Freshman Geoffrey Schmidt attended last month's Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm as part of his award for being a top winner at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Ft. Worth, TX in May 1998. The native of Little Rock won one of two ISEF Glenn T. Seaborg Nobel Trip Awards for his project entitled "3-D Computer Graphics Visible-Surface Determination Using Hierarchical Beam Tree Clipping," which makes it possible for computer graphics imaging software to render larger, more complex 3-D models in less time than with applications now on the market.
At the fair, which featured 1,200 participants from 34 countries, Mr. Schmidt was also one of three winners of a $40,000 Intel Young Scientist Scholarship, and one of four Pinnacle Award winners whose projects were sent to international fairs.
Professor Robert S. Langer is one of 50 "R&D Stars To Watch" selected by Industry Week magazine. Those chosen are people "whose achievements are shaping the future of industrial culture and technology policy," the magazine wrote in its December 21 issue. "The recipient of this year's Lemelson-MIT Prize, Langer is considered a pioneer in biomedical and chemical engineering. As the holder of 320 patents, his discoveries are at the heart of the emerging technology of tissue engineering. Langer's findings at the Children's Hospital in Boston have revolutionized biomaterials research and technology," the authors wrote.
Professors Joshua Angrist and Ricardo Caballero of the Department of Economics have been elected Fellows of the Econometric Society, an international society dedicated to the advancement of economic theory in its relation to statistics and mathematics. Professor Angrist studies human capital, schooling, and the economics of the family, evaluation research methodology, and program and policy. Professor Caballero's research interests include macroeconomic implications of transactional problems in labor and financial markets; restructuring, productivity and technological unemployment; and capital flows.
The Whitehead Memorial Lecture of the 1998 Conference on Electrical Insulation and Dielectric Phenomena, which annually recognizes the most sustained and significant work in the field of electrical insulation and dielectrics, was given this year by Professor Markus Zahn of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS). His lecture was entitled "Optical, Electrical and Electromechanical Measurement Methodologies of Electric Field, Charge and Polarization in Dielectrics."
Two graduate students, Alexander V. Mamishev and Matthew R. Tate, have received 1998 American Vacuum Society Graduate Student Research Awards of $1,000 each. Mr. Tate, a PhD candidate in chemistry, is studying the chemical reaction dynamics of gas-surface systems related to semiconductor etching. Mr. Mamishev, a PhD candidate in EECS, is researching development of instrumentation and algorithms for characterisation of bulk and surface properties of dielectric materials.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 13, 1999.
