This feature debuted in the Spring 2013 issue of ECpE Connections Magazine Brian Kraus, Robert Romore, and Jacob Cramer are architects, but they don’t build museums. They’re designers, but they don’t lay out magazines. They work with physics, but they’re not physicists. All three are software engineering majors, but they consider themselves game developers at heart. [...]
Engineering students learn glassblowing skills through Gaffer’s Guild
March 1, 2013 By
Blowing glass is a form of art that takes practice to perfect. The glassblowing studio on campus has been used to perfect that art within the Gaffer’s Guild. The Gaffer’s Guild is made up of ISU students and Ames residents who learn to create unique glass objects. “Your imagination is your limit,” said Tanner Borglum, [...]
Liang Dong featured in Lab on a Chip Journal
February 28, 2013 By
By Thane Himes ECpE professor Liang Dong’s latest research recently was featured on the back cover of the journal, Lab on a Chip. Dong’s research project, which is a collaboration with Richard Martin, Professor, of Veterinary Medicine at Iowa State, focuses on a high-throughput, low-cost way to monitor the movement of microscopic nematodes using a [...]
Jacobson wins IEEE award for education innovation
February 27, 2013 By
Doug Jacobson, University Professor of electrical and computer engineering and IEEE fellow, was presented with a 2012 Major Educational Innovation Award from the IEEE Educational Activities Board at a ceremony held in Austin, Texas, February 15. The award recognized Jacobson’s career in instruction and educational outreach, citing him for “creating innovative materials that support the [...]
Industrial design class tackles tractor rollover safety products and outreach
February 22, 2013 By
A research and outreach collaboration led by Iowa State’s Department of Industrial Design has designed an amazingly simple product that could save hundreds of farmers lives in Iowa alone. They have developed a prototype of a device that addresses one aspect of tractor rollover fatalities: response time. The tractor-mounted communications device alerts family and emergency [...]
ISU Group Visits Garmin Headquarters
January 23, 2013 By
A group of Iowa State faculty, staff, and students visited Garmin International in Olathe, Kan. late last year. The trip, led by Anson Marston Distinguished Professor and Palmer Endowed Department Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering David Jiles, included a number of Garmin Scholars and several representatives from the Iowa State College of Engineering and [...]
Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust funds brain stimulation research
January 11, 2013 By
The Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust of Muscatine, Iowa, recently committed $395,280 over a two-year period to establish a laboratory for brain stimulation research at Iowa State University. “We believe this is an important area with a range of likely beneficial impacts for health care,” said David C. Jiles, principal investigator for the project, and [...]
Roohparvar named COO of Skyera
December 10, 2012 By
Iowa State University alumnus Frankie Roohparvar (BS CE ’84) has been named Skyera’s new Chief Operating Officer. Roohparvar has nearly 30 years of professional experience and has joined Skyera after 13 years at Micron, where he worked primarily with Flash memory and NAND development. “Having been involved with NAND from the early days of its [...]
ECpE researcher completes lab on a chip device
October 25, 2012 By
by Thane Himes Liang Dong recently completed research on a device that can help scientists find more effective ways to protect crops and combat Parkinson’s disease by studying, of all things, worms. Nematodes possess simple nervous systems, but still share important characteristics with the nervous systems of humans. By studying nematode nerves, researchers can learn more [...]
Xiu advances discovery on emerging topological insulators; paper featured in Nature Journal—Scientific Reports
October 15, 2012 By
Faxian Xiu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his senior postdoctoral fellow Lihong Bao have published successive works on topological insulators in the Nature Journal Scientific Reports. The original article, published on September 18, discussed findings that indicate unique electrical charge carrier transport exists on the surfaces of topological insulator thin films. The [...]
Texas Instruments adopts ECpE researcher’s testing algorithm
October 9, 2012 By
by Thane Himes High-performance semiconductors are individually tested to guarantee quality before they can be shipped to customers. This is done by inputting precisely known data values into a part, and measuring how the part responds to the input data. As Moore’s law continues to push up performance and push down prices, test time has [...]
Students will be doing vulnerability tests on security products at Iowa State University’s new lab
October 1, 2012 By
Iowa State University (ISU) is setting up a product-security test and evaluation lab where university students will be assessing network security products’ strengths and weaknesses in a formal program supervised by faculty and a newly named lab director. “We have a large pool of students interested in cybersecurity,” says Dr. Doug Jacobson, director of ISU’s [...]
New NSF award for high-performance computing
September 27, 2012 By
From the office of the CIO at Iowa State University The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Iowa State University a $1.8 million grant for a high-performance computing (HPC) system. Nearly all of the grant will go directly to purchasing computer equipment for science and engineering. Iowa State will provide an additional $780k as a [...]
Xiu’s research on topological insulators published in Scientific Reports, hosted on Nature.com
September 18, 2012 By
The research of Faxian Xiu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and his first PhD student Nicholas Meyer attracted global attention when it was published in Scientific Reports, a primary research publication from the publishers of Nature. As part of this research, Xiu and his team have grown high-quality topological insulator thin films on [...]
ECpE grad student wins IEEE poster contest
September 17, 2012 By
by Thane Himes Subhadarshi Sarkar, grad student in electrical engineering, was awarded first prize at the 2012 IEEE PES General Meeting Student Poster Contest in July for his presentation on optimal renewable energy. Sarkar presented his poster to judges, professors, students, and professionals at the general meeting. The next day, he found out that he [...]
ECpE alum, former professor honored by IEEE
September 10, 2012 By
by Thane Himes Vijay Vittal (PhD EE ’82), former distinguished professor of electrical engineering at ECpE, has been named the 2013 recipient of the IEEE Herman Halperin Electric Transmission and Distribution Award. Vittal’s work includes a number of projects in several areas, including online dynamic security assessment, the application of a new analytical methods to [...]
Teachings, interests, and skills shape ECpE lecturer’s philosophy
September 7, 2012 By
Mani Mina is an educator and researcher, as well as a practitioner of martial arts. He believes the three are intricately related, helping him meet the demands of teaching larger classes as well as performing research that adds value in both educational and technical fields. The key, says Mina, who is a senior lecturer in [...]
Quantifying Cascading Failure
August 17, 2012 By
Around 2 p.m. on August 14, 2003, an overhead transmission line carrying 345 kilovolts of electricity near Walton Hills, Ohio sagged too close to a nearby tree and shorted out. By 4 p.m., more than 50 million people were affected by one of the largest blackouts in history. In September 2011, an Arizona Public Works [...]
ECpE mourns loss of alum
July 6, 2012 By
ECpE lost one of its most treasured alums last week. Richard Kohler (RK) Richards died Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at Mary Greeley Hospital. He was 90. RK graduated from Iowa State with an Electrical Engineering degree in 1943 and, after serving in the army Signal Corps during World War II, obtained a PhD in theoretical [...]
ECpE engineers featured in EEWeb
June 27, 2012 By
Manimaran Govindarasu, Professor and Associate Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Doug Jacobson, University Professor, and Koray Celik, ECpE graduate assistant, were featured this week in EEWeb, one of the premier online communities for electrical engineering hardware designers. Govindarsu discusses how he first became interested in the engineering field and what is on his book shelf. [...]
Keystrokes yield ID clues
June 11, 2012 By
Written by Perry Beeman Des Moines Register The way you type on your computer’s keyboard is as unique as your handwriting, and may even be a matter of national security, says an Iowa State University engineering professor. The U.S. Department of Defense, looking for better ways than hacker-prone passwords to protect its systems, is betting a [...]
Four from ECpE earn NSF CAREER Awards
June 5, 2012 By
Four researchers in the Iowa State Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering were awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in 2012. Santosh Pandey, Aditya Ramamoorthy, Umesh Vaidya and Joseph Zambreno each earned awards and pushed the department’s total number of NSF CAREER Awards to 16. The four awards represent [...]
Engineering professor and student bond over shared interests
May 30, 2012 By
Traditionally, graduate students and their major professors become very well acquainted. They spend hours together furthering research and exploring new theories. Every now and again, a passion outside of academics crops up, just as it has for Doug Jacobson and Joseph Idziorek, who formed a unique bond over foot races that have had them doing [...]
