Professor Dickinson Joins GALCIT Faculty
06-02-17
Professor Michael Dickinson joins the GALCIT faculty as the Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering and Aeronautics. Professor Dickinson has spent the last 25 years creatively pairing physics with biology to probe and understand at a detailed level how animals move, behave and make decisions – work that has advanced a number of divergent fields, ranging from aerodynamics to neuroscience. GALCIT Director Mory Gharib welcomes the potential that Michael brings to GALCIT for collaborating on activities such as development of advanced experimental techniques for unsteady aerodynamic visualizations and measurements; unsteady flight dynamics and characterization of engineering principles underlying biological systems. GALCIT is also looking forward to Professor Dickinson’s involvement in research projects under development in the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST) which is currently under construction in GALCIT.
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Michael Dickinson
The Future is Autonomous
05-01-17
On April 19, 2017 Electrical Engineering alumnus Evangelos Simoudis (BS '83) moderated a panel titled "The Road Ahead: A Panel on the Future of Driverless Vehicles," hosted by the Caltech Associates. The panel members were Professors Mory Gharib, Richard Murray, and Pietro Perona, along with Reuters automotive industry reporter, Paul Lienert. They discuss a variety of opportunities and challenges associated with autonomous technologies and systems. Beyond the legal and ethical challenges, several technological obstacles must be overcome before driverless cars become common on the road. One key challenge is teaching driverless cars how to read the behavior of other cars and react accordingly. Professor Perona described the problem of a car attempting to merge onto a crowded freeway. A driverless car would see an impenetrable wall of vehicles, but a human driver could edge forward and wave at other drivers to work his or her way into the line of traffic. [Caltech story]
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EE
GALCIT
CMS
Morteza Gharib
Pietro Perona
alumni
Richard Murray
Evangelos Simoudis
Paul Lienert
Professor McKeon Named Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow
03-29-17
Beverley J. McKeon, Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics; Associate Director, Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, has been named by the Department of Defense (DoD) as a 2017 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow. “The fellowship program provides research awards to top-tier researchers from U.S. universities to conduct revolutionary “high risk, high pay-off” research of strategic importance to the Department of Defense,” said Mary J. Miller, acting assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering. Professor McKeon has been named a fellow in the area of fluid dynamics. Her research is employs new approaches to modeling and controlling turbulent flow. [DoD release]
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honors
GALCIT
Beverley McKeon
