Personal Mention
Jonathan A. Malen, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has been awarded the Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Malen developed a new experimental approach to study how different phonons — vibrational waves that carry heat — contribute to thermal conductivity in solids. He will receive the award at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition in November. He runs the Malen Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon.
Mechanical Engineering Professor Shelley L. Anna has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for her work on controlling microfluidic tip streaming to generate droplets less than a micrometer in size. Nominated by the society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, Anna will receive the award during the division’s annual meeting in San Francisco in November. Fellows make up only one half of 1 percent of APS members. Anna has joint appointments in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering, and a courtesy appointment in Physics. She runs the AnnaLab at Carnegie Mellon, developing microscale experimental methods to probe and control liquid-fluid interfaces.
People are always coming and going, leaving one place on their way to another. And often they spend the time in those “non-places” in between staring at a mobile device. Justin Cranshaw, a Ph.D. student in the Institute for Software Research, has helped Microsoft develop an app to see if those people in non-places might constitute communities. The app, announced by Microsoft this week, will be released first for Android, and eventually for iOS and Windows phones. Cranshaw, whose research explores the future of cities in this age of ubiquitous and social computation, helped develop the app, called Journeys and Notes, while interning last summer at Microsoft Research. Journeys and Notes gives people who want to share transit woes, stories and tips to have a way to connect with others without the need to exchange names. The app’s algorithm connects people with similar commutes, based on their origin, destination and distance. The app was developed as part of Microsoft Garage, the company’s initiative to encourage its employees to experiment and innovate, often in side projects.
Anita Woolley, assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory at the Tepper School of Business, was named one of the most 30 influential industrial and organizational psychologists by Human Resources MBA. Woolley was recognized for her concept that teams of individuals possess a “collective intelligence” and that intelligence rises in correlation to the number of women who are on the team. Her 2010 study was published in the journal Science. Learn more about the study.
English Professor Kristina Straub is curating an exhibit for the Folger Shakespeare Library titled "Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen, and the Cult of Celebrity." Debuting in fall 2016, the exhibit will coincide with the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the upcoming bicentenary of Austen’s death. The exhibit, which will include much more than books, will explore how Shakespeare was celebrated 200 years ago in order to compare public spectacles like Garrick’s Jubilee and Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery to today’s media celebrations such as BBC "bonnet dramas" made from Austen’s works. Learn more.
Elizabeth Finley, a student in the Department of English’s Master of Arts in Professional Writing (MAPW) Program, wrote a piece for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s The Next Page titled "CMU Classroom innovator brought science and art under same roof." Finley adapted the piece from an assignment she wrote about her mentor, Patricia Maurides, adjunct associate professor of art. Read it.