At the nineteenth annual Virginia Tech College of Engineering faculty reception, awards were presented to engineering professors for teaching innovation, research, service, and outreach for 2016.
T. M. Murali of computer science is a recipient of one of the College of Engineering’s research in excellence awards. T. M. ’s overall research goal is founded in computational systems biology – to build phenomenological and predictive models of interaction networks that govern living cells functionality. Most recently, with colleagues, T. M. has developed PathLinker, a network based algorithm that reconstructs signaling pathways. He has been published in top journals such as Bionformatics and Molecular Biology of the Cell. T.M. co-directs the ICTAS Center for Systems Biology of Engineered Tissues and under his leadership the center’s faculty have received grants exceeding $11 million. He is also the associate program director of the Computational Tissue Engineering Interdisciplinary Graduate Education program – a program that was renewed last year based on student accomplishments and overall research productivity.
Chang-Tien Lu of computer science is a College of Engineering faculty fellow recipient, which carries an annual $5,000 account for the next three fiscal years to support his research. He is the Associate Director of the Discovery Analytics Center. In 2015 Chang-Tien was one of 49 researchers in the world to be named Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery. His research on data management is to fulfill emerging requirements for storing, analyzing, and visualizing spatial data. His ongoing projects range from explorations of fundamental access and retrieval issues to practical applications that deal with data analysis and knowledge discovery tasks. These projects have led to the publication of numerous high-quality research papers and the production of innovative prototype systems. They are also helping professionals in many fields to react quickly and make effective decisions in time-sensitive applications. His major contributions include efficient mining algorithms and sophisticated storage structures that can be scaled up to process large scale data, as well as the formalization of spatial patterns and trends. Chang-Tien has published over 112 articles, which have been featured in top rated journals and conference proceedings. According to the Google scholar index, his papers have been cited 2,630 times and have an h-index of 25. He has received 33 grants — 23 he serves as the P.I. for, with funding over $33 million and his share, almost $4 million. Chang-Tien has graduated 6 PhD students and 31 masters’ students and currently supervising 13 PhD students.
One of the college’s certificate of teaching award goes to Tom Martin of electrical and computer engineering. Tom also has courtesy appointments in the School of Architecture and Design and the Department of Computer Science. He is also the associate director of the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the co-director of the E-textiles Lab. His research and teaching interests include wearable computing, electronic textiles, and interdisciplinary design teams for pervasive computing. In 2006 he was selected for the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for his research in e-textile-based wearable computing. Over the past few years Tom’s research has lead to the development of the InZone Alert Vest that includes radio sensors that construction workers can wear on or inside vests with connected vehicle technology that allows cars to “talk” to one another, roadside infrastructure, and personal electronics such as mobile phones.
