News & Events

02-25-11

José E. Andrade, Associate Professor of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, has been selected by the Geo-Institute Board of Governors of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) to receive the 2011 Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award.  Professor Andrade is receiving the award "for his contributions toward the understanding of instabilities in multi-phase porous media under static and dynamic loading by the development of predictive multiscale computational procedures".

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Tags: honors MCE Jose Andrade Jean-Lou Chameau ASCE

02-23-11

At a special event entitled "Meet the Volts" students had the opportunity to learn about the evolution of electric vehicles from Kent Kresa, Chair of the Caltech Board of Trustees and former Interim Chairman of GM's Board of Directors. Also, presenting at the event was Larry Nitz, GM's Executive Director of Hybrid and Electric Powertrain Engineering, who discussed the propulsion technology that makes the Volt, GM's new electric car, unique. [Watch the Presentations] 

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Tags: energy Kent Kresa Larry Nitz Tom Mannion electric vehicle

02-23-11

Graduate student Xiaowei Deng and Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Civil Engineering, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist, have received the Best Paper award from the 11th AIAA Gossamer Systems Forum for their technical paper "Wrinkling of Orthotropic Viscoelastic Membranes." [Read the Paper]

Tags: honors GALCIT MCE Sergio Pellegrino

02-16-11

Congratulations to Chiara Daraio, Professor of Aeronautics and Applied Physics, for receiving a 2011 Sloan Research Fellowship. The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded yearly to 118 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.[Caltech Release]

Tags: APhMS honors Chiara Daraio GALCIT Sloan Research Fellowship

02-15-11

Christopher E. Brennen, Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus, has been elected to the grade of Fellow at ASME. The Fellow grade recognizes significant engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession. Professor Brennen is one of only 3068 Fellows out of 121,087 ASME members.

Tags: honors MCE Christopher Brennen

02-08-11

Ares J. Rosakis, Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Michael R. Hoffmann, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Professor Rosakis was elected for discovery of intersonic rupture, contributions to understanding dynamic failure, and methods to determine stresses in thin-film structures. Professor Hoffmann was elected for oxidative treatment technologies for the removal of organic and inorganic contaminants from water.

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Tags: honors GALCIT MCE ESE Ares Rosakis National Academy of Engineering Michael Hoffmann

02-07-11

Simon Ramo, EE Ph.D. '36 and Life Trustee of Caltech, has been awarded the Goddard Memorial Trophy.  This award is the National Space Club’s preeminent award and it is given annually to recognize significant contribution to United States leadership in the field of rocketry and astronautics. 

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Tags: EE honors Simon Ramo

02-03-11

Costas Anastassiou, a postdoctoral scholar working with Professor Christof Koch, and colleagues have found that coordinated behavior occurs in the brain whether or not neurons are actually connected via synapses.  To tease out the effects, Anastassiou and his colleagues, focused on strong but slowly oscillating fields, called local field potentials (LFP), that arise from neural circuits composed of just a few rat brain cells.  Measuring those fields and their effects required positioning a cluster of tiny electrodes within a volume equivalent to that of a single cell body—and at distances of less than 50 millionths of a meter from one another. [Caltech Press Release]

Tags: EE research highlights health Christof Koch Costas Anastassiou postdocs

02-01-11

Joel A. Tropp, Assistant Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics,  is one of two winners of the eighth Monroe H. Martin Prize competition.  The prize is awarded to an outstanding paper in applied mathematics by a researcher who is younger than 36 years old.  Professor Tropp's winning paper is entitled "On the conditioning of random subdictionaries."

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Tags: honors research highlights CMS Joel Tropp

01-20-11

Sossina Haile, Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, and colleagues have built a reactor at the heart of which is a cylindrical lining of ceria—a metal oxide. The reactor takes advantage of ceria's ability to "exhale" oxygen from its crystalline framework at very high temperatures and then "inhale" oxygen back in at lower temperatures - concentrating solar energy in order to convert carbon dioxide and water into fuels .  Ultimately, Haile says, the process could be adopted in large-scale energy plants, allowing solar-derived power to be reliably available during the day and night. [Caltech Press Release]

Tags: APhMS energy research highlights Sossina Haile fuel metal oxide reactor