MIT Professor Emeritus of Chemical and Fuel Engineering János Miklós Beér was recently awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic, which was recommended by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Power Industries. He was presented with the award on March 17. The citation of the award mentions Beér's support of Hungarian higher education and research, among his other lifelong work.
The journal Science, published by the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science, recently announced plans to expand its online journal, Science Signaling, which focuses on new insights for combating disease as well as understanding normal human biology, and named Michael B. Yaffe, associate professor of biology and biological engineering at MIT, as chief scientific editor for Science Signaling.
Edward B. Roberts, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is the fourth recipient of the annual Adolf F. Monosson Prize for Entrepreneurship Mentoring. He was presented this prestigious award by Kenneth P. Morse, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, at the April 17 reception for CEOs of the MIT Entrepreneurship Laboratory (E-Lab) host companies. Roberts was awarded for his extensive mentoring of aspiring entrepreneurs in the classroom and seasoned entrepreneurs active in the business world.
Environmental engineering junior Allison St. Vincent won a $5,000 Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (SGH) Scholarship on April 7 at the annual "Student Night" of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The event, hosted by students in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and sponsored by the department, brought together more than 60 engineers from industry and Boston-area universities for dinner at the MIT Faculty Club. This year the engineering firm SGH awarded its annual scholarship for the best essay proposing how the civil-engineering industry can address environmental concerns in a global market. In her winning essay, St. Vincent called for an interdisciplinary approach across the subdisciplines of the civil and environmental engineering fields to help ensure that engineers implement sustainable solutions.
Michael Metzger, a research assistant in the MIT Engineering Systems Division's Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals and a PhD student in MIT's Operations Research Center, received second-place honors for his research on strategies for hurricane preparedness and response at the second annual Department of Homeland Security University Network Summit. The event, held March 19-20 in Washington, showcased key research and education priorities of DHS Centers of Excellence, the Science and Technology Directorate and the Department of Homeland Security at-large.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 30, 2008 (download PDF).
