Congratulations to Hui Hu, AerE; Pranav Shrotriya, ME; and Jiming Song, ECpE, who have each received prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development Grants. The proposal titles are:

Hu—“Development of a Molecule-Based Diagnostic Technique to Study Joule Heating and Micro-Scale Heat Transfer Process in Electrokinetically Driven Microfluidics”;





Shrotriya—“High Resolution Interferometry-Based Surface Stress Sensors for Chemical and Biological Species Detection”;






and Song—“Accurate and Efficient Electromagnetic Modeling Techniques for RF Integrated Circuits.”

The NSF Career award recognizes and supports the early career development activities of teacher-scholars who are likely to become the academic leaders of this century. Junior faculty from all over the country compete for the awards.

Iowa State’s $1.25 million IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer was unveiled to the news media on Monday. Srinivas Aluru, ECpE professor, leads the interdisciplinary research team that received an NSF grant and university support to purchase the equipment. Capable of 5.7 trillion calculations per second, the supercomputer is among the top 10 university supercomputers in the country.

Carolina Cruz-Neira is the featured speaker at the 2006 Presidential University Lecture on Monday, February 6, at 8:00 p.m. in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union. In her presentation, “The Wonders of Virtual Reality: A Research Extravaganza,” Cruz-Neira will mix presentations by her students and collaborators with engaging demonstrations for the audience. A reception and display of student research will start at 7 p.m. in the South Ballroom.

A paper by Zhiqun Lin, an MSE assistant professor, will appear in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, the most prestigious journal of the American Physical Society. Lin’s co-authors include PhD students Jun Xu and Suck Won Hong, visiting student Jianfeng Xia, and colleagues Feng Qiu and Yuliang Yang from Shanghai’s Fudan University.

Titled “Self-assembly of gradient concentric rings via solvent evaporation from a capillary bridge,” the paper examines what the authors describe as a strikingly regular pattern of gradient concentric rings resulting from the evaporation of a nonvolatile solute between a sphere and a flat surface. By manipulating the concentration of the solute together with the properties of the solvent, the researchers were able to control both the descending heights of successive rings as well as their distance from one another along the gradient path over the course of evaporation.

“The study demonstrates,” its authors assert, “that dynamic self-assembly in a confined geometry may offer a new means to produce gradient features, as well as a simple, versatile, generalizable approach to produce yet more complex patterns.”

More than merely creating intriguing patterns, Lin and his colleagues believe the nonlithographic method could find practical use in fields such as nanotechnology and optoelectronics. Specifically, the research team used a linear conjugated polymer as the nonvolatile solute because of its “numerous potential applications in the areas of LED, photovoltaic cells, thin-film transistors, and bio-sensors.”

The article will be available online February 13 at www.prl.aps.org/.

An engineering faculty meeting will be held Tuesday, February 7, from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium in Howe Hall. Faculty votes will be taken on
• A change to foreign language entrance requirements
• Software engineering program
• Engineering studies minor
Information about these topics is available on the Intranet.