Dr. Alan C. Bovik has been selected to receive the 2008-2009 Claude R. Hocott Distinguished Centennial Engineering Research Award. Dr. Bovik will receive the award at the Faculty Excellence Awards Dinner later this fall.

Dr. Charles Roth has received the 2008 McGuffey Longevity Award for his fifth edition of Fundamentals of Logic Design. The Text and Academic Authors Association created the McGuffey Longevity Awards in 1993 to recognize textbooks and learning materials demonstrating excellence over a significant period of time. Works must have been in print at least 15 years and currently remain in circulation and use.

ECE professor Michael Orshansky has just published a book on the emerging techniques for design for manufacturability. Manufacturability has become a crucial challenge in the design of nanometer scale integrated circuits and systems. The book—co-authored by IBM researcher Dr. Sani Nassif and MIT professor Duane Boning—is entitled Design for Manufacturability and Statistical Design: A Constructive Approach.

ECE Professor Seth Bank has just been selected to receive the 2008 Young Investigator Award that is presented by the North American Molecular Beam Epitaxy (NAMBE) Advisory Board. The award will be presented at the 2008 NAMBE conference, which is being held in Vancouver, Canada on August 3-8.

ECE graduate student Patrick Doody received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship for 2008. Each year NSF offers about 1,000 fellowships nationwide to provide graduate students with up to $40,000 annual support for three years.

Prof. Sriram Vishwanath is working on a novel solution to the wireless bandwidth needs of the future. Wireless multimedia applications require significant bandwidth, some of which will be provided by third-generation (3G) services. Even with substantial investment in 3G infrastructure, the radio spectrum allocated to 3G will be limited.

Professors Jon Valvano and John Pearce are testing an enhancement to pacemakers that measures heart volume. For many, heart disease is a cycle: the heart swells, the lungs get wet, and drug therapy in a hospital is the treatment. Early detection of increased heart volume could drastically reduce medical expenses and dramatically improve a patient's quality of life.

Dr. Joydeep Ghosh applies data mining techniques to remotely sensed and GIS data to develop a comprehensive framework for efficient and accurate mapping, monitoring, and modeling of land cover and changes in usage over large regions.

Dr. Arjang Hassibi's research focuses on new approaches to sense, detect, and analyze biological systems using integrated systems and advanced signal processing techniques. His interdisciplinary research group addresses technical challenges at the interface of engineering and biotechnology.

His current research focuses on developing ultra-high throughput, ultra-low cost portable biosensors. These devices will lead to a significant cost-savings, throughput increases, and enable heretofore infeasible biological assays making in the field biological testing a reality.

ECE grad student Chulhan Lee, Prof. Sriram Vishwanath, Texas A&M Prof Tie Liu, and Intel's Dr. Ozgur Oyman received the Best Paper Award at the 2008 International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications (CrownCom). Their paper Limits on Cognitive Communications in the Wideband Regime proposes a novel solution to the wireless bandwidth needs of the future.