Electrical and computer engineering Assistant Professor Matt Reynolds was recently awarded a grant of $234,612 from NSF for a three-year project entitled "Assistive Object Manipulation via RFID Guided Robots." He will leverage his experience with RFID signal processing to create a new form of digital vision, fusing metadata from RFID tags with vision and laser rangefinder data to improve the navigation and manipulation capability of autonomous robots. This project is part of a larger effort with colleagues at Georgia Tech to build autonomous service robots for people with disabilities.

Mechanical engineering Associate Professor Stefano Curtarolo’s research was selected for the cover of the July 31 Physical Review Letters journal. The cover art, featuring green Fullerene molecules adsorbed on a blue silver surface, was generated for his article titled “Surface Geometry of C60 on Ag(111).” Read the full article.

Earl Dowell, the William Holland Hall Professor of Mechanical Engineering, was recently awarded the J.P. Den Hartog Award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The award was established to recognize lifetime contributions to teaching and practice of vibration engineering.

Jim Ruth has been named the new Director of Major Gifts. A 2001 Pratt graduate in mechanical engineering with a minor in economics, Ruth was also the founder and president of Duke’s waterski team and a member of the women’s basketball practice squad. He comes to Pratt from the North Carolina State University Libraries, where he served as Director of Friends of the Library and Annual Giving. In addition to being a Duke alum he also holds a Masters of Library Science degree from UNC.

The New York Times ran a story written by Master of Engineering Management student Harsimarbir Singh. In his essay titled “Becoming a Dukie (and an American),” Singh painted an engaging view of what’s it’s like to leave your home country to embrace life and higher education in a foreign land. Read the entire piece.