2018 ANNUAL REPORT
Volgenau School of Engineering
POWERFUL PARTNERSHIPS
2018
Dean’s Message Dear Alumni and Friends,
At the Volgenau School of Engineering, we take pride in the strength and longevity of our powerful partnerships. As engineers and IT professionals, we know the importance of forging alliances, building teams, and creating collaborations. Much of our work would not happen without the investment of the partners featured in this year’s Annual Report. For example: Partnerships break barriers. Our students and faculty reached out across international borders to engage with partners in Nicaragua to design sustainable housing. Our researchers are working with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency to predict extreme weather on a global scale. Partnerships develop career-ready graduates. Strong partnerships with local, regional, and international companies, as well as with federal agencies and nonprofts, promote student learning by sponsoring capstone projects and keeping us up-to-date on industry needs.
Partnerships generate ideas. Teams of researchers are asking questions and solving problems to make the world a better place. In the last 12 months, the school’s research enterprise has reached all-time highs in awards, contracts, and expenditures. Our researchers and their teams have engaged with scientists and engineers within the school, across our campuses, and around the world. Partnerships build the philanthropic spirit. Some of our most valuable alliances are the ones that provide private gift support for our school. Friends and alumni have given gifts, large and small, to establish scholarships for students, create fellowships for faculty, and improve our laboratories and instructional facilities for all. This report highlights just a few of our many powerful partnerships. If you want to learn more, please visit us in person or on the web. Finally, if you already partner with us, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider it. You’ll be glad you did. Best regards, Ken Ball, PhD, PE Dean, Volgenau School of Engineering
ABOUT THE COVER PhD student Ali Rezaie and senior Tyler Miesse with Associate Professor Celso Ferreira (right) research wetlands and coastal fooding. Ferreira’s team focuses on developing and promoting innovative water resources and coastal engineering ideas aimed at restoring and improving urban infrastructure and resilience against food hazards. The team studies waters of the National Capital Region, the Chesapeake Bay, and beyond.
Contents PARTNERSHIPS FUEL OUR GROWTH Research, Faculty, and Enrollment Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
BIG DATA Improving the Odds for Better Clinical Trials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Statistics: Increasing Chances for Student Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
CYBERSECURITY
VOL GE N AU S CHO O L OF E N GI N E E RING 2018 AN N U AL REPO RT Designed and produced by the Offce of Communications and Marketing
Martha Bushong Editor
From Marine to Cyber Warrior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Colleen Kearney Rich and Priyanka Champaneri Copy Editors
GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT
Evan Cantwell and Ron Aira Photographers
Fighting a New Trojan War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Home Sustainable Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Predicting Unpredictable Weather . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
HEALTH CARE TECHNOLOGY A Smarter Way to Predict Brain Aneurysms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 PhD Student Works on Aneurysm Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Ultrasound Technology Could Improve the Lives of Amputees. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Computer Scientist Speaks the Language of Medicine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Marcia Staimer Illustrator For more information, contact Martha Bushong, director of communications, George Mason University, Volgenau School of Engineering mbushong@gmu.edu Phone: 703-993-5595
ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS Thunder Rat Invades Mason’s Storm Drains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 No Strings Attached: Discarded Musical Instruments Get New Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
SIGNALS AND COMMUNICATION Putting the Brakes on Automobile Cyberattacks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Mason Team Wins Prestigious Franz Edelman Award for Work with FCC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Rescued Satellite Dish Gets Another Shot at the Moon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
SUSTAINABILTY Keeping Naval Vessels Shipshape Through Better Data Analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Wetlands May Be Coastline’s Best Defense Against Storms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
GIVING Statistician Not Only Sponsors Seminars, He Attends Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Adobe Supports Computer Science Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Micron Expands Lab Space, as Well as Minds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 New Scholarships Open More Doors to Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 The Benefts of John Toups’ $1.5 Million Gift Are Far Reaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
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PARTNERSHIPS FUEL O Our students and faculty team up with industry and government on real-world projects. They work with local schools to promote STEM education, and they collaborate across disciplinary boundaries on research of consequence. These partnerships help promote our extraordinary growth.
Research Growth
RESEARCH EXPENDITURES AND AWARDS (In millions of dollars)
Active collaborations with external agencies and industries promote research growth.
$40
$50
$51
35
Research expenditures totaled $30 million and research awards $51 million—a record high for the second consecutive year.
30
$30
25
Expenditures grew among nearly all departments and centers, indicating that growth is distributed school-wide.
20 15
$21 $16
$17
$22
$16.8 $16.8 $16.6 $16.7
10 5 0
FY 14
FY 15
FY 16 Expenditures
FACULTY BY YEAR 250
150
211 92
197
200 170
169 85
231 95
87
83 43 36
100
50
0
40 60
23
23
47
47
14
17
21
24
Fall ’15
Fall ’16
Fall ’17
Fall ’14
Research
55
53
Instructional
Tenure Track
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33
Fall ’18 Tenured
FY 17
FY 18
Awards
Faculty Growth Our faculty are experts in their felds who team up with industry, nonprofts, and government agencies to drive research productivity and enhance student learning.
L OUR GROWTH TOTAL NUMBER OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS (In thousands) 7,800*
8.0 7,291
6,723
7.0 6,195
Enrollment Growth We work with our industry advisory boards to develop educational programs that meet the needs of today’s employers. Our partnerships with K-12 schools and community colleges create access for all students.
6.0
5,590
5.0 0
Fall ’14
Fall ’15
Fall ’16
Fall ’17
Fall ’18
*Estimated
Relevant courses create career-ready graduates who strengthen the nation’s workforce. + Fall 2018 enrollment of 7,800 (estimated) + All-time high enrollment for second consecutive year STUDENTS BY DEGREE (In thousands) 8.0 7.0 6.0 5.0 4.0 3.0 2.0 1.0 0
Fall ’14
Fall ’15 Undergraduate
Fall ’16 Master’s
Fall ’17 PhD
Fall ’18*
Non-degree
*Estimated
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BIG DATA
Our collaborations in K-12 education prepare future generations while our mature research discovers new ways to fnd meaning from vast amounts of information.
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Department Chair and University Professor William Rosenberger serves as a member of an international advisory board for a European Union consortium. Photo by Ron Aira
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RESEARCH PARTNERS
Improving the Odds for Better Clinical Trials
William Rosenberger would like to see more favorable odds for patients in clinical trials. So the University Professor and chair of Mason Engineering’s Department of Statistics is helping medical researchers apply the concepts used in personalized medicine to better design studies—and beneft patients. In personalized medicine, patients get targeted treatments based on their genetics, specifc illness or disease, and other characteristics. For years, medical researchers have conducted large-scale studies on the general population. They use statistical analyses to evaluate the safety and efectiveness of experimental treatments, such as new medications or medical devices. Many studies have failed because the therapies didn’t work on the population at large, but they may have worked on a subgroup of patients, Rosenberger says. Instead of using the older protocol, Rosenberger and his doctoral students are developing enrichment design methodology to help scientists pinpoint new experimental treatments that work for some people, as is done in personalized medicine. Here’s one way it works: Researchers start out by testing several new medical therapies on a large population. At an interim point of the study, they look at the initial results, do some statistical decision-making with the help of statisticians like Rosenberger, and narrow down the treatments to those that seem to be working the best. Adaptive designs can also identify the patients who are responding best to treatments and weight the study to favor assigning treatments that work most efectively for the patients in the clinical trials. This is called covariate-adjusted response-adaptive (CARA) randomization, Rosenberger says. He is particularly interested in designing clinical trials for rare diseases, which led him to serve as a member of an international advisory board for a European Union consortium on small population clinical trials. Changing how the studies are conducted could make it easier for people to get new therapies earlier and also potentially save lives. “The methodology of CARA enrichment designs has the potential to impact the way we think about designing clinical trials in the future,” he says. “It could lead to more efcient study designs that beneft patients.” —Nanci Hellmich
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Assistant Professor Elizabeth Johnson contributed to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistics in Schools program for K-12 teachers and students. Photo by Evan Cantwell
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K-12 PARTNERS
Statistics: Increasing Chances for Student Success When Elizabeth Johnson says that many students lose interest in math during middle school, she is speaking from experience. An assistant professor of statistics in the Department of Statistics, Johnson taught high school math for several years in her native South Carolina. “Somehow we kill math,” she says. “In elementary school, they love it, they soak it up. But by the time they get to high school, they lose interest in it. It’s the worst thing in the world.” That is why Johnson was happy to be part of the U.S. Census Bureau’s updated Statistics in Schools program for K-12 teachers and students. The program, which Johnson applied to participate in, offers free classroom-ready activities and resources that help students understand real-world applications of statistics. That is important, Johnson says, because the world has become so driven by data analysis. “The key is, can we make it more exciting for them?” she says. “Can we make it more meaningful to them so they’ll continue their studies?” Not only did Johnson’s team work to create interesting lessons in both teacher and student versions (students can download the lessons online), they also had to ensure those lessons met the standards and guidelines of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Statistical Association. Lessons included using fractions to compare amusement parks by state, creating data tables by categorizing classroom items, and comparing data on camping and backpacking goods. Johnson says the exercise was rewarding for her as an educator, because collaborating with peers and using real data reinforced the necessity of making lessons accessible and interesting at all levels. She audited the lessons, as well. “I went through it and tried to do it from the point of view of a sixth grader, all the steps,” she says. “That’s half the battle. You make sure, when you set up an activity, can you do it? We made sure it wasn’t going to frustrate them.” “We want them to be critical readers and thinkers,” Johnson adds. “It could be very dry, but hopefully they will be so interested in this they’ll be doing it without realizing they’re doing it.” ––Damian Cristodero
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CYBERSECURITY Our established alliances with government and industry are
creating new networks and educating trained experts.
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Houman Homayoun, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, works with PhD student Katayoun Neshatpour to develop solutions that will prevent malware from being installed in computer chips. Photo by Evan Cantwell
GOVERNMENT PARTNERS
Fighting a New Trojan War National security is at risk because of a war on hardware, according to Mason Engineering researcher Houman Homayoun. An associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Homayoun says that many cybersecurity attacks today are targeting hardware, and these invasions are dangerous and diffcult to defend. Experts have been using different strategies to protect software from hackers for more than 20 years. “Now the hacking technology is so advanced that instead of just making software attacks on the system, attackers change the hardware itself,” Homayoun says. “Hardware security is emerging as a new feld that is needed to address the enormous challenges government and industry are facing to protect integrated circuits used in areas such as the Internet of Things and cloud infrastructures.” To improve hardware security, Homayoun has received more than $3 million in funding from multiple government research programs.
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Part of the reason for the increase in hardware security problems is that many semiconductor chips are no longer manufactured in the United States but are made overseas, including in Europe and Asia, he says. Some untrustworthy manufacturers are inserting hardware Trojans, a type of malware, into integrated circuits during fabrication, and some are copying and cloning sensitive chips. “They can steal the technology completely because they know every detail of the design to fabricate it, which means they don’t have to spend time and money designing their own defense technology,” he says. This is a problem for national security because many chips are used in important military equipment or in safety-critical systems such as emerging smart cars. The U.S. government is combating these problems in several ways, including identifying trustworthy manufacturers.
Homayoun’s research team members are developing new hardware security defenses designed to help protect against the hacking of integrated circuits and cloning of chips, and to secure processor architecture. It’s diffcult to detect if an integrated circuit has been hacked because the Trojan is manufactured into the hardware, he says. “It sits side-by-side the hardware. You need very expensive equipment to catch it.” His group is using machine learning, at both the hardware and software levels, to work on this problem, which means they are programming the computer to learn from past attacks to predict future ones. “We want to make it more diffcult and more expensive for the attacker to insert Trojans and to clone the chip,” he says. “But there is no absolute security.”
To improve hardware security, Houman Homayoun has received more than $3 million in funding from multiple government research programs.
––Nanci Hellmich
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Matt Wilkes at the school’s 2018 degree celebration and as a Marine. Wilkes was the class speaker for the ceremony. He now works for Inova Fairfax Hospital. Photo by Evan Cantwell
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CORPORATE PARTNERS
From Marine to Cyber Warrior While alumnus Matt Wilkes, BS Cyber Security Engineering ’18, was busy serving his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mason Engineering was busy forging an alliance with its advisory board members and corporate partner Northrop Grumman. His goal was to come home safely; the school’s vision was to develop a program to educate a new generation of cyber engineers. The leaders who envisioned this program often needed the same kind of dedication and perseverance that Wilkes showed in completing the program. A member of Mason Engineering’s inaugural cybersecurity engineering class, Wilkes has spent the past three years balancing full-time school, a family, and part-time jobs. “It’s always about hard work and dedication,” says Wilkes, who rose to the rank of sergeant before leaving the Marine Corps. “What I learned in the Corps is that you have a job, and you’re going to do your job. No matter how hard it is, it’s your responsibility.” Mike Papay, Northrop Grumman’s vice president and chief information security offcer, is an industry advisor to the Volgenau School. It was Papay’s thought leadership and determination that helped create the degree program. “The cyber threat is real, and it’s not going away,” says Papay. “In fact, it’s getting worse.” One of the ways to jump ahead was to think differently about cybersecurity. “A common reason for the prevalence of these attacks is that we are dealing with most of the attacks after they happen instead of before,” says Papay. “Cybersecurity needs to be integrated during the design process, not after. This program addresses that issue by teaching students how to design large, secure systems from the ground up.” The program helped Wilkes transition from fghting battles on the ground to learning how to safeguard existing fnancial networks, utility systems, and lines of communications, as well as building resilient new ones. It’s hardly been easy, but it beats getting shot at it or nearly killed by incoming mortar rounds exploding around him, which he experienced on three combat tours during the 12-year stint in the Marines that preceded his arrival at Mason. “This frst class of [cybersecurity] graduates is an incredible group of engineers—our country’s future leaders,” Papay says. “They’re motivated by giving to the present, and our world will beneft from that motivation. I’m really proud of them.” ––Martha Bushong
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GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT
Students and faculty reach across borders to engage with international partners.
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NONPROFIT PARTNERS
Home Sustainable Home Over the university’s winter break, a team from Mason’s Engineers for International Development (EfID) few to sunny Nicaragua. They weren’t there to enjoy the weather. The students and their advisors were there to help their Nicaraguan partners address a critical need. Nicaragua is the second most impoverished country in Latin America, after Haiti, and the poorest country in Central America. About half of the population have limited access to improved sanitation. Scores of homes consist of sheet metal roofs and unreinforced cinder blocks, and they lack doors and windows. Stable, affordable housing is a critical, unmet need. The trip’s main objective was to develop a master plan for two related and affordable Nicaraguan housing projects. During the action-packed week, the team encountered steep and dry terrain, a live volcano, rattlesnakes, and groundwater resources potentially impacted by decades of chemical and untreated sewage releases into the regional Lake Managua. “We toured the area, developed a site master plan, presented it to our partners, and spoke to the bankers,” says Mason mechanical engineering major Jack Scherer. “The trip made me want to come back to school and work harder because now I know how the work can change people’s lives.” Although the country’s steep terrain is inhospitable for housing, it presents an excellent opportunity for wind and solar felds to supplement the student engineers’ vision for solar panels on individual homes. The Nicaraguan partners are considering other sustainable practices that are new to Nicaraguan housing developments, including stormwater collection and underground storage, burial of power lines to reduce the impact of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, and solid waste composting and recycling.
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In addition to affordability, the plan for the two communities will incorporate a primary school; exposure and opportunity to promote sustainable practices to preserve the natural environment; establishment of employment opportunities within the community to support economic development and viability; support for preventative health care and healthy lifestyle practices; and resilient infrastructure systems. “The most impactful part of the trip was the student interaction with the community and families who might live in such a community and their enthusiasm and gratitude for the students’ conceptual master plan,” says Liza Wilson Durant, associate dean, strategic initiatives and community engagement. For civil engineering major Andrew Simpson, the trip was the frst time he had been out of the United States. “I had never been on a plane before. The farthest away from home I had traveled was New York City,” says Simpson. “My parents are from Ghana and have made me aware of our family’s story, but it’s easy to forget that others are writing their narrative. The experience in Nicaragua drove that point home.” “It’s projects like these that allow us to be the change we wish to see in the world,” Simpson says. ––Martha Bushong
Team members who participated in the project include Andrew Simpson, Nicaraguan engineer Kenneth Garcia, Jack Scherer, Anna Close, Badana Mohamadi, Eden Beth Devera, faculty advisor Matt Doyle, and Liza Wilson Durant, associate dean, strategic initiatives and community engagement.
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GLOBAL PARTNERS
Predicting Unpredictable Weather Mason Engineering PhD student Leonardo Porcacchia remembers watching the news when he was growing up in Italy and seeing reports about weather hazards. He says the scenes and stories from his youth drove him to become a scientist of the atmosphere with a focus on precipitation. Extreme weather events represent a serious problem everywhere in the world, particularly in remote regions that are not well equipped with instruments to predict these events and prepare for them. Porcacchia’s research focuses on a peculiar precipitation process in the atmosphere, a process responsible for high-intensity rainfall rates at ground level. “The process, called collision-coalescence, is like the snowball effect, except with raindrops. It works like this: Some drops in the cloud reach the point where they start to fall toward the Assistant Professor Viviana Maggioni and her research team analyze satellite data to improve the characterization of precipitation around the globe. Photo by Evan Cantwell
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surface,” he says. “In their descent, if the right conditions are met, they collide with smaller drops, collect them, and become larger. It is like a snowball rolling down a hill and collecting fresh snow and becoming bigger and bigger.” Collision-coalescence processes are very effective at increasing the amount of water that falls to the ground and may lead to fash foods, but they are often diffcult to detect. That’s why Porcacchia has been developing a classifcation scheme for identifying collision-coalescence scenarios that use observations from advanced radar to see inside clouds. Recently, a new satellite mission dedicated to precipitation has been launched. The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) is a NASA-JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) satellite mission to provide next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours. The GPM Core Observatory satellite carries advanced instruments that set a new standard for precipitation measurements from space, including a Dual-frequency Polarimetric Radar (DPR). The data these tools provide is used to unify precipitation measurements made by an international network of partner satellites to quantify when, where, and how much it rains or snows around the world. “The GPM mission contributes to advancing our understanding of Earth’s water and energy cycles, improves the forecasting of extreme events, and extends current
capabilities of using satellite precipitation information to directly beneft society,” says Viviana Maggioni, Porcacchia’s advisor and an assistant professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering. “Leonardo’s research aims at improving the DPR algorithm for precipitation estimation.” “My classifcation scheme can be applied to the dataset collected by this space-borne radar, and therefore I am able to detect collision-coalescence processes at a global scale,” Porcacchia says. “One of the signifcant limitations of remotely sensed data is the potential error associated with the data, especially in the case of precipitation systems triggered by orography, which yield signifcant nonmeteorological backscatter of the radar signal,” Maggioni says. “Leonardo’s work proposes a new algorithm to improve the classifcation of precipitation regimes observed by radars and, consequently, improve the estimation of rainfall rates to reduce those errors and uncertainties.” Porcacchia thinks his classifcation scheme and this space-borne radar dataset together will improve real-time prediction of rainfall rates in cases of extreme events and help remote regions all over the world that cannot count on local ground instruments. Particularly, it will help communities like those in Italy that frst inspired his work. ––Martha Bushong
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HEALTH CARE TECHNOLOGY National and international collaborations between researchers,
hospitals, government agencies, and medical professionals promote scientifc discoveries, new technologies, and medical therapies. ENGINEERING.GMU.EDU | 23
RESEARCH PARTNERS
A Smarter Way to Predict Brain Aneurysms
We are trying to understand how aneurysms form, progress, and rupture. Juan Raul Cebral, a professor of bioengineering, is using image-based, patient-specifc computational modeling to study blood fow in the brain to learn more about aneurysms. Photo by Evan Cantwell
A bioengineering researcher is combining math and medicine to help patients who have strokes and other cerebrovascular disease. Juan Raul Cebral uses image-based computational modeling to study blood fow in the brain so he can learn more about aneurysms. A cerebral aneurysm is a ballooning, weak area in the wall of an artery that supplies blood to the brain. If it ruptures, it can cause a hemorrhagic stroke, which can lead to death or brain damage. “We are trying to understand how aneurysms form, progress, and rupture,” says Cebral, PhD Computational Sciences and Informatics ’96. A professor in the Department of Bioengineering, Cebral has funding for three research projects from the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) and funding for another from Philips Healthcare. In one NIH-funded study, Cebral and his team created a database of more than 2,000 aneurysm cases from Inova Fairfax Hospital, Mayo Clinic, and Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. They’re using that data to develop models to predict which aneurysms are most likely to rupture. The risk of an incidental aneurysm rupture—one with no symptoms that’s discovered by chance—is below 1 percent, but if it ruptures, about 50 percent of people die, Cebral says. About 50 percent of the other half never recover a normal life because of bleeding into the brain. “That’s devastating,” he says.
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Current imaging tools give doctors some insights into the risks of a rupture, but the tools don’t reveal suffcient details about fow dynamics (blood fow in the arteries of the brain), the body’s biological response to those fows, or the artery wall biomechanics, he says. It is not well understood how the aneurysms form, but it’s thought that abnormal blood fow conditions result in arterial degeneration, he says. An aneurysm starts to grow, and the artery wall progressively degenerates and weakens. To gain insights into this process, Cebral and colleagues are using three-dimensional images of patients’ aneurysms and constructing patientspecifc computational models. “In those models, we’re solving the mathematical equations that
represent the fow inside these arteries.” “We are trying to better understand the interaction between the fow dynamics, the biological responses, and the artery wall biomechanics,” Cebral says. “If we understand these mechanisms, hopefully new drug therapies that attack those specifc mechanisms could be designed.”
This research also may help identify which patients to treat with medications or surgical interventions. Cebral is also working on another NIH-funded study with several other major universities and hospitals in the United States and Finland. He and his team are developing computational tools that combine different data about the aneurysm, including
information acquired from tissue harvested during surgery. Cebral says he hopes “our work may one day result in new diagnostic tools and therapies that will transform brain aneurysms into an innocuous disease that’s easy to manage.” ––Nanci Hellmich
STUDENT PARTNERS
PhD Student Works on Aneurysm Research Felicitas Detmer, a PhD student in bioengineering, says that when she meets new people, they often ask about her research topic. When she says it’s about brain aneurysms, they often tell her something like, “my friend had an aneurysm,” or once somebody said to her, “You know, my father died of an aneurysm.” These comments show how common aneurysms are. Aneurysms occur quite frequently––overall two to fve percent of the population have aneurysms––but usually they don’t cause any symptoms. If an aneurysm ruptures, or bursts and starts bleeding, it can cause a stroke, which often has fatal consequences, Detmer says. There are different treatment options to prevent unruptured aneurysms from bleeding, but the risk associated with these options and the associated complications are much higher than the natural aneurysm rupture risk. That is why, when an aneurysm is diagnosed, it can be quite challenging to decide whether to treat it. She is working with Juan Cebral, a professor in the Bioengineering Department, to develop “statistical models, which can identify those aneurysms that are likely to rupture in the future and thus require treatment,” Detmer says. She hopes that, in the future, this model can be applied in clinical practice to identify high-risk aneurysms, treat them, and prevent these patients from suffering a stroke.
PhD student Felicitas Detmer, who works with Professor Juan Raul Cebral on brain research, won second place in the university’s Three-Minute Thesis Competition for her explanation of their work. Photo by Evan Cantwell
––Martha Bushong
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RESEARCH PARTNERS
Ultrasound Technology Could Improve the Lives of Amputees
Siddhartha Sikdar, a professor in the Bioengineering Department, is using ultrasound technology to give people better control of prosthetics for their arms, hands, and legs. Photos by Evan Cantwell
Mason Engineering researchers are designing and evaluating miniaturized ultrasound transducers, which are compact devices worn as a small band on the forearm or under the prosthetic shell.
There’s new hope for a better life for people who’ve lost an arm or a leg. Mason Engineering researchers are using cutting-edge ultrasound technology to help people gain greater control of prosthetics for their arms, hands, and legs. “Our goal is to help amputees go about their daily lives with improved function,” says Siddhartha Sikdar, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering.
which are compact devices worn as a small band on the forearm or under the prosthetic shell. The transducer sends sound waves into the body and senses the refected sound waves. These signals are analyzed using computer algorithms to recognize muscle activity. This method can sense muscle activity deep inside the tissue, and it differentiates between different muscle groups much better than electrodes on the surface of the skin.
Sikdar’s team is investigating a new way of operating prostheses by using ultrasound waves to sense muscle activity. The research is funded by two $1 million grants, one from the National Science Foundation and the other from the Department of Defense.
Their laboratory research suggests that the ultrasound method allows for much dexterity in controlling upperbody prosthetics, including fne-tuned motor control of the fngers and thumb, Sikdar says.
The team is designing and evaluating miniaturized ultrasound transducers,
In the lab, the team has shown that computer algorithms can use this ultrasound method to learn to differ-
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entiate between 15 distinct hand and wrist movements. Users can robustly perform partial movements with a high degree of control. “The military is funding this technology as a way to improve the lives of those who have been wounded in action,” Sikdar says. Sikdar is currently doing a pilot feasibility study with amputees who are using this ultrasound-based system. The research is being conducted in conjunction with MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington, D.C., and in collaboration with Wilsaan Joiner and Michelle Harris-Love in the Department of Bioengineering. In another project, funded by the National Science Foundation, Sikdar’s team is applying the ultrasound-based method for sensing muscle activity to develop new types of exoskeletons for people with spinal cord injuries.
They are also exploring several other areas of this research, including developing simpler, less expensive upper-body extremity prosthetics; extending the ultrasound-based control methods to lower-limb prostheses; and training people to use the prosthetics using video games.
Sikdar has applied for patents on the work and is looking for ways to commercialize it if the latest research proves successful.
“Knowing that this technology can potentially help real people keeps us all highly motivated,” he says. ––Nanci Hellmich
Eventually, these developments may help not only amputees in the United States, but also those around the world.
ACADEMIC PARTNERS
Computer Scientist Speaks the Language of Medicine Mason Engineering professor Özlem Uzuner speaks three languages—English, French, and Turkish—but it’s her fourth language that could help save lives. Uzuner is an expert in natural language processing, a feld of computer science that involves turning human language into coded form. She is working on algorithms that translate physicians’ narratives about their patients into data that can be analyzed to fnd better treatments.
Özlem Uzuner, associate professor in the
“The algorithm’s aim is to get the computer to understand human language the way we do,” says Uzuner, who joined Mason Engineering’s Department of Information Sciences and Technology last year. “Once we achieve a certain level of performance, we can give the algorithm all of our narrative text data, and it codifes everything for us.”
Uzuner and other researchers, including her collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), are developing natural language processing methods to fnd insights into the unexplained deterioration of patients’ health, adverse prescription drug reactions, and problems with combinations of medications. They are also extending their methods to help fgure out which patients are best suited for specifc clinical trials to test new therapeutic treatments. Uzuner’s other recent work involved using computer methods to remove private information from patients’ records—such as names, ages, addresses, and insurance details—so the remaining health information can be used by medical researchers who study different diseases and treatments. “Those who could not study the data before because of privacy concerns now can, which means science moves forward faster,” she says. This is a feld where computer science meets medicine, and it’s the perfect career path for Cyprus-born Uzuner, who comes from a family of medical doctors. “I want to help patients get the treatment they need and get it faster,” Uzuner says. —Nanci Hellmich
Department of Information Sciences and Technology, is an expert on natural language processing.
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ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS Our students and faculty form robotics and
artifcial intelligence teams to develop the next steps in robot/human technology.
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Jeffrey Counts (center) from Mason Facilities Management and seniors Alex Walters and Kristin Lewis inspect a storm drain on the Fairfax Campus with a custom-made robot called Thunder Rat. Photo by Evan Cantwell
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CAMPUS PARTNERS
Thunder Rat Invades Mason’s Storm Drains If a storm drain clogs on campus, it’s Thunder Rat to the rescue. The custom-made robot goes where no man dares. Armed with a camera, lights, and a water-resistant chassis, the bot explores deep dark drains underground looking for leaves, debris, and garbage that block water fow. “He’s a robot doing what a human can’t do,” says Kristin Lewis, BS Mechanical Engineering ’18. Lewis and three other students in the Mechanical Engineering Department designed the robot for their senior capstone project so that Mason’s Facilities Management employees could use it to inspect the university’s storm drain system. The reason: It’s often diffcult to pinpoint precisely where drains are clogged, which can lead to costly excavations and disrupt campus activity, Lewis says.
Facilities Management’s land development group has already used Thunder Rat to inspect a few pipes on campus, and the videos and photos played an important role in the decision-making process, says the group’s manager Zhongyan Xu. “The students were energetic, ambitious, and self-driven. We were impressed not only by their technical skills but also their project management skills.” There are products like Thunder Rat on the market, but they are bigger, more expensive, and sometimes it takes a team of people to run them, Lewis says. “It was great to apply some of the academic concepts that I learned over my four years at Mason and leave some small legacy behind.” ––Nanci Hellmich
Thunder Rat gives “us a set of eyes that can go underground for an inside view of the quality and condition of the pipes,” says Samira Lloyd, sustainability program manager in the Offce of Sustainability, which funded the project through the Patriot Green Fund. “It can save us time and trouble and help our system run better.” The team, which also calls itself Thunder Rat, faced several challenges in their efforts to design a nondestructive storm drainage inspection system. They had to make sure the robot was water resistant, so they flled in lots of cracks and gaps in the chassis. The students also had to fnd a way to operate the bot because they couldn’t use WiFi underground, so they tethered it to a laptop with a sturdy Ethernet cable, which they also used to pull it out of drains. Operating the laptop with a game controller, the user can control the onboard computer on Thunder Rat to manipulate the robot’s lights, wheels, and video camera, says mechanical engineering major Alex Walters. As Thunder Rat travels through the drain, the robot displays the inspection. If an issue is detected, the user has the robot take photos. A mechanical wire counter tracks how far the bot travels inside the pipe.
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UNIVERSITY PARTNERS
No Strings Attached: Discarded Musical Instruments Get New Life
Close-up of the digital theremin violin, an 1805 Seidel violin outftted with a wire coil, alternating pole magnets, speakers, and other electronic parts. Photo by Evan Cantwell
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An engineering professor and an art professor have embarked on an ambitious project: They want to create an orchestra of robotic gadgets made of cast-off musical instruments that will autonomously perform an opera bearing a topical social message. “Totally doable,” says Daniel Lofaro of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. “That is my dream, that is what we are working toward,” says Edgar Endress, an associate professor at Mason’s School of Art in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. The instruments used in the Narrative Machine project were deemed beyond repair—but not beyond their usefulness to the Mason professors. The orchestra is a small band consisting of two guitar towers, a horn fower, a cello drum, a piano guitar, and a digital theremin violin. The instruments were among those donated to the Mason Community Arts Academy’s (formerly the Potomac Arts Academy) “Instruments in the Attic” program, in which refurbished musical instruments are loaned to community members and Mason students in need of an instrument for music studies. The digital theremin violin was the frst contraption created by the team in mid-December. An 1805 Seidel violin was outftted with a wire coil, alternating pole magnets, speakers, and other electronic parts. With the push of a button, a bow is stroked over the violin’s bridge, creating a decidedly un-violin-like sound. Computer software turns it into music.
No strings are plucked on the cello drum. Instead, linear actuators strike different parts of the cello’s fretboard and body, producing percussive sounds controlled by a musical instrument digital interface (MIDI). There are two guitar towers among the instruments on display. Actuators, connected to an electric keyboard by means of a MIDI, strike the strings of a well-used Fender Stratocaster electric guitar. The sound is amplifed by a large megaphone atop the tower. When the full orchestra is ready for its operatic debut, Lofaro says there will be 16 guitar towers looming over the stage, playing alongside an assortment of other colorful, Dr. Seuss-like hybrid instruments. Some of the instruments were designed with the help of students who participated in hack-a-thons. Endress says there may be as many as 50 different instruments on stage. “Imagine all the extension cords,” he adds with a laugh. The music, he says, could be created from sources refecting topical social issues. “Any data can be turned into music,” he says. “The libretto could be about housing or displacement, and the data could come from a housing project or from people telling a story about homelessness and displacement. That’s my dream.” ––Buzz McClain
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SIGNALS AND COMMUNICATION In an increasingly connected world, our partnerships with industry and federal agencies allow for unique learning opportunities.
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For their senior capstone project, Chirag Sharma, Oscar Jaramillo, Borhan Fanayan, Ahmed Amkor, Ryan Davidson, and Abudullah Alkhudair developed software that can identify malicious cyberattacks on a vehicle’s internal networks. Photo by: Ron Aira
STUDENT PARTNERS
Putting the Brakes on Automobile Cyberattacks It sounds like a scene from a James Bond movie: A villain hacks 007’s car to take control and crash it. Something like this could happen if cybersecurity in automobiles isn’t beefed up. Cars today operate a lot like computers on wheels, and several years ago, researchers showed they could hijack a moving vehicle, says Ryan Davidson, BS Electrical Engineering ’17. “The problem is not common now, but it will become more of an issue in the future.” So, for their senior capstone project, Davidson and fve other Mason Engineering students developed software that can identify malicious cyberattacks on a vehicle’s internal networks. The backstory: Embedded devices, called electronic control units, regulate nearly every function of an automobile, including the brakes, steering, and acceleration. They send information to other components through the controller area network. Cyber attackers could take over a driver’s steering or braking capability by hacking into one of the devices on the network, says the group’s faculty 36 | MASON ENGINEERING ANNUAL REPORT 2018
supervisor Kai Zeng, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The students’ goal was to create a system to determine if the messages to and from the devices were legitimate and not from hackers. To do this, they applied machine-learning algorithms to develop a “fngerprint” for each legitimate message on the network, and they put those fngerprints into a database so they could differentiate between trusted and malicious messages on the network. “The goal was to detect the bad guys without rejecting good signals,” Zeng says. After they created the software, they tested it by sending both real and fake signals. They ran this process on several vehicles including a Toyota Camry, Chevy, and BMW. The intrusion detection system was able to identify the signals with up to 90 percent accuracy, Davidson says. The students didn’t modify any device on the car’s current network, he says. “That was probably the most important part of this project. People have been able to do some-
thing similar before, but they had to modify the software on the car’s devices, which makes integration into existing networks diffcult.” Eventually, their system might be useful for military vehicles, airplanes, and driverless cars. “Driverless vehicles are
going to be connected to the internet, and in theory, a hacker might be able to hack into thousands of vehicles at the same time,” Davidson says. “We always want to be a step ahead of potential threats.” ––Nanci Hellmich
FEDERAL PARTNERS
Mason Team Wins Prestigious Franz Edelman Award for Work with FCC If we want driverless cars, drones, and new medical technologies, if we want the Internet of Things, Mason systems engineering and operations research professor Karla Hoffman says the electromagnetic spectrum must be repurposed. To do that, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently repurposed 84 megahertz of low-frequency spectrum. It did this by purchasing spectrum from the nation’s television broadcasters and auctioning that spectrum to wireless providers. Television stations remaining on the air were reassigned channels within a smaller TV band. Developing the optimization software and analytics both for the auction and to place 2,990 television stations in the United States and Canada on channels that allow them to reach the same number of viewers was the job of a nine-person team with deep Mason roots, mostly handpicked by Hoffman. The four-year project was so successful that the FCC team received the 2018 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. The $10,000 award, the most prestigious in the feld, is given annually by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. “It was my dream project with my dream team,” says Hoffman, whose FCC experience and reputation as a leader in the feld of mathematical and statistical modeling
positioned her and Mason to have a prominent role in the venture. The spectrum auction brought in $20 billion, $7 billion of which went to reducing the federal defcit. Through operations research, and mathematical and computer science techniques, 78 percent of the television stations remained on their same channels after the auction. “We were worried about all the stations,” Brian Smith, MS Operations Research ’15, says. “If they were moving to a new channel, would they still reach the same population they were broadcasting to before; would they interfere with each other and cause populations to not get their services?” What to do? First, Smith says, the physics of the individual television signals were modeled to determine whether stations operating on close to the same channels would interfere with each other. That data was processed into mathematical equations that, with the help of a lot of computer processing power, allowed the team to provide solutions that satisfed the FCC’s goals and overcame all interference constraints. “We were so excited when the tools and models we developed outperformed all expectations,” Smith says. ––Damian Cristodero
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Peter Pachowicz, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, says the salvaged satellite dish will serve as a platform for hands-on student projects, including senior design projects and student club activities. Photos by Ron Aira
CORPORATE PARTNERS
Rescued Satellite Dish Gets Another Shot at the Moon Sometimes the race to space begins in your own backyard. That was the case for Mason Engineering’s Peter Pachowicz, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Last winter, Pachowicz got word that a 27-year-old, 30-foot satellite dish on the Fairfax Campus was going to be demolished. “If we didn’t take it, it was headed to the scrap yard,” he says. Pachowicz looked to CACI, a longtime corporate partner of the Volgenau School of Engineering, for help. CACI is a provider of information solutions and services—including satellite engineering and space operations—in support of national security missions.
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The company agreed to sponsor a project to make the satellite dish—which is being donated and fnancially supported by a subsidiary of the George Mason University Instructional Foundation—available to students. “This satellite dish is a powerful system that ignites the excitement of everyone involved in the project,” says John Mengucci, the company’s chief operating offcer. “It represents a unique opportunity for CACI engineers to join forces with Mason students and faculty as they explore the outer limits of what is possible.” The dish, which Pachowicz dubbed Space Communications Ground Station, or SpaceCom, will be used to receive signals, data, and images from satellites as well as signals
Mason students can join the renewed space race.
from missions to the moon. “Mason students can join the renewed space race,” he says. It will also serve as a platform for student projects, including senior design projects and student club activities. Other benefts will include hands-on experience communicating with spacecraft traveling to the moon and with satellites, he says. “We believe that the involvement of students in all aspects of dish modifcation and upgrades will provide an unprecedented learning opportunity.” When Pachowicz tells students about this opportunity, “[they] jump at the chance and ask when they can work on it.” —Nanci Hellmich
Pictured in front of the satellite are Sammy Lin, Aaron Martinez (front row), Brian Smiga, Landon DeCoito, Peter Pachowicz, Jay Deorukhkar, and Keerthana Nukavarapu.
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SUSTAINABILITY Partnerships make sustainable cities, towns, and structures by seeking solutions to environmental problems that matter.
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MILITARY PARTNERS
Keeping Naval Vessels Shipshape Through Better Data Analysis David Lattanzi, assistant professor of civil, environmental, and infrastructure engineering, is working on a project to make it easier for the people who monitor and analyze naval ship and structure performance data to understand and act on the information they gather. Naval vessels, as well as many other engineered systems, must undergo routine surveys throughout their life cycles to assess their integrity and the need for repairs and retrofts. Through these surveys, a broad range of information is collected. Most of this data is not easily integrated or correlated, and it is typically not structured in a manner that allows for engineering analyses. The goal of this research is to develop a framework for integrating these sources of data to enable the application of a range of new and advanced data analytics techniques. The concept is to create a living virtual model, or “digital twin,” of a structure that can provide a platform for data fusion and analytics. The result of the program will be new methods for integrating and modeling engineering information to improve life cycle prediction capabilities. Lattanzi received $391,000 from the U.S. Department of the Navy for this research. He is working with doctoral student Sara Mohammadi and master’s student Nicole Nmair on this project. Lattanzi expects to complete the project in June 2021. —Michele McDonald
Assistant professor Dave Lattanzi uses digital technology to create virtual twins of structures that may improve life cycle prediction capabilities for the U.S. Navy. Photo by Evan Cantwell
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RESEARCH PARTNERS
Wetlands May Be Coastline’s Best Defense Against Storms When civil and infrastructure engineering PhD student Juan L. Garzon came to Mason from Spain, he fell in love with the marshes and wetlands of the Chesapeake Bay. “Many people think of the wetlands in a negative way—as a place full of bad smells and mosquitoes,” says Garzon, “but coastal marshes, among many other things, have the potential to shield communities from storms.” Hurricanes like Irma, Harvey, Maria, and Sandy remind us every summer how vulnerable we are. These storms can cause huge economic losses and fatalities in coastal communities, he says. While traditional infrastructures, such as levees and dikes, have been used to protect populations living on the coast, a new approach might be needed because of the threat of rising sea levels and climate change, says Garzon. That is what lead him to begin searching for an environmental solution to coastal fooding.
travel across land, he says. Without the presence of the vegetation, waves will travel freely along the wetlands, hitting houses and buildings, overtopping coastal defenses, damaging properties, and threatening people’s lives. Garzon took feld measurements during storm events and discovered that ocean waves are effciently dissipated by the vegetation, and they disappear in less than 200 meters. He also developed a mathematical expression that can predict the wave height decrease inside the wetland for any storm and plant conditions. This expression can be used for coastal engineers when they are designing protection plans against coastal hazards. “The outcomes of my research promote wetland protection and restoration,” says Garzon. “This will help to fght against climate change and protect coastal populations and therefore reduce our vulnerability against hurricanes.” ––Martha Bushong
Among the different alternatives for coastal protection, wetlands might be the most appropriate form of protection. Juan Garzon, who graduated in
These ecosystems present two huge advantages over traditional infrastructures. First, they can capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transfer it to the ground, fghting climate change and global warming. Second, through a sedimentation process they can grow vertically, helping to maintain the coastal elevation when the sea level is rising.
May 2018, worked with associate professor Celso Ferreira’s Flood Hazards Research Lab. Photo courtesy of the Flood Hazards Research Lab
Wetlands are the transition space between the sea and the land, and they receive the direct impact of waves and fooding. The complex interaction between waves, currents, tides, and the vegetation growing in wetlands is far from being completely understood. “My research aims to better understand the ability of wetlands in the Chesapeake Bay to reduce the height of ocean waves,” says Garzon. Wetlands can be used as a natural defense to protect coastal communities from the strong impact of waves. When wetlands food during a coastal storm, waves can
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GIVING
Partnerships with our alumni and friends nurture a spirit of giving.
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Statistician Not Only Sponsors Seminars, He Attends Them Statistician R. Clifton Bailey of McLean, Virginia, has several decades of experience working on high-profle statistical studies for the government, but he’s still learning. He has attended numerous statistics seminars at Mason in recent years, and he’s so convinced of the value of these events that he donated money to fund the R. Clifton Bailey Seminar Series for Mason Engineering’s Department of Statistics. He has also given money to help pay for statistics students to travel to conferences.
Gifts and Pledges to Mason Engineering YEAR TO DATE COMPARISONS* (In millions of dollars) $2.0
$1,985,927
1.5
$1,219,347 $1,106,631
1.0
0.5
2015
2016
2017
*Information from GMU Foundation Reports
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donates money to fund a seminar series for Mason Engineering’s Department of Statistics.
Adobe Supports Computer Science Research Professors in the Department of Computer Science are working with Adobe Research on several cutting-edge projects. Adobe donated $120,000 to Mason Engineering. For one project, Associate Professor of Computer Science Jyh-Ming Lien’s team collaborated with Adobe researchers to develop a new photo-editing technique that allows people to modify their pictures to refect different materials. For another project, Computer Science Professor Songqing Chen’s research team investigated ways to improve streaming video on mobile phones. Adobe has a list of research questions it shares with Mason Engineering researchers to form collaborations, says Computer Science Professor Robert Simon. The company also offers internships to Mason Engineering students.
$949,843
0
Statistician R. Clifton Bailey
2018
“Truly for us, it has been an excellent industrial-academic partnership not just because of how interesting the students’ jobs are during the summer, but because the Adobe researchers follow up and maintain a relationship with Mason throughout the year,” he says.
Micron Expands Lab Space, as Well as Minds Thanks to the generosity of the Micron Technology Foundation, Mason Engineering students now have a new much-needed lab on the Science and Technology Campus. The newly renovated lab is one of three distinct spaces in a larger laboratory suite. The hope is that the suite’s open design will encourage creativity, free-fowing exchange of ideas and collaboration among Mason Engineering departments. The renovated space opened for classes in 2017.
“The completion of these labs and collaborative learning spaces is a vital part of our strategic planning to build a presence for mechanical engineering at the Science and Technology Campus,” says Mason Engineering Dean Ken Ball. Mason Engineering’s nearly 7,500 students account for roughly one-ffth of Mason’s entire student enrollment. Mason’s mechanical engineering degree program, which includes a very heavy lab component for its students, will number nearly 350
students this school year. That program, in particular, will make use of the added lab space. Micron has been a major supporter of engineering and other programs at the university for more than a decade. Mason’s Science and Technology Campus in Manassas is conveniently located near one of the company’s largest manufacturing facilities, allowing for a greater partnership between Micron and Mason students and faculty.
New Scholarships Open More Doors to Learning Alumni and friends of the school established four new endowed scholarships this year to provide ongoing aid to academically talented students. THE CHARLES C. JOYCE SCHOLARSHIP ENDOWMENT The school’s advisory board honored its outgoing chair, Charles C. Joyce, by establishing the Charles C. Joyce Scholarship Endowment. THE MARK H. HOUCK PHD SCHOLARSHIP ENDOWMENT The Volgenau School of Engineering established the Mark H. Houck PhD Scholarship Endowment in honor of Mark H. Houck, a professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry
Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering. THE HATHI ENDOWMENT Advisory board member and campaign leadership committee chair Deepak Hathiramani and his wife, Hansa Hathiramani, have established the Hathi Endowment to provide scholarships for undergraduate students pursuing degrees in engineering. THE ANSHUL CHIMALADINNE MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP ENDOWMENT Mason Board of Visitors member Anjan Chimaladinne, MS Technology Management ’10, and Shridevi Chimaladinne established this scholarship in memory of their son Anshul.
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The Benefts of John Toups’ $1.5 Million Gift Are Far Reaching Entrepreneur, civil engineer, and Northern Virginia businessman John Toups, who died this year, pledged $1.5 million to support the Sid and Reva Dewberry Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering Department. His generous gift provides for facility improvement and faculty support, and it will enhance Mason Engineering students’ education.
John Toups, Northern Virginia businessman and entrepreneur, established an endowment to support the school’s teaching and research missions.
“When I began my education in civil engineering, spaces for lab work were limited,” Toups said when he made the donation. “Because of this experience, I understand the importance of having a place where you can test, build, and collaborate.” A second portion of the gift will support two faculty fellowships. The frst has already been awarded to civil engineering assistant professor David Lattanzi, who is engaged in research related to computer visioning in infrastructure and structural health monitoring. “Lattanzi is a rising star with more than a million dollars of research, including grants from the Offce of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation,” says Liza Wilson Durant, Mason Engineering’s associate dean of strategic initiatives and community engagement. “The Toups Fellowship enabled us to invest in Dave as a faculty leader at Mason.” The third portion of the gift will enrich the school’s graduate student experience by supplementing travel to conferences, summer study, and other programs.
The gift’s largest portion will beneft the department’s teaching laboratory, located on the frst foor of the Nguyen Engineering Building. This lab is where civil engineering students test, build, experiment, innovate, and work in teams. The aid for this lab will allow for its ongoing maintenance and future improvements. In recognition of the gift, the teaching laboratory will be named the John Toups Instructional Laboratory for Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering.
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––Martha Bushong
The John Toups gift will beneft the teaching laboratory where civil engineering students test, build, experiment, innovate, and work in teams. In this photo Associate Professor Laura Kosoglu teaches CEIE 240 Hydraulics, a course on the principles of fuids in equilibrium and motion. Students perform an open channel fow experiment using a hydraulic fume. Photo by Alexis Glenn
▼
“The gift from John touches three aspects of our philanthropic efforts,” says Dean Ken Ball. “It enriches the student experience, maintains faculty excellence, and improves existing facilities. The school will beneft greatly from John’s generosity.”
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