Awards/Distinctions

George Corcoran Faculty Award

Prof. David B. Stewart is the recipient of the Department of Electrical Engineering's George Corcoran Award for 1997. The faculty award is presented for "Significant Contributions to Electrical Engineering Education," and recognizes "Teaching and Leadership at the College Park Campus, Effective Contributions at the National Level, and Creative and Other Scholarly Activities Related to Electrical Engineering Education."

Stewart has spurred many innovations in undergraduate research and education, including the Pinball Machine Project, a multidisciplinary design project funded by Lockheed Martin. He also developed the Programming Concepts for Engineers undergraduate-level course, as well as the Software Systems Implementation graduate-level course. Stewart is the director of the Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems Laboratory.

EE Faculty Members Make Impact at Inventions Award Ceremony

Seven faculty members were featured at the Office of Technology Liaison's Tenth Annual Reception, Honoring Inventors and Inventions of 1996 and Issued Patents of 1995 and 1996, held on May 23, 1997. Of these seven, two faculty members were finalists, one took the "Outstanding Invention of 1996" award, and four were cited for their inventions.

Professor Kawthar Zaki received the highest honor, with an invention titled "Filter Realizations Using New Transmission Medium," a wide range and spurious-free response filter that can be used for transmitters and receivers in many communication systems-including wireless, mobile, satellite, and other terrestrial networks. Research leading to the award was conducted for K&L Microwave.

Professor Christopher Davis was nominated with an invention titled "Near-Infrared Optical Fiber Evanescent Field-Excited Fluorosensor," in conjunction with Saeed Pilevar, Alexander J. Fielding, and Frank Portugal. The invention is an immunoassay optical fiber sensor that captures and conducts fluorescent radiation emitted by molecules. The sensor could be used for medical applications such as antibody-antigen recognition, DNA or RNA sequence recognition, immunoassay and hybridization assay, and microorganism detections.

Professor Anthony Ephremides was nominated with an invention titled "Optimal Base Station Placement in Indoor Wireless Networks." Ephremides, with Dimitrios Stamatelos, created this software design tool, which optimizes the placement of a base station in an indoor wireless environment, and allows for improved design of wireless networks. The invention is licensed to W. J. Schaeffer.

Four other inventions involving department faculty members were cited: (1) Programmable Aperture Plate for High Throughput sub 0.1 micrometer Lithography, by Professor John Melngailis, James Nichols, Ivan Berry, and Alfred Mondelli; (2) Method of Measurement of Raman Gain Spectrum in Single-Mode Optical Fiber, by Daniel Mahgerefteh, Douglas Butler, Professor Julius Goldhar, and Lance Joneckis; (3) Building 2-D Site Models From SAR Images, by Professor Rama Chellappa and Shyam Kuttikkad; and (4) The Infra-Red Emitting Si-MOSFET, by Professor Agis Iliadis.

More Awards

• Professor Joseph JáJá, along with a team of mostly National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) researchers, received R&D Magazine's R&D 100 Award for 1997 with S-Check, a tool for assaying and improving performances of parallel and networked (PVM-type) programs.
• William S. Levine has been named an Asscoiate Editor at Large of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, starting Janurary 1, 1998.
• Prof. Rama Chellappa was appointed member of the DARPA ISAT Study Group on Dynamic Databases. Chellappa also served as a panelist at the JTEC/WTEC conference on Digital Libraries.
• Prof. David Barbe had an invited paper published titled "Charge Coupled Device (CCD) Imagers," in the Journal of Information Recording, September 1997.