Bazant

Zdenek P. Bazant, McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been elected a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The induction ceremony will take place in Rome in June. The Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, known as the Italian National Academy, was founded in 1603 and is the oldest honorific scientific academy in the world. Located in Palazzo Corsini in Rome, across the Tiber River from the Vatican, the academy counts Galileo among its earliest members. “This is a tremendously prestigious honor for Zdenek and a wonderful acknowledgement of his contributions to the understanding of size effects in quasi-brittle materials,” says Brian Moran, chair of civil and environmental engineering. “Galileo himself was a pioneer in the field of strength of materials, and we are thrilled for Zdenek that his own contributions to the field have been recognized by the academy of which Galileo was a member.” Bazant discovered the nonstatistical (energetic) size effect on the strength structures consisting of brittle heterogeneous materials such as concrete, fiber composites, tough ceramics, rock, and sea ice, and he is known as a world leader in the research on scaling in solid mechanics. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Engineering Academy of Czech Republic, and the Accademia di Scienze e Lettere (Milan). Bazant is the recipient of numerous awards and honors and has received six honorary doctorates.

—Kyle Delaney

Volpert

Vladimir Volpert, professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics, received a 2006 Northwestern Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award. The award recognizes outstanding faculty selected by the Northwestern Alumni Association with the help of the University’s deans, students, and alumni. Volpert has taught at all levels of applied mathematics since joining the Northwestern faculty in 1992. Whether it’s teaching introductory calculus to freshmen or differential equations of mathematical physics to graduate students, his philosophy is the same: “I attempt to provide my students with the tools necessary to study real-world problems rather than merely train them to perform mathematical exercises with no connection to science and technology.” A PhD graduate of the Institute of Chemical Physics of the former USSR Academy of Sciences, Volpert came to the United States in 1990 as a two-year visiting scholar at Northwestern. He joined the McCormick faculty in 1992 and became a full professor in 2002. His awards include McCormick School Teacher of the Year in 1999–2000. He has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy. He is the author of two books and numerous journal articles, serves on two editorial boards, and has been a reviewer for many journals.

People and Progress

Faculty honors

Zdenek Bazant, McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was elected a foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and presented the opening plenary lectures at the International Conference on Damage in Composite Materials at the University of Stuttgart and the 18th International Conference on Computational Mechanics in Lublin, Poland.

Ted Belytschko, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Mechanical Engineering, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lyon, France.

Randall Berry, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was the keynote speaker at the Second Annual Workshop on Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks.

Linda Broadbelt, professor of chemical and biological engineering, was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Fabian Bustamante, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.

Justine Cassell, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, gave invited talks at the AI for Human Computing Workshop in Hyderabad, India, and the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Yan Chen, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, won an NSF CyberTrust Award and an Early Career Award from the U.S. Department of Energy.

J. Edward Colgate, professor of mechanical engineering, was appointed the Pentair– D. Eugene and Bonnie L. Nugent Teaching Professor.

Isaac Daniel, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, received the P. S. Theocaris Award of the Society for Experimental Mechanics and was named an honorary member of the society.

Mark Daskin, professor of industrial engineering and management sciences, was the keynote speaker at the Operations Research Society of China national conference and was named the Bette and Niesen Harris Chair of Teaching Excellence.

Horacio Espinosa, professor of mechanical engineering, will receive the 2007 Young Investigator Medal from the Society of Engineering Science.

Ken Forbus, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electric Engineering and Computer Science, was elected a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Bartosz Grzybowski, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, received the Sloan Fellowship Award.

Dongning Guo, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, received the NSF CAREER Award.

Walter Herbst, adjunct professor of mechanical engineering, was the keynote speaker at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Chicago in September 2006.

Michael Honig, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, received a Humboldt Research Award for senior U.S. scientists from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Yehea Ismail, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was elected editor in chief of IEEE Transactions.

Bill Kath, professor of engineering science and applied mathematics, was elected a fellow of the Optical Society of America.

Aggelos Katsaggelos, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was a corecipient of the best paper award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Multimedia and Expo.

Sridhar Krishnaswamy, professor of mechanical engineering, was elected a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Todd Kuiken, associate professor of biomedical engineering, received a Da Vinci Award for Innovative Engineering from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, won an NSF CyberTrust Award.

Lincoln Lauhon, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, received the Sloan Fellowship Award.

Tobin Marks, professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering, was elected to the German Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina.

Bernie Matkowsky, John Evans Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.

Gokhan Memik, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was named the Lisa Wissner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Chair in Computer Science.

Don Norman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, presented the keynote lectures at the Nielsen Norman group conference in Seattle, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology conference in Daejon, and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola. He also presented a lecture to interactive design students at the Royal College of Art in London. Norman has joined the editorial board of the international journal Design Research Quarterly and presented an inaugural speech for the Microsoft Research Chair on Intelligent Environments at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

Thrasos Pappas, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was elected a fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering.

Bryan Pardo, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, received the NSF CAREER Award.

Manijeh Razeghi, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society.

John Rudnicki, professor of civil and environmental engineering and of mechanical engineering, received the 2006 Maurice A. Biot Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Rod Ruoff, professor of mechanical engineering, was appointed managing editor of NANO, the first journal on nanoscale science and technology to be published in Asia.

Alan Sahakian, professor of biomedical engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, was elected a fellow of IEEE.

David Seidman, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, received the Albert Sauveur Achievement Award from ASM International.

Surendra Shah, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was honored by a symposium held in his honor at the European Conference on Fracture.

Randall Snurr, professor of chemical and biological engineering, gave a plenary lecture at the Sixth Brazilian Meeting on Adsorption.

Allen Taflove, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, gave a plenary lecture at the 2006 annual meeting of the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society.

Jack Tumblin, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was the keynote speaker at the 2006 Human Vision and Electronic Imaging Conference.