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Home > News > Weekly News Archive > Weekly News from 2004-05 > January 3, 2005
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ECE Department Weekly Newsletter January 3, 2005 |
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CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN It is with pleasure that I welcome our faculty, staff, and students to the beginning of Winter Quarter 2005. Happy New Year to all. We hope you enjoyed the break and the holidays, and that you are coming back refreshed to start working five days a week again. Congratulations are in order to our colleagues: Professor Razeghi has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) for her pioneering work on optoelectronic quantum devices including quantum well infrared detectors, quantum cascade lasers, high power lasers, GaN-GaAlN visible and UV emitters and detectors. Professor Kumar received a gift-in-kind from Tyko Telecommunications to the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing. Professor Nocedal is now included on the ISI highly cited list. I was delighted to see an invited paper from Professors Katsaggelos, Pappas, and Berry in the special issue of the IEEE Proceedings of January 2005. It is a great honor to be included in the Proceedings. We hope to hear more of such honors during the rest of the Quarter. Enjoy the Winter quarter!
-Abe Haddad EXAMINATIONS
Tuesday, January 4, 2005: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination - 3:30 p.m. TRAVEL Randy Freeman traveled to Paradise Island, Bahamas, December 13-17, to attend the 2004 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, chairing two sessions and presenting two papers. Gokhan Memik traveled to Portland, OR, December 4-8, to attend International Symposium on Microarchitecture 2004. His student, Arindam Mallik, presented a paper entitled "A Case for Clumsy Packet Processors." Bruce Wessels traveled to SUNY Albany on December 10 and presented a paper entitled, "Ferromagnetic III-V semiconductors." OTHER NEWS As reported in our March 17-21, 2003, Newsletter, McCormick Faculty Fellow, Frank Splitt, has been working on the Campaign for Systemic Engineering Education Reform, a.k.a. the SEER Campaign. The ultimate aims of this nationwide reform campaign are to provide undergraduate engineering students with significantly better preparation for the 21st-century engineering workplace and to help attract and retain more of the "best and brightest" students on campus as well as involve some of the best minds among our faculty. John Birge, former Dean of the McCormick School, and numerous engineering education notables provided endorsements and personal commentaries* on "A Proposed Change to ABET EC 2000." Dr. James Duderstadt, University of Michigan President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, was a strong supporter of the SEER Campaign. According to Dr. Splitt, Dr. Duderstadt also provided the motivation that led to his work with the Drake Group and the publication of the brief*, "Reclaiming Academic Primacy in Higher Education," and its sequel*, "The Faculty-Driven Movement to Reform Big-Time College Sports." Dr. Splitt argued the case for the revisions to EC 2000 in his trilogy on Engineering Education Reform that was published in 2002 - serving as the SEER Campaign "white paper." His summary article*, "Systemic Engineering Education Reform: A Grand Challenge," appeared in The BENT of Tau Beta Pi. The revised Engineering Criteria were approved at the ABET Board's fall meeting this past October. The ABET Engineering Criteria will now reflect the aims of the environment-related initiative that began in the fall of 2001. The revised criteria will be applicable for accreditation visits commencing in fall 2005. Engineering programs must then demonstrate that their students attain an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs within realistic constraints such as economic, environmental, social, political, ethical, health and safety, manufacturability, and sustainability, as well as demonstrate the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context. See the ABET Website, http://www.abet.org/criteria.html, for the precise wording of the new criteria for 2005-06. Additionally, this past January, Dr. Splitt served as a keynoter at the 2004 Photonics West Conference. His address, "The Fraying Web of Life and Our Future Engineers," led to a derivative paper, "Engineering Education Reform: Signs of Progress," that appears in the December 2004, issue of the International Journal of Engineering Education. He also collaborated with Professor Linda Vanasupa, Chair of the Materials Engineering Department at California Polytechnic, in presentations at the Materials Research Society's Annual Conference in April 2004 and at the "Sustainability and Higher Education" Conference at the University of Portland in October 2004.
*Note: Asterisked items can be viewed at
http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/EXTERNAL/Splitt/.
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© 2002 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, |
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