Princeton Engineering

Jacobus Prize

The Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship is the highest honor Princeton University bestows on graduate students, awarded each year to just four students whose work has displayed the highest scholarly excellence.

Electrical engineer Vaneet Aggarwal was among those selected for the 2009–10 fellowship, while Peter DiMaggio of chemical engineering received the 2008–09 Jacobus fellowship. Aggarwal has published papers on a wide range of topics concerning digital communications, from error correction to secrecy capacity. DiMaggio focuses on the new field of proteomics—the large-scalestudy of proteins in a living system.

Graduate teaching awards

The Graduate School honored two engineering grad students for their outstanding abilities as teachers at a dinner May 30. The winners, Katherine Meierdiercks of civil and environmental engineering and lya Ryzhov of operations research and financial engineering, were among six students honored this year.

Meierdiercks was recognized for her work with the Princeton Writing Program where she led a seminar on “The Science and Politics of Urban Sprawl” and earned consistent praise from her students.

Ryzhov was honored for his care and skill in leading precepts, which one student described as “perhaps the most thorough precepts I had ever experienced.”

Wu prize recognizes excellence in graduate work

The Gordon Wu Prize for Excellence supports the final year of study for graduate students who have demonstrated excellence in scholarship and research during their time at Princeton.

The Wu Prize recipients for 2009-2010 are:

Chemical Engineering
Peter Verderame

Civil and Environmental Engineering
Yan Zhang

Computer Science
Melissa Carroll
Mohammad Mahmoody Ghidary
Harlan Yu

Electrical Engineering
Abhishek Bhattacharjee
David Champagne
Tian Lan

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Eric Cady
Nick Kattamis
Yang Jiao

Operations Research and Financial Engineering
Zhou Yang

Peter Verderame
Developing sophisticated mathematical models and computational tools to address fundamental issues with supply chain management. His work has helped improve planning and scheduling for chemical processes and has provided a more rigorous basis for managing a company’s financial assets to maintain diversity while supplementing a company’s balance sheet.

Yan Zhang
Studying the impacts of human-caused emissions on climate and air quality in mega-cities such as New York and Beijing. She also studies the interaction of aerosol pollution and weather, particularly rainfall in metropolitan regions.

Melissa Carroll
Developing new methods for statistical analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, enabling more reliable “mind reader” tools that recognize mental activities, such as viewing pictures or remembering words. Such tools may produce insights into brain function and aid in the diagnosis and treatment of disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.

Abhishek Bhattacharjee
Designing chip-multiprocessor hardware that dynamically detects bottlenecks when multiple applications are running in parallel. He is proposing hardware and software techniques that address these bottlenecks for increased performance and energy efficiency.

Nick Kattamis
Developing a technique to print ultra sensitive, functional material systems at high spatial resolution, ranging from mouse embryonic stem cells to organic light emitting materials. Among uses of the research are possible new methods for tissue generation and more durable and energy efficient light sources.

Zhou Yang
Addressing the recent liquidity crisis and tumultuous market conditions by studying the interactions between oligopolistic players who trade securities with certain illiquidity characteristics. The work moves beyond previous models by taking into account volatility in the security’s market price and the players' rational responses under realistic conditions.