Hongyan Yuan, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics, under the advising of Dr. Sulin Zhang, attended a one-week summer school on Biomechanics at the California Institute of Technology from July 20 - 26, 2008 in Pasadena, California.

Sean Pursel, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics, under the advising of Dr. Mark Horn, will be presenting a paper titled “Growth Characterization of Magnesium and Magnesium Alloy Sculptured Thin Films,” at the SPIE Optics and Photonics Nanostructured Thin Films meeting on August 10 - 15, 2008 in San Diego, California. To read more about the meeting, please visit their website.

Jonathan Pitt, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics, under the advising of Professor Fancesco Costanzo, presented a paper on “Theory and Simulation of Brittle Damage Model in Thermelastodynamics.” The paper was presented at the 8th World Congress on Computational Mechanics on June 29 - July 5, 2008 in Venice, Italy.

To learn more about the conference, please visit their website.

Michael Motyka, graduate researcher in engineering science and mechanics, under the advising of Professor Akhlesh Lakhtakia, is to present a paper at the SPIE conference on nanostructured thin films on August 8 - 15, 2008, in San Diego, CA.

To learn more about the SPIE conference, please visit their website.

Niranjan Malvadkar, doctoral student in engineering science and mechanics, under the advising of Professor Melik Demirel, gave an oral presentation on “Chemically Functional Nanostructure Anti-fouling Coatings,” at the 14th International Congress on Marine Corrosion and Fouling in Kobe, Japan July 27-31, 2008.

To learn more about the meeting, please visit their website.

Sahar Maghsoudy-Louyeh, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics under the advising of Dr. Bernhard Tittmann, delivered an invited presentation at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) on May 29, 2008 in Los Angeles, CA. To read more about the lab, please visit their website.

Kamrun Nahar, post-doctoral scholar in engineering science and mechanics, under the advising of Dr. Steven Schiff, Brush Chair Professor of Engineering, presented a research paper entitled: “Model-based Discrimination of Tasks towards to Development of Brian Machine Interfaces (BMI)”. The paper presentation was at the Bio- and Medical Informatics and Cybernetics: BMIC 2008 on June 29 - July 2, 2008.

The presentation was a demonstration that in the newly developed brain machine interface laboratory. Along with increasing interest in the field, Kamrun has started generating research results taking a different approach than commonly used, and his approach has significant potential for future applications in this field of research.

To learn more about the Center for Neural Engineering, please visit their website.

John Petrilli, graduate student in engineering science and mechanics under the advising of Professor Barbara Shaw, has been selected to receive the NASA Space Grant Fellowship for two years during the 08-09 and 09-10 academic years.

The Fellowship’s mission is to increase awareness of and participation in science, math, engineering, and technology for all citizens. Join ESM in congratulating John for this outstanding opportunity.