Claude Lupis, the Danae and Vasilis Salapatas Professor of Ferrous Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received the 1999 Extraction and Processing Distinguished Lecturer Award from the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society at its Annual conference in San Diego. He was cited for his "scientific leadership in the extraction and processing of nonferrous metals and for delivering his lecture entitled 'Greenhouse Gases and the Metallurgical Process Industry.'"
Professor of Architecture Jan Wampler received the annual Distinguished Professor Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) at a ceremony in Minneapolis on March 21. A short profile in ACSA News said Professor Wampler "has demonstrated distinctive and effective studio teaching throughout his career. He values a full and tangible grasp on life for himself and for others, be they his students, clients, or unknown eventual users of the spaces he designs or builds... Term after term, at whatever level, he brings out the best in his students."
Assistant Professor Hari Balakrishnan of electrical engineering and computer science and a member of the Laboratory for Computer Science has won the Association for Computing Machinery's Doctoral Dissertation Award. His award-winning thesis, "Challenges to Reliable Data Transport Over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks," was completed at the University of California at Berkeley. It presents ways to improve the performance of TCP (transmission control protocol) over a variety of wireless networks. The award is presented annually to the author of the best doctoral dissertation in computer science and engineering. The award consists of a $1,000 prize and the publication of the winning dissertation by Springer-Verlag.
A team from MIT took second place in this year's William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition held in December. The team -- Amit Khetan, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and mathematics seniors Eric Kuo and Edward D. Lee -- won $800 apiece as well as $20,000 for MIT's Department of Mathematics. They were selected to represent MIT by Professors Richard Stanley and Hartley Rogers, the team's coaches. Harvard won the competition with the highest three-person team total score, while Princeton took third place and Caltech finished fourth. Almost 2,600 students (including more than 60 at MIT) from several hundred US and Canadian universities took the competition's exam as individuals. Mr. Khetan and freshman Abhinav Kumar had two of the top 25 individual scores in the competition. Seven more MIT students (including three freshmen) finished in the top 60.
Ernest Rabinowicz, professor emeritus and senior lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was awarded the 1998 Tribology Gold Medal Award by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in England. He is recognized as a leader in the field of tribology, performing critical experiments to clarify the fundamental friction and wear of mechanisms. His seminal book Friction and Wear of Materials (John Wiley & Sons, 1965, reissued in 1995) has been widely cited in the literature. Professor Rabinowicz also produced a video through the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Studies which has been used by many engineers in industry to learn the subject.
A version of this article appeared in the April 7, 1999 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 43, Number 25).
