2010 News Archive

The 20th Annual Reception for the Award for Excellence in Teaching was held on November 17, 2010. Marc Cole, a PhD student in the Biomedical Engineering, was recognized for his excellence in teaching.

BME Ph.D student Xiang Li was recently selected as the winner in a Student Paper Competition at the 2010 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium (Oct. 11 – Oct. 14 2010, San Diego, California, USA). Xiang presented his paper entitled: “High-Resolution Co-registered Intravascular Imaging with Integrated High Frequency ultrasound and OCT Probe”.

BME Research Associate Professor Dr. Qifa Zhou, affiliated with the NIH Ultrasonic Transducer Resource Center (UTRC), has recently won a $3 million NIH R01 grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This 5-year grant is shared by Dr. Zhou with another PI, Dr. Lihong Wang, who is a Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Dr. Michael Khoo has been awarded a $3.5 million dollar grant by the NIH National Heart Lung and Blood Institute in support of a four-year project dealing with sleep apnea syndrome in pediatric obesity using dynamic magnetic resonance imaging”. The co-investigators in this project include Drs. Krishna Nayak and Shrikanth Narayanan from the department of Electrical Engineering, and Drs. Sally Ward and Thomas Keens from Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and USC Keck School of Medicine.

The Breakthrough Awards, sponsored by Popular Mechanics, recognizes products and innovators that show progress in the scientific and technological world. USC's Mark Humayun, James Weiland and Armand Tanguay, as part of the US Department of Energy Artificial Retina Team, won a Breakthrough Innovators Award for their revolutionary retinal implant, Argus II.

Suvimol "Ming" Sangkatumvong was recently selected as an Open Finalist in the Student Paper Competition at the 2010 Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference in Buenos Aires.

Doctoral candidate Arthi Srinivasan was recently awarded a two-year F31 PreDoctoral Fellowship by the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. K. Kirk Shung has received the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) Joseph H. Holmes Pioneer Award in Basic Sciences. Dr. Shung is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California.

When Apple unveiled its tablet computer on Jan. 27, the proper response by Bartlett Mel of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering could have been a yawn. That’s because Mel, as a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois in 1987, was part of a team that won first place in a contest sponsored by Apple to design the personal computer of the year 2000. The winning concept from Mel’s team: a tablet computer.