An MIT graduate will be among the top winners at the 10th annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards and Conference banquet in Baltimore on February 24.
Dr. Patrick B. Usoro, principal research engineer at the General Motors Research and Development Center, will share the award for Outstanding Technical Contributions with Stanley E. Woodard, an aerospace engineer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. Usoro received the SM (1977) and ScD (1980) in mechanical engineering.
More than 6,000 engineering professionals and students will gather at the conference, created in 1986 by the Baltimore-based US Black Engineer magazine, published by Career Communications Group, Inc., and the Council of Engineering Deans of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
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MIT's programming team finished fifth at the Association for Computing Machinery's International Competition in Philadelphia last month, taking home $1,500 in prize money from Microsoft. This was its best finish in many years, said coach and Professor of Mathematics Tom Leighton of the Laboratory for Computer Science. The Institute placed seventh last year and 27th in 1994; it last won the competition in 1978. University of California-Berkeley, Harvard, Waterloo and Sofia finished ahead of MIT. Team members were Scott Smith, Brian Dean and alternate Nathan Williams, all sophomores in electrical engineering and computer science, and Matthew Levine, a graduate student in EECS. The other coaches were Assistant Professor Bonnie Berger of mathematics and the LCS, and Frans Kaashoek, Jamieson Career Development Professor of Computer Science and Engineering.
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MIT's Department of Economics is ranked among the top five in the nation in a study published in the Journal of Economic Literature.
Princeton was rated first and MIT second, followed by the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and Harvard University.
One of the measures used in the study was to rank schools according to the total number of publications by economics faculty in each school and the average number of publications per faculty member. The focus was on publication in a core set of eight "blue ribbon" journals over a five-year period from 1987 to 1991.
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Several faculty members in the Department of Economics also have received recognition.
Dr. Paul L. Joskow, Mitsui Professor of Economics and Management and head of the department, and Dr. Richard L. Schmalensee, Gordon Y Billard Professor of Management and Economics, have won the 1995 Edward A. Hewitt Prize awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. They were cited for their research on privatization and competition policy in Russia published by the Brookings Institution. They have published extensively on issues in industrial organization, antitrust policy and government regulatory policies.
Dr. Olivier J. Blanchard, Class of 1941 Professor of Economics, has been elected vice president of the American Economic Association. He has written widely on topics in macroeconomic theory and policy.
Dr. Glenn D. Ellison, Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Economics, has been awarded a prestigious Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship. Professor Ellison is an expert on game theory and industrial organization.
Dr. Abhijit Banerjee, associate professor of economics, has been elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He joins 15 other department faculty and emeriti who have been elected as Fellows. Professor Banerjee studies problems of developing countries.
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One of MIT's most famous alumni, world-renowned architect I.M. Pei, will soon add a new award to his many honors.
He has been selected to receive the Municipal Art Society of New York's highest honor, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal, given to an individual who by his or her work has made an outstanding contribution to the City of New York in the field of architecture, urban design and planning, and the arts. The award will be presented on February 27 by the late Mrs. Onassis' two children, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.
Mr. Pei, who received the BA in architecture from MIT in 1940, has designed some of the world's best-known structures, including the Pyramid of the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.
He is best known for his use of simple, sculptural forms and his devotion to rigorous geometry.
His talent has contributed to the MIT campus in his design of four buildings, all within a few hundred feet of each other-the Wiesner Building (E15), the Green Building (54), the Landau Building (66) and the Dreyfus Building (18).
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Dr. Richard J. Temkin, a senior scientist in the Department of Physics, is the recipient of the 1995 Kenneth J. Button Prize in Far Infrared Physics awarded by the Institute of Physics, London.
The prize is given annually in recognition of outstanding contributions in the field of infrared and millimeter waves.
Dr. Temkin heads the Waves and Beams Division of the MIT Plasma Fusion Center. His citation reads: "For leadership in the research, development and application of high-power coherent sources at infrared and millimeter wavelengths, especially the high- frequency gyrotron."
Dr. Temkin's research has been primarily on the development of high-power (one megawatt), high-frequency gyrotrons. The gyrotron is a microwave generator which operates at cyclotron resonance in a high magnetic field. It is used in plasma heating, radar, electron spin resonance spectroscopy and other scientific and industrial applications.
Dr. Temkin and coworkers were the first to demonstrate a high-power gyrotron at a frequency above 100 GHz in1982.
The Kenneth J. Button Prize is one of a series of prizes and medals awarded by The Institute of Physics in recognition of advances in the Science of the Electromagnetic Spectrum. The prize was established in 1990.
Dr. Temkin is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
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Dr. Herman Chernoff, professor emeritus of applied mathematics, will travel to Italy in April to receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Rome.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 13, 1996.
