Greetings: And now on to this week: 1. Dr. Anthea Coster of MIT Lincoln Labs gave the EE Department Colloquium on 11/13 about the current and future status of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The on-demand video playback of her talk can be found at the link 2. The Grainger Foundation has approved a renewal of graduate fellowships and undergraduate scholarships for our EE Department. This comprises $200,000 over the next two years and brings the total Grainger Foundation funds to a total of $600,000. CONGRATULATIONS to Prof. Chen-Ching Liu for fostering and organizing the Grainger program! 3. Two of our graduate students, Jonathan Jantz and Ania Mitros, presented a slide show of their travels to Patagonia and other parts of South America in the HUB on 11/12. It is good to see our students get out of the labs now and again! 4. Your acting chair has also returned from two weeks in Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. I was involved in two back-to-back expeditions, the first to investigate soil sensors and measurements in the sterile high Atacama desert in Northern Chile, and the second to help with some biomedical instrumentation for a climbing party on Volcan Licancabur, a 19,000 ft. volcano on the Chilean-Bolivian border. These expeditions were led by Dr. Chris MacKay and Dr. Natali Cabral, both from the NASA Ames Research Center. Here is a page describing the expeditions. I've also put some photographs up on my web page if you would like to see what these expeditions were like. Enjoy! --Bruce Robert Bruce Darling, Ph.D., P.E. |