Personal Mention
Four distinguished young faculty in the College of Engineering have been awarded the 2017 Dean’s Early Career Fellowships for groundbreaking work in their fields. The awardees are Albert Presto from the Mechanical Engineering Department; Deanna Matthews and Meagan Mauter from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy; and Steven Chase from the Biomedical Engineering Department. The fellowships will provide funding to further their outstanding research.
The Dean’s Early Career Fellowships are awarded to untenured faculty members who have been nominated by their department heads and then selected to receive the fellowship after review and discussion by the College of Engineering's Review Committee. Presto researches and implements new methods to better understand air pollution in urban environments. Matthews is actively searching, exploring and implementing mechanisms to improve the EPP student experience. Chase has research interests in information representation in neural systems, brain-computer interfaces, neural signal processing and learning, adaptation and motor control. Mauter runs the Water and Energy Efficiency for the Environment (WE3) Lab. Read more.
School of Computer Science alumnus Harry Shum has been elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Born in China, Shum earned a Ph.D. in robotics at CMU in 1996, and now is executive vice president of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research group. He was recognized by the NAE "for contributions to computer vision and computer graphics, and for leadership in industrial research and product development." In his current position, Shum is responsible for driving Microsoft's overall AI strategy and forward-looking research and development efforts spanning infrastructure, services, apps and agents. He oversees AI-focused product groups (the Information Platform Group, Bing and Cortana product groups) and the Ambient Computing and Robotics teams. He also leads Microsoft Research, one of the world's premier computer science research organizations, and its integration with engineering teams across the company. Learn more.
Artist, educator and activist Jon Rubin has been named the first master's degree program director for Carnegie Mellon's School of Art. Rubin, an associate professor of art, is recognized as a leading artist in the field of social and contextual practice. Rubin is among the first artists selected by the Guggenheim Museum to take part in a new Social Practice Art Initiative this spring. The appointment is the first step in the School of Art's graduate initiative, which aims to establish a core faculty, increased funding and a new studio facility. Read more.
Citizen science is not a new concept. The Smithsonian Institute relied on the practice to gather data for a weather project in the mid-1800s. But the digital age has vastly expanded its potential and usefulness. James Wynn, associate professor of English and rhetoric, explores the rhetoric, science and public engagement of it in the new book, "Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science and Public Engagement.” Read more.
From the last meals his mother is able to cook and joy rides to Canada, to childhood and the end of it, Jim Daniels circles back to his life in Detroit in his 15th book of poetry, “Rowing Inland.” Similar to many of Daniels’ works, urban and working-class life appear throughout the four sections of the collection. While Detroit shows up in many of Daniels’ pieces, this time around he’s looking at it as both an insider and an outsider. Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English. Learn more about the book and watch a video of Daniels reading a few of its poems.