Please send news of professional and personal achievements to Editor, VU Station B 357703, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37235-7703; fax: (615) 343-8547; e-mail: enews@vanderbilt.edu; phone: (615) 322-2601.

Thomas A. Cruse, associate dean for research and graduate affairs and the H. Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering, gave one of five invited plenary lectures at the 1998 international conference on Computational Engineering Science in Atlanta in October. Cruse has begun a two-year term as treasurer of the United States Association for Computational Mechanics, which is part of the International Association. He was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Computational Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Benoit Dawant, associate professor, ECE, was appointed to the program committee of the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference, one of the largest annual international conferences in the area of medical imaging, and will chair a session on image segmentation. He also has been invited to be guest editor for a special section of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering on the topic of biomedical data fusion. He is one of five co-principal investigators, along with J. Michael Fitzpatrick, associate professor, on a two-year National Science Foundation grant for "Position Tracking for Motion Correction in MRI."

Douglas H. Fisher, associate professor, CS, has been invited to contribute two articles to the upcoming Handbook of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Oxford University Press). One article details cluster analysis, and the other, coauthored with Vanderbilt alumnus Bob Evans, ME'91, describes the successful application of data mining techniques to mitigate process delays in roto-gravure printing.

J. Michael Fitzpatrick, associate professor, CS, and Benoit Dawant, associate professor, ECE, are coauthors of a paper that received the 1997 Giovanni DiChiro Award for Outstanding Scientific Research published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography. Entitled "Comparison and Evaluation of Retrospective Intermodality Image Registration Techniques," the article appeared in the July/August 1997 issue and presented the results of an international and multi-institutional study funded by the National Institutes of Health. Fitzpatrick is the principal investigator on a three-year National Science Foundation grant to study "Approximate Expressions for Error Statistics in Point-Based Image Registration."

While on leave from Vanderbilt, Ephrahim Garcia, associate professor, ME, is serving as a program manager for the Defense Science Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He is responsible for the development of such innovations as morphing aircraft structures and technology for acoustic signature reduction in naval systems and structural vibration reduction in helicopters. Garcia presented an invited paper on "Designing Piezoceramic Actuators and Motors" during a session of the 136th meeting of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in October. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Intelligence Community Research and Development, a technical journal published as a community service by the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.

Michael Goldfarb, assistant professor, ME, has been appointed chair of the robotics technical panel of the ASME Dynamics Systems and Control Technical Division.

Research Associate Professor William Hofmeister, ChE, gave an invited lecture on "State of the Art Materials Research Using TEMPUS and Its Prospective Contributions to Industrial Applications" at the International Symposium on Space Utilization--IN SPACE '98, held September 21-22 in Tokyo, Japan.

E. Duco Jansen, assistant professor, BME, was awarded a three-year grant from the Whitaker Foundation for a project entitled "Multispectral In Vivo Monitoring of Laser-Induced Injury to Biological Tissue." Using genetically engineered mice and single photon counting detection techniques, the expression of genes that play a role in tissue response (wound- healing) following laser irradiation will be documented in the intact living animal.

DesignSafe donated 15 copies of its program to Paul King, associate professor, BME, ME, as a grant to incorporate design safety studies in BME 272, (Design of Biomedical Engineering Devices and Systems). King also received a second-year renewal on a Microsoft award for software licenses for projects developed in the course.

Eugene J. LeBoeuf, assistant professor, CEE, co-chaired a special session, "Sorption of Organ Pollutants to Soil, Sediment, and Other Geologic Solids II" and presented the paper "Glass Transition Behavior of Aldrich and Leonardite Humic Acids" at the 1998 American Geophysical Spring Meeting in Boston. In June, he was invited to participate in a workshop sponsored by the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program. He coauthored the plenary lecture, "Processes for Advanced Treatment of Water," presented by his coauthor at the Second International Conference of the International Association of Water Quality in Milan, Italy.

M. Douglas LeVan, Centennial Professor and chair, ChE, participated in the UOP/Allied Signal Invitational Lecture Series, speaking on "Multiplicity and Other Odd Behaviors in Adsorption Cycles: Indications from Models and Experiments." He also presented the keynote address, "Adsorption Processes and Modeling: Present and Future," opening the Sixth International Conference on Fundamentals of Adsorption in Presqu'ile de Gien on the French Riviera.

Sankaran Mahadevan, associate professor, CEE, was invited by NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, to lecture in a three-day workshop on uncertainty-based optimization in July. He also taught a three-day short course in September on probabilistic design methods at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Mahadevan has been appointed chairman of the technical committee on dynamics and controls, Aerospace Division, ASCE, for a two-year period.

Lloyd Massengill, associate professor, ECE, was technical program chairman for the 1998 IEEE International Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference, held July 20-24 in Newport Beach, California. NSREC is the premier international symposium on radiation effects in electronic materials, devices, circuits, and systems. The meeting included a one-day short course, a four-day technical program, a radiation effects data workshop, and an industrial exhibit. The technical program consisted of 10 technical sessions and two invited lectures.

Robert Pitz, professor and newly appointed chair, ME, presented an invited talk on "Ozone Tagging Velocimetry for Unseeded Velocity Measurements in Air Flows," at the 20th AIAA Advanced Measurement and Ground Testing Technology Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on June 16, and a second invited lecture on "Oscillating Stretch Effects on the Structure and Extinction of Counterflow Diffusion Flames" at the 27th International Symposium on Combustion in Boulder, Colorado, on August 7.

Professor Ronald Schrimpf, ECE, and Dean Kenneth Galloway received the Outstanding Paper Award at the 1998 IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference held in Newport Beach, California, in July. Their paper, "Space Charge Limited Degradation of Bipolar Oxides at Low Electric Fields," will appear in the IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. The first author was one of their former students, Steve Witczak of the Aerospace Corporation.

Julie Sharp, associate professor of the practice of technical communication, ChE, gave a presentation, "Classroom Uses of Student Portfolios," at the annual meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education in Seattle in June and served as a moderator of the session, "Using Portfolios to Evaluate Students, Programs, and Faculty." Presenting a workshop on "Power Packaging Your Ideas" to the annual conference of the Dietary Managers Association in Nashville in July, she also published an invited article, "Power Packaging Your Ideas in a Memo," in the monthly magazine, the Dietary Manager.

During the June graduation ceremony at Drexel University, Professor Richard Shiavi, BME, EE, was recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus for his contributions to the field of biomedical engineering. He also was involved in the recent NASA mission, NEUROLAB, as a member of the autonomic nervous system team. The mission's goal is to uncover changes in blood pressure control during space flight that lead to problems astronauts encounter after flight. Shiavi helped design and test the instrument needed for measuring activity of the nervous system and contributed to the post-flight analysis of the data.

Edward L. Thackston, professor, CE, was invited to present the results of a recent research project at a workshop in Portland, Oregon, sponsored by the Corps of Engineers. The project involved the use of the Corps' water quality model, CE-QUAL-W2, and he reported on the modeling of Cumberland River water quality that allowed Nashville to alter its combined sewer overflow correction plan, saving $106 million. Of eight speakers reporting on successful use of the model, the first three were from Vanderbilt. Preceding Thackston on the program were Paul Craig, '78, owner of a consulting engineering firm in Knoxville, and James Bowen, MS '83, assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

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