2006
• 11/7/06 Professor and Chair Greg Chirikjian was an invited speaker at the 16th Fall Workshop on Computational and Combinatorial Geometry at Smith College.

• 11/1/06 In a recent issue of The Physical Review Letters postdoctoral fellow Dr. Laurent Chevillard and Professor Charles Meneveau describe a new approach to model pressure effects on the dynamics and geometry of turbulent flows.

• 10/1/06 Professor Bill Sharpe installed an optical strain gauge on a high-frequency, high-temperature, fatigue test machine at the University of Michigan. The DARPA sponsored system operates at 20 kilohertz and can measure strains at temperatures as high as 600C.

• 9/1/06: Professor Noah J. Cowan, in collaboration with Professor Greg Hager in the Computer Science Department, received a research award from the National Science Foundation to study "Vision-Based Control of Mechanical Systems via Sampling Kernels".

• 6/6/06 Professor K.T. Ramesh and former graduate student Dexin Jia received the M. Hetenyi Award from the Society of Experimental Mechanics for their work on miniaturization of Kolsky bar systems.

• 4/24/06 Undergraduate student Alican Demir received a Provosts Undergraduate Research award for his work on tactile sensing in Prof. Noah Cowan's LIMBS Laboratory. The project is entitled "A New Approach in Tactile Sensing: Fiber Optic Array Sensor".

• 4/14/06 Graduate student Francesco Soranna, Dr. Yi-Chih Chow, Dr. Oguz Uzol, and Professor Joe Katz has won the Knapp Award from the ASME Fluids Engineering Division, which is given to the authors of the best paper dealing with analytical, numerical and laboratory research.

• 4/14/06 Alumnus Dr. Jun Chen and Professor Katz was also recognized with the Outstanding Paper for 2005 honor for his work in the journal "Measurement Science and Technology."

• 4/14/06 Lester Su received the 2006 William H. Huggins Excellence in Teaching Award, to be presented at this year’s Convocation.

• 4/13/06 Undergraduate student Reuben Brewer has been named one of 15 Hertz Foundation Fellows from across the United States.

• 4/4/06 For their work in the Ready, Set, Design project student coordinators Emily Kumpel, Olivia Mao, Angela Pelletier, Sarah Webster, and Professor Lester Su, have been awarded a 2006 Diversity Recognition Award from the Diversity Leadership Council.

• 4/4/06 Special Research Assistant Jeff Jarosz has been been awarded a 2006 Diversity Recognition Award from the Diversity Leadership Council for his work with groups such as the Whiting School of Engineering Diversity Council and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

• 4/4/06 Graduate Student Steve Martin has been awarded the Link Foundation Fellowship in Ocean Engineering.

• 4/1/06 Of the only several hundred National Science Foundation graduate fellowships awarded annually, FIVE have been awarded to students in this department:  graduate student Eatai Roth, and undergrads Reuben Brewer, Tristan Flanzer, David Helmer, and Emily Kumpel.

• 3/14/06 Undergraduate student Chris Kovalchick was selected to serve as a Young Trustee on the Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees.  Chris was also recognized recently with an honorable mention on USA Today's 2006 All-USA College Academic Team and an honorable mention in the National Science Foundation graduate fellowship awards.

2005
• 12/19/05 Professor Charles Meneveau has been elected a corresponding foreign member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences.

• 12/7/05 New nanosensor uses quantum dots to detect DNA: Using tiny semiconductor crystals, biological probes and a laser, Professor Jeff Tza-Huei Wang’s group have developed a new method of finding specific sequences of DNA by making them light up beneath a microscope.

• 12/1/05 Professor Shiyi Chen has been named the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Professor of Science and Engineering.

• 11/17/05 The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics has awarded its best Graduate Paper Award to graduate student Francesco Soranna, for his paper entiled "Particle Image Velocimetry Measurements Within a Two-Stage Axial Turbomachine," co-authored by PostDoc Yi-Chih Chow, Mr. Soranna, Oguz Uzol and Professor Joseph Katz.  In addition, Tristan Flanzer, BS '06 won the best Undergraduate Paper Award at the same conference.

• 10/21/05 Alumnus Lou Sardella (Engr. 1969) and chairman and CEO of Sun Automation, Inc., has endowed a professorship in Mechanical Engineering. Professor Charles Meneveau has been named as the inaugural Louis M. Sardella Professor.

• 10/15/05 New equation helps unravel erratic behavior of turbulence: graduate student Yi Li and Professor Charles Meneveau have uncovered a mathematical shortcut that pinpoints the origins of intermittency in turbulence.

• 9/9/05 This past summer, undergraduate student Peter Lillehoj joined ten other engineering students to design and build an irrigation system for residents in the small town of Zimátlan de Alvarez, Mexico through the Engineers for a Sustainable World program.

• 8/31/05 Professor K. T. Ramesh and Dr. Dexin Jia has been selected to receive the 2006 Hetenyi Award.  This annual award honors the Best Resarch Paper published in the journal "Experimental Mechanics" as judged by the editorial board of that journal.

• 7/14/05 Professor Andrea Prosperetti has received the 2005 Fluids Engineering Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). This award is in recognition of Dr. Prosperetti’s “outstanding contributions, over a period of years, to the engineering profession and especially to the field of fluids engineering through research, practice, and teaching.”

• 5/7/05 A team of JHU Mechanical Engineering undergraduates had a successful first-entry in the Society of Automotive Engineers Mini-Baja competition in Rochester, New York, passing the first phase of safety scrutiny, a significant accomplishment for first-entries.

• 4/28/05 Professor Tza-Huei (Jeff) Wang's work on single-molecule detection is highlighted in the Nanozone News in the website for Nature.

• 4/26/05 Professor Allison Okamura has received the 2005 Early Academic Career Award  from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. This award recognizes persons within seven years of earning their PhDs who have made an identifiable contributions that have had a major impact on the robotics and/or automation fields.

• 4/25/05 Professor Noah Cowan will be awarded the William H. Huggins Excellence in Teaching Award at this year's Commencement ceremony.

• 4/13/05 The Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University was ranked the second highest Mechanical Engineering school with less than 20 faculty members in the U.S. News and World Report's "America's Best Graduate Schools" and 15th overall among top Mechanical Engineering schools.

• 4/11/05 Professor Andrea Prosperetti will receive the 2005 Fluids Engineering Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for years of outstanding contributions to the engineering profession, especially to the field of fluids engineering.

• 4/6/05 The Research Channel recently aired a short video presentation on Professor Allison Okamura's ARTBOT competition.

• 3/31/05 Professor Genevieve Comte-Bellot of Ecole Centrale de Lyon, France, former postdoctoral scholar of mechanics at JHU, and now member of the JHU Society of Scholars, has been elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering for her contributions in fluid mechanics and acoustics.

• 3/22/05 The ISI Science Citation Index has recognized the article "Scale Invariance and Turbulence Models for LES" (2000) by Profs. Charles Meneveau and Joe Katz as a "Highly Cited Article", placing it in the top 1% within its field.

• 2/1/05 Professor Charles Meneveau was recipient of UCAR Outstanding Publication award for co-authorship of paper in J. Atmospheric Science.

• 1/21/05 Prof. Noah Cowan's research on cockroach-inspired robots is the subject of a Science magazine article.

2004
• 12/6/04 Prof. Allison Okamura's "Robot Sensors and Actuators" class held an ArtBot show on December 6th; see the following article .

• 11/26/04 Prof. Allison Okamura's research on haptics is the subject of a Wall Street Journal article .

• 9/13/04 Prof. Greg Chirikjian is the new Chair of the department.

• 9/17/04 JHU's Applied Physics Laboratory's Principal Professional Staff Member Jack Roberts is recognized in USA Today for development of advanced body armor technology.

• 7/1/04 Assoc. Prof. Louis Whitcomb was promoted to Full Professor with Tenure.

• Prof. Kevin Hemker was named Principal Editor of the journal Scripta Materialia.

• 7/12/04 Prof. Joseph Katz received the 2004 Fluid Engineering Award from the ASME. Prof. Katz is recognized for his contribution to "the development and implementation of innovative quantitative flow visualization techniques, and for the use of these techniques in advancing our understanding of complex phenomena in cavitation inception, turbulent shear flows, turbomachinery flows, and ocean small-scales dynamics."

• Vredenburg Scholarship recipients for summer 2004: Christopher Kovalchick - Hannover, Germany (research at the University of Hannover); Emily Kumpel - Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (research at University of Dar es Salaam); Olivia Mao - Cambridge, England (research at Cavendish Physics Lab); Eiline Yoon - Shanghai, China (internship at Motorola).

• 5/11/04 Prof. Ilene Busch-Vishniac was presented with a 2004 Diversity Recognition Award by President Brody at the 2004 Diversity Recognition Awards Ceremony. The award recognizes her contributions to increase diversity in engineering.

• 5/1/04 ME Senior Goldie Katzoff and first-year graduate student Lawton Verner have won National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships. Goldie will use her fellowship for graduate study at MIT. Lawton, who also won a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, will continue his graduate studies at JHU.

2003
• 11/11/03: Hybrid Underwater Vehicle Project is announced at the American Geophyical Society's Fall Annual Meeting in San Francisco. (See Press Releases by WHOI and JHU.) Associate Professor Louis Whitcomb is co-investigator in a new project to develop a novel underwater robotic vehicle capable of diving to 11,000 meters, twice the depth of any existing U.S. submersible.  The vehicle will employ control systems developed by Whitcomb and his students at the JHU Dynamical Systems and Control Lab.  This project was featured by Scientific American (Dec. 2003) and BBC News

• 9/4/03:  We welcomed new graduate students to the ME Department with a fun Barbecue. Thanks to Mike Bernard for taking all the pictures!

• 9/1/03:  Assistant Professor Allison Okamura has been awarded a Whitaker Foundation Biomedical Engineering Research Grant for the study of haptic feedback in robot-assisted surgical systems. The program assists young faculty in establishing biomedical engineering research careers.

• 8/18/03: Professor Charles Meneveau of Mechanical Engineering has been selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's ninth annual Frontiers of Engineering symposium.  The three-day event will bring together the nation's top engineers aged 30 to 45 who are performing leading-edge engineering research and technical work. 

• 8/8/03: Homewood Professor Robert Kraichnan of the Department of Mechanical Engineering wins the 2003 Dirac Medal. Kraichnan's most profound contribution has been his pioneering work on field-theoretic approaches to turbulence and other non-equilibrium systems; one of his profound physical ideas is that of the inverse cascade for two-dimensional turbulence.  

• 7/21/03: Undergraduate students in the Mechanical Engineering senior design course developed a computer-guided pill-dispensing machine that is enabling a quadriplegic to lead a more independent life.

• 7/1/03: Professor Andrew Douglas of Mechanical Engineering has been appointed interim Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering.

• 7/1/03: We congratulate Professor Ilene Busch-Vishniac on her many accomplishments during her five-year term as Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, and welcome her to the Department of Mechanical Engineering.  She will also assume the presidency of the Acoustical Society of America.

• 7/1/03: Professors Noah Cowan and Sean Sun joined the Mechanical Engineering Department on July 1, 2003. Prof. Cowan's specialty is robotics and Prof. Sun's specialty is theoretical and computational biomechanics.

• 6/1/03:Emily Nalven, a senior undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded the Vredenburg Scholarship in the amount of $7000 for her study at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan during the summer of 2003.

• 5/23/03: Mechanical Engineering associate research scientist Mingwei Chen and Professor Kevin Hemker in collaboration with their colleagues in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Physics and Astronomy, have discovered a "twinning" phenomenon in a nanocrystalline form of aluminum that was plastically deformed during lab experiments.  The finding will help scientists better predict the mechanical behavior and reliability of new types of specially fabricated metals. Their discovery was published in the May 23, 2003 issue of the journal Science.

• 5/22/03: Professor Charles Meneveau received the 2003 Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, presented at the 2003 Commencement Ceremony. He was honored for his teaching skills, approachability and helpfulness in the mathematically demanding field of fluid mechanics.

• 5/6/03: Professor Allison Okamura received the 2003 Johns Hopkins University Diversity Recognition Award for her work to increase the number of women, minorities and people with disabilities in engineering. The award was presented by President Brody at the first campus-wide Diversity Recognition Awards ceremony.

• 5/1/03: Dr. Robert Kraichnan has joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering as Homewood Professor. Kraichnan is a world leading scientist in the field of fluid turbulence and statistical mechanics, and is member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

• 5/1/03: Professor Gregory L. Eyink of the Johns Hopkins Department of Mathematical Sciences has been granted a secondary appointment in Mechanical Engineering.

• 4/14/03: Seven Johns Hopkins undergraduates are participating in a NASA program to perform an experiment of their own design aboard a KC-135 aircraft (sometimes referred to as the "weightless wonder" or "vomit comet") this month. The team, called StillMix, is advised by Mechanical Engineering Professor Cila Herman.

• 4/13/03: Ph.D. student James Kinsey was awarded the "Best Paper by an Author Under 30" at the 2003 IFAC Workshop on Guidance and Control of Underwater Vehicles, held in Newport South Wales. James is advised by Professor Louis Whitcomb. Their new hydrodynamics tank was recently featured in Mechanical Engineering Magazine.

• 4/3/03: Congratulations to JHU Undergraduates Daniell Dokko and Mark O'Leary, who received 2002-2003 Provost's Undergraduate Research Awards. Mechanical Engineering Professor Allison Okamura advised Danny on the project "Haptic Sensors in Robot-Assisted Surgery", and Mechanical Engineering Professor Gregory Chirikjian advised Mark on the project "The Art of Motion."

• 3/20/03: Professor Charles Meneveau was named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

• 3/7/03: Professor Kevin Hemker, associate research scientist Mingwei Chen, and James W. McCauley, a senior research scientist at the Army Research Laboratory, have discovered why boron carbide, a lightweight ceramic material sometimes used in protective armor, cannot resist impact from high-energy projectiles. Their discovery was published in March 7, 2003 issue of the journal Science.

2002 and Earlier
• 6/1/02: Mark O'Leary, a senior undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering, has been awarded the Vredenburg Scholarship in the amount of $7000 for his study at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan during the summer of 2002.

National Science Foundation (NSF) awards $2.5 million grant to Center for Environmental and Applied Fluid Mechanics, including 3 ME faculty members, to establish a Biocomplexity Research Initiative.