McKelvey School of Engineering

Seven distinguished alumni and a former dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science were honored at a dinner April 19 at the Coronado Ballroom. Six received Alumni Achievement Awards, one a Young Alumni Award, and the former dean received the Dean’s award. The honorees are: Larry Chiang, Richard Janis, Deepak Kantawala, Janice Karty, Milind Kulkarni, James McKelvey, Jr., Jennifer Dionne, and Sal Sutera.

Aaron Ciechanover, MD, PhD, the Distinguished Research Professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and co-recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his contributions to the discovery and description of a process cells use to discard unwanted proteins, will give a special seminar at Washington University in St. Louis Friday, April 27. His lecture, “The Ubiquitin Proteolytic System: From Basic Mechanisms Through Human Diseases and on to Drug Development,” will take place at 4 p.m. in the Laboratory Sciences Building, Room 300. The seminar is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

Washington University biomedical engineer Lihong Wang, PhD, will explain his photoacoustic tomography technology April 3 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago.

At recent Board of Trustees meetings, the following faculty members were appointed with tenure, promoted with tenure or granted tenure effective July 1, 2012, unless otherwise noted.

Four applications of the new imaging technique photoacoustic tomography are moving into clinical trials. One is to visualize the sentinel lymph nodes that are important in breast cancer staging; a second to monitor early response to chemotherapy; a third to image melanomas; and the fourth to image the gastrointestinal tract. Biomedical engineer Lihong Wang believes photoacoustic tomography might also allow early diagnosis of cancer because the technique can reveal the hypermetabolism that is cancer’s hallmark.

Kunal Agrawal, PhD, assistant professor of computer science & engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has won a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. The goal of Agrawal’s project, titled “Provably Good Concurrency Platforms for Streaming Applications,” is to design platforms that will allow programmers to easily write correct and efficient high-throughput parallel programs.

William F. Pickard of Washington Unviersity in St. Louis introduces the February 2012 special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE by quoting the Bible: “The wind bloweth where it listeth.” That, in so many words, describes is the major technological problem with renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power. The special issue, which Pickard co-edited with Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide, discusses several solutions to intermittency, as it is called, first among them massive energy storage.

Oh, for a bit of wrought iron. Using tried-and-true triangular trusses, Lesley Olson (right), a junior in chemical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, helps high school girls compete to erect the tallest marshmallow and toothpick tower during Engineering Olympics Feb. 25, the final day of EnWeek. The week, intended to inspire current and future engineers, began Feb. 19 with a variety of activities intended to make increase awareness in engineering as a profession.

“No Boundaries: Women Leaders of Washington University,” an intergenerational discussion group, will be held from 3-4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 6, in Brown Hall Lounge. An RSVP is required by Tuesday, Feb. 28.

The Gephardt Institute for Public Service invites student groups, centers, departments and schools, as well as individual members of the University community, to join an open discussion about plans for the 2012 election year.  The meeting will be held from 4-5:30 p.m. Monday, March 5, in the Multipurpose Room, lower level of Mallinckrodt Center on the Danforth Campus. ​