Student Achievements

In spring 1997, a number of engineering students from various Whiting School divisions won Provost Awards for Undergraduate Research and Excellence: Jennifer Anderson, Nabeel Azar, Tang Ho, Leo Kim, Min Sang Kim, Justin Kung, Percy Lee, Robert Mittendorff, Irfan Qureshi, David Stein, Robert Susil, and Gowritharan Thaiyananthan, all biomedical engineering students; Jennifer Anderson and Stephen Kaminski, chemical engineering; Thomas Gillard, civil engineering; Rimmy Malhotra, computer engineering; and Jonathan Lazarus, Kito Mann, and Parag Shah, computer science.

Biomedical engineering sophomore Michael Berka received honorable mention in the nationwide master student essay contest sponsored by Houghton-Mifflin.

Graduate student Tobias Berndt, who is working on his doctorate in the Center for Nondestructive Evaluation, received a fellowship award at the Fall Conference of the American Society for Nondestructive Testing.

David Cheng was the winner of the Eighth Annual Materials Science and Engineering Degree Research Colloquium.

Weihua Dai, a chemical engineering graduate student, received one of three fellowships awarded nationwide for 1996-97 by the North American Membrane Society.

A paper and presentation titled "An Analog VLSI Front-End for Auditory Signal Analysis," by electrical and computer engineering graduate students Nagendra Kumar and Wolfgang Himmelbauer and by Assistant Professor Gert Cauwenberghs and Professor Andreas Andreou, won the Best Student Paper Award at the 1997 International Conference on Neural Networks.

Mechanical engineering graduate student David LaVan received first place in the Student Paper Competition at the annual Society for Experimental Mechanics meeting in June.

Brenda Knox, a graduate student in geography and environmental engineering, won a minigrant from the University's Subcommittee on Electronic and Distance Education for an interactive Web enhancement to courses on mathematical foundations for public decision- making.

Biomedical engineering freshman Andrew McAleavey was awarded third place in the American Society for Engineering Education Mid-Atlantic Student Competition held at West Point in April. McAleavey described his research on "Tensile Testing of Nickel Microspecimens for MEMS Applications."

Steven Marra, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, won a three-year National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. The award goes to less than ten students nationwide in each discipline.

The American Society of Civil Engineers awarded graduate student Michelle Porterfield the prestigious O.H. Ammann Research Fellowship in Structural Engineering. Only one award is given each year based on a national competition. Ammann endowed the award in 1963 to "encourage the creation of new knowledge in the field of structural design and construction."

Bin Yuan, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, won third place in the 1996 American Society of Mechanical Engineers Student Paper Competition held during the Society for Experimental Mechanics annual meeting in Nashville.