Personal Mention

Martial Hebert, a leading researcher in computer vision and robotics at Carnegie Mellon since 1984, will become director of the Robotics Institute, effective Nov. 15. Hebert succeeds Matthew Mason, who will return to teaching and his research in robotic manipulation after leading the institute for the last decade. Hebert joined the Robotics Institute in 1984, just five years after the Robotics Institute was founded, and was named a full professor in 1999. The Robotics Institute has since grown into the world's largest robotics education and research institution, with an annual research budget of more than $54 million. Hebert has played a role in such high-profile projects as NavLab, a pioneering program for self-driving vehicles, and in leading the development of perception capabilities for personal care robots in the Quality of Life Technology Center. His research interests include computer vision, especially recognition in images and video data; model building and object recognition from 3-D data; and perception for mobile robots and intelligent vehicles. His group has developed approaches to object recognition and scene analysis in images, 3-D point clouds and video sequences. Learn more.

Tabitha Voytek, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics and a member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology, has won the outstanding collegiate member award from the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). She was specifically honored "for being a role model for women in science and engineering and inspiring graduate student involvement in SWE through creative new initiatives." The prize was awarded at the annual SWE conference in Los Angeles this year. In 2009, Voytek joined the Physics Department, where she now works with her Ph.D. adviser Professor Jeffrey Peterson on observational 21-cm cosmology, aiming to unveil the early history of the universe by looking at its large-scale structure. Learn more.

JitKang Lim, who earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at CMU in 2009, has won the National Young Scientist Award of the Malaysian Government. The award is the highest honor that can be given to a scientist at the age of 35 or younger by the Malaysian government. Lim received his award, administered by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, from Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin at a Nov. 1 ceremony. Lim is a senior lecturer in the School of Chemical Engineering at the Universit Sains Malaysia, where his research group specializes in hybrid magnetic nanomaterials and their applications. He also has received the 2014 Universiti Sains Malaysia Outstanding Service Award, the 2013 Takeda Young Entrepreneurship Award and is the founding chair of the American Chemical Society Local Chapter of Malaysia. Lim completed his Ph.D. dissertation on “Design and Synthesis of Magnetic Nanoparticles with Gold Shells for Single Particle Optical Tracking” under the joint supervision of Bob Tilton, professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering, and Physics Professor Sara Majetich.