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Harding recognized by American Psychological Foundation
Courtenay M. Harding, a SAR professor of rehabilitation counseling and a senior director of the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, recently received the American Psychological Foundation’s Alexander Gralnick Research Investigator Award for her commitment to research and education in the area of serious mental illness. Named for the late schizophrenia researcher Alexander Gralnick, the award includes a $20,000 prize. Harding is the author of two influential studies that challenge conventional beliefs among mental health clinicians and researchers by showing that it is possible for patients with schizophrenia and other prolonged psychiatric disorders to recover. She also directs the Institute for the Study of Human Resilience.
Baillieul elected president of IEEE Control Systems Society
John Baillieul, an ENG professor and chairman of aerospace and mechanical engineering, has been elected the 40th president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Control Systems Society, the leading organization in its field. The society organizes many prominent conferences and workshops and publishes three journals, Control Systems Magazine, Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and Transactions on Automatic Control, of which Baillieul is past editor-in-chief. Baillieul, who directs ENG’s Laboratory for Intelligent Mechatronic Systems, is an expert on robotics, the control of mechanical systems, and mathematical systems theory.
ENG prof to pursue acoustic fusion as alternative energy source
R. Glynn Holt, an ENG associate professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, will participate in a new multi-institutional research project attempting to develop an acoustic fusion process that could provide a cheap and clean alternative energy source. Acoustic inertial confinement fusion (AICF) involves bombarding water with sound waves in a way that produces in the water pockets of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen commonly referred to as heavy hydrogen. This produces very high temperatures and densities that fuse the heavy hydrogen into helium, which releases enormous heat that researchers hope can be used to create steam and drive a turbine to produce electricity. Holt will collaborate with researchers from Purdue University, the University of Mississippi, the University of Washington, and Impulse Devices, a California-based research company that recently made available the first commercial reactor to study AICF. Holt’s research interests include physical acoustics, interfacial wave phenomena, nonlinear drop and bubble dynamics, and surface and bulk rheology.
21
January 2005
Boston University
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