Research at Viterbi

Providing Tomorrow's Answers Today

Research at Viterbi is interdisciplinary, with a focus on the solution of societal problems and a goal to lead in innovation, creativity and timeliness. No better is this synergy manifested than in national centers of research excellence. These highly competitive awards provide the stability needed to launch long-range programs, and are the catalysts for the recruitment and nurturing of new scholars whose ideas and solutions will change the future. No less is their impact on engineering education, including undergraduate education, and on the cross-pollination of ideas between different fields.

The Viterbi School is fortunate to count a good number of such research jewels: Two National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers (ERC), the graduating Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), and the Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems (BMES) center; the first ever Department of Homeland Security university Center of Excellence, Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE); the METRANS Transportation Center of the U.S. Department of Transportation; and the Center for Embedded Network Sensing, an NSF Science and Technology Center, with our sister institution UCLA as the lead.

IMSC is graduating after 11 continuous years of NSF support—the maximum an ERC can receive. The rest have been renewed and actively pursue their brilliant research agendas. In the next few pages, you will have a chance to review some of the accomplishments of the three Viterbi centers—and how they provide tomorrow's answers today.

You'll also find feature stories on faculty, undergraduate student and alumni research projects. Members of the faculty conduct research with their graduate students, but the Viterbi School has a long tradition of allowing talented undergraduates to work on research projects. And when they graduate to become alumni, they take that Viterbi spark of research creativity with them.