Six Viterbi Faculty Honored for Achievements and Service

Murali Annavaram of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering has been named the Robert G. and Mary G. Lane Early Career Chair. An assistant professor, Annavaram joined the School in 2007, and has since received 14 funded awards, including six major National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, a recent NSF CAREER award, and the IBM Faculty Partnership Award. This endowed chair appointment recognizes his exceptional achievements and the future promise of his research. Annavaram is a key member of a faculty team designing an energy-efficient, multimodal body area sensing system called KNOWME, for monitoring physical activity. It is a highly visible research project in the area of wireless health and health monitoring systems. He also developed a new graduate course, EE 579: Wireless and Mobile Networks Design and Laboratory, in which students design useful mobile applications. For this course offering, he received the USC Stevens Institute “Innovation Inside Curriculum Award.”
 

Alexandros G. “Alex” Dimakis, an assistant professor of electrical engineering who joined the Viterbi School’s Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering in 2009, has received a five-year, $450K NSF CAREER Award. His winning proposal detailed novel use of network coding for significantly improved reliability and cost of distributed storage systems that is especially applicable in modern cloud storage systems. These new network codes – called "regeneration codes" – are “poised to make a significant impact on the way next-generation distributed storage systems are designed and deployed. Alex's research has led to a large quantity of work in such R&D in both academia and industry.
 

Martin Eskijian, a lecturer in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has received the 2011 Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Eskijian teaches a course in coastal engineering. He was selected "for significant contributions to lifeline earthquake engineering, including the development of marine oil terminal engineering standards; the active involvement in the ASCE-TCLEE Ports Committees; and the post-earthquake reconnaissance following the 1995 Japan,1999 Turkey, 2004 Sumatra, and 2010 Chile earthquakes." In selecting Eskijian for this award, ASCE noted his contribution to the understanding of the impact of earthquakes on society.
 

Terence G. “Terry” Langdon, the William E. Leonhard Professor of Engineering in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, has added another honor to his long list of honors. Langdon was presented with the NanoSPD Achievement Award on March 24, at the 5th International Conference on Nanomaterials by Severe Plastic Deformation (NanoSPD5). Langdon is only the second individual to receive the award, established in 2008. The award, to be presented quarterly, was introduced to recognize outstanding achievements within the field of nanomaterials. The conference, attended by about 300 participants from 29 countries, was held on the campus of Nanjing University of Science and Technology in Nanjing, China, from March 21-25, 2011. Langdon holds joint appointments in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ Department of Earth Sciences, and in the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton School of Engineering Sciences’ Engineering Materials and Surface Engineering research group.
 

Andreas F. Molisch, an internationally noted researcher in wireless technologies, professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, and a member of the School’s Communications Sciences Institute, has received the Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), one of the highest publication honors presented by the organization. Awardees are selected for the most outstanding survey, review, or tutorial paper published in IEEE’s various transactions, journals, or magazines, or in the Proceedings of the IEEE, and is based on the recommendation of the Prize Papers/Scholarship Awards Committee and the Awards Board. Molisch shares the award with Larry Greenstein of Rutgers University and Mansoor Shafi of Telecom New Zealand, for their paper entitled “Propagation Issues for Cognitive Radio,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 97, No. 5, May 2009.
 

The Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) has named Cyrus Shahabi a United States Faculty Scholar for 2011-2012. Shahabi, a professor in the department of Computer Science, director of the USC Viterbi Information Laboratory, and director of the USC Viterbi Integrated Media Systems Center, is in the fourth group of individuals to receive this honor on the other side of a highly competitive process. Program grantees are asked to commit to engaging in academic activities in Vietnam, and are also considered ambassadors there who will “represent with pride” their country and culture. The VEF Board of Directors also conveyed that “we trust you will bring your experiences in Vietnam to the U.S. and help foster mutual understanding and professional collaborations that will be lasting and beneficial to both countries.”