Berger, a biomedical engineer,  is a specialist in learning and neural  computation who has collaborated with colleagues in a wide range  of disciplines to decipher the way hippocampus cells in the brain code information, and has developed silicon chips  that can  "talk"  to cells in their own language.  He holds the David Packard Chair in Engineering, is director  of the USC Center for Neural  Engineering, and is a part  of the Viterbi  School's Biomemetic MicroElectronic Systems national  research center, whiere he is attempting to develop a prosthesis that could replace damaged or diseased  nerve tissue.

He is confident that his team will soon implant chips into the brains of rats, with the chips working with the brains to replace lost memory function. In 10 to 15 years such chips may be in human brains, helping patients with epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, stroke and other neurological disorders.The algorithms he developed in his brain research have been applied to detecting the sound of gunshots and are starting to be used in systems around the nation.

 

Hans Kuehl received a Lifetime Achievement  Award.

 

Hans Kuehl

Kuehl  is a professor emeritus of Electrical  Engineering/Electrophysics who is an internationally recognized authority on "solitons" — single  waves propagating in plasmas and optical fibers. Solitons, which retain their shape after colliding with each other, are beginning to have an important technological impact in the area of fiber optic communication, where light pulses in the form of solitons can be used for broadband information transmission.  Earlier in his career, Kuehl formulated the basic theory governing the interaction of antennae and plasmas. He was one of the first theoreticians to predict and describe in detail the phenomenon of plasma resonance cones, which produce significant enhancements of the electromagnetic fields of an antenna in a magnetized plasma.

 

Other USC Awards that Kuehl has received include the University of Southern California Associates Teaching Excellence Award, the USC Archimedes Circle Faculty Service, and the Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Electrical Engineering Faculty Award. In addition, Kuehl served as the co-chairman of task force at USC that developed an innovative new electrical engineering curriculum that became effective in 1999