Dear Colleagues and Friends:

Welcome to the most recent installment of our e-newsletter.

With each issue, we plan to bring you the latest in news from the department. We hope you enjoy reading about our achievements and events. We welcome feedback and suggestions, so please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,

Mun Choi
Department Head and Professor
choi@drexel.edu

Dr. Brooks Trains Six Teachers for Gulf of Mexico Atmospheric Composition and Climate Study

Dr. Brad Layton Hosts IEEE-EMBS/ASME Workshop

MEM Well Represented at the 2006 Digneo Golf Tournament

MEM Hosts Successful ASME Essential Teaching Seminar

RESEARCH AND SPECIAL AWARDS

Prof. Mun Choi (MEM), Prof. Mary Jo Grdina (School of Ed), and Joanne Ferroni (MEM) were recently awarded a State of PA education grant entitled, “Math and Science Partnerships with the School District of Philadelphia.” Through this program, middle school teachers are trained in the topics of Solar Energy and Landforms through experiential learning. This activity is also an excellent example of our involvement with the community and local school districts. The budget for this one year project is $95K.

Prof. Mun Choi (MEM), Prof. Moshe Kam (ECE), and Prof. Kapil Dandekar (ECE) were recently awarded a NSA grant entitled, “Information Assurance Scholarship Program and Institutional Capacity Building.” This program will support two graduate students (ECE and IST) and provide funds to develop an anechoic chamber for telecommunications and networking research. The budget for this one year project is $214K.

PRESENTATIONS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

Dr. Bakhtier Farouk, MEM Professor, presented a poster titled, "Design, Construction and Operation of a Travelling-wave Pulse Tube Refrigerator" at the 14th International Cryocooler Conference, Annapolis, Maryland, June 14 - 16, 2006. The poster was co-authored by Steven Rotundo, Gregory Hughel, Anita Rebarchak (MEM seniors) and Yiqiang Lin (MEM graduate student).

Dr. Wei Sun, MEM Associate Professor, presented “Computer-Aided Tissue Engineering for Design and Evaluation of Lumbar-Spine Arthroplasty” at the CAD’06 International Conference, June 22, 2006, Phuket, Thailand.  He also chaired the session of “Geometric Modeling” at the conference.

Gregory Fridman, Halim Ayan (MEM graduate students), Dr. Alex Fridman (MEM), Dr. Alex Gutsol (MEM), Dr. Ari Brooks, Dr. Marie Peddinghaus and Dr. Manjula Balasubramanian (Drexel College of Medicine) authored an article entitled “Blood Coagulation and Living Tissue Sterilization by Floating-Electrode Dielectric Barrier Discharge in Air” that was published online in Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing on June 15, 2006.  View the full text article at

http://www.springerlink.com/media/e2eytwxxtp2rd226ua5y/contributions/p/8/l/q/p8lq261248016765.pdf

Dr. Howard Pearlman's (MEM) combustion research has been featured in a recently published article authored by Hughes, Griffiths, Fairweather and Tomlin at University of Leeds.  The article is entitled "Evaluation of models for the low temperature combustion of alkanes trough interpretation of pressure-temperature ignition diagrams" and appears in this months edition of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Physical Chemistry and Chemical Physics.  It can be accessed through the website:

http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/CP/News/2006/Griffiths.asp

Dr. Brad Layton (MEM), Dan Tamayne, Matt Dolin (MEM undergraduate students), and Mike Gallagher (Mem graduate student) presented “An Integrated Atomic Force Microscopy Nanomanipulation Stage for Biological Samples,” at Seeing at the Nanoscale IV, July 17-20, 2006, Philadelphia, PA.

Dr. Brad Layton (MEM Assistant Professor) was the invited speaker at the Bioengineering Department Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, where he presented “Mechanical Axonal Growth Models: Towards Directed Neural Growth and Highly Parallel Piconewton Force Transduction,” in July, 2006.  Dr. Layton was also the invited speaker and presented this research at National Nanotechnology Laboratories, Lecce, Italy in July.