Personal Mention

Roberta L. Klatzky, a world-renowned expert in cognition, has been awarded the 2019 Association for Psychological Science (APS) James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award. The award honors psychological scientists for their lifetime of significant achievements in applied psychological research and their impact on critical problems and challenges in society at large. Klatzky will receive the award during the 2019 APS Annual Convention at the end of May, where she’ll give the talk “Sensory Technology as Target and Tool for Applied Psychological Science.” Klatzky, the Charles J. Queenan Jr. University Professor of Psychology, investigates perception, action and touch from the perspective of multiple modalities, sensory and symbolic, in real and virtual environments. Her research has been instrumental to the development of telemanipulation, image-guided surgery, navigation aids for the blind and neural rehabilitation. She also holds appointments in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the Carnegie Mellon Neuroscience Institute. Learn more.

Benjamin Moseley's project proposal has been selected to receive a Google Faculty Research Award. The award provides unrestricted gifts to fund research in computer science, engineering and other related fields. Moseley, an assistant professor of operations research and the Carnegie Bosch Junior Faculty Chair at the Tepper School of Business, will receive an unrestricted gift totaling $81,631. The awards program selects about 15 percent of applicants following a thorough Google-wide review and vetting process. Moseley's project, titled “Algorithmic Techniques for Fast Scalable Hierarchical Clustering,” will build upon his past research that deals with developing a mathematical understanding of hierarchical clustering, a data mining method utilized by data scientists. The main objective will be to develop algorithms that scale to massive data sets. Find out more.

Erina Ytsma, assistant professor of accounting at the Tepper School, and her colleague Jana Gallus of UCLA, have received a Sloan Foundation grant totaling $49,500 for their research project that studies the effects of non-financial incentives on innovative productivity on open source platforms. The project, titled "The Power of Public: Recognition and Reputation as Drivers of Open Source Success," seeks to understand how recognition and reputation affect productivity through a series of randomized field experiments on a large, international open source platform. The researchers analyze the extent to which recognition and reputational concerns succeed in driving more or better contributions to open source projects. Their project was one of 13 selected for funding from more than 240 applications.  Learn more.

Sophomore computer science major Abraham Riedel-Mishaan is featured in "Science Fair," a documentary that follows high school students as they prepared for and competed at the 2017 International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles. "Science Fair" will air at 8 p.m., today, Thursday, May 9 on the National Geographic Channel. Inspired by the 200th anniversary of French physician René Laennec's invention of the stethoscope, Riedel-Mishaan and two friends at duPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky, decided their science project would be an inexpensive, 3D-printable stethoscope that could be used to detect heart disease in medically underserved areas. Riedel-Mishaan devised an algorithm that could diagnose heart problems.The filmmakers came to duPont Manual High Sch because they knew the school regularly sends top competitors to the international fair. "It was cool to have a film crew following us around," Riedel-Mishaan said, "but no one really knew what would come of it." The team began work on the project in mid-fall 2016, entered their first competition in March 2017 and ultimately qualified for the international fair in May. Find out more.

Kashish Garg, Natalie Isenberg and Ngoc Phuong (Phoebe) Dinh are the 2019 winners of the Gelfand Student Educational Outreach Award, which recognizes students who have made a commitment to sharing their knowledge, talents, skills and time to make a difference in the lives of children in the community, with a priority for STEM educational outreach activities. 

Garg is a senior who has served as president of ECE Outreach, a student run volunteer organization that teaches middle and high school students about electrical and computer engineering via many different kinds of labs.  As the coordinator for the Psychology Outreach Program,

Dinh, a second-year Ph.D. student, works with local organizations to schedule events and leverages connections within the Psychology Department to develop content and recruit presenters for the educational programs. 

Isenberg, a third-year Ph.D. student, has served as the outreach coordinator of the Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Association for two years, working to connect the ChemE graduate student population to STEM and community outreach activities in the region.