THE FU FOUNDATION SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING & APPLIED SCIENCE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK Spring 2010, Vol. 4 Issue 2In This Issue Message from the Chair• Student News• 2010 Simon Prize Award Winner: Jeremy Hanson Undergraduate Award Winners: Davidovits, Shu, and Chen Alumni News • 2009-2010 Graduates APAM Ph.D.s Alumni Updates Plasma Physics Reunion DinnerFaculty News• Applied Math Professor Works to Keep Students Off “The Street” Faculty Updates Billinge Receives the 2010 Hanawalt Award Boozer Receives the 2010 Alfvén Prize Venkataraman Receives the 2010 SEAS Kim Award Sabbagh Receives the 2009 Nuclear Fusion Award Weinstein Named 2010 SIAM Fellow Focus on Faculty Activities • Michael Mauel: Levitating Magnet May Yield New Approach to Clean EnergyDepartment News• In Memoriam: Praveen Chaudhari Postdoc/Research Scientist News: Sarbajit Banerjee APAM Staff News: Farewell to Chad Gurley and Jennifer ChoContact Us• APAM NEWS THE DEPARTMENT OF APPLIED PHYSICS & APPLIED MATHEMATICS Dear Alumni and Other Friends of APAM:This term we celebrate the wonderful gradu-ates of our undergradu-ate and graduate pro-grams, and note those who won departmental prizes!We are so very proud that APAM gradu-ated the class salutatorian last year, Stan-ley Snelson, and the class valedictorian this year, Seth Davidovits.In this issue we also profile the many excit-ing recent activities in APAM. We highlight the major awards and recognition received by Simon Billinge, Allen Boozer, Latha Ven-kataraman, Michael Weinstein and Steve Sabbagh. We report on the spectacular success of Michael Mauel’s levitated di-pole plasma physics experiment. We also note the articles in the Columbia press and general science media written about and by our faculty members Chris Wiggins and Simon Billinge. We in APAM are very pleased to extend a warm hello to our alumni and other friends of the department. Please let us know of important events in your lives!Best,Irving P. HermanChair, APAM2010 Graduation: (left to right) Photo 1: Applied Physics B.S. Dragos Velicanu & Peter Traverso; Photo 2: Materials Science & Engineering B.S. Grace Chen, Tian Luan, Min Hua Chen, Zachary Bullard, Yu-Hsuan Wang, Chad Gurley, and Yin Ju; Photo 3: Medical Physics M.S. Jo-Ann Provenchar & Alena TsioplayaUndergraduate Awards Prof. Irving Herman presented undergraduate awards to three outstanding seniors in Applied Mathematics, Ap-plied Physics, and Materials Science and Engineering at the annual SEAS Senior Awards Dinner on May 4, 2010 in the Low Rotunda. Winners received a plaque and a check for $250, have their names inscribed on plaques in the department headquarters, and are listed on the department web site.Applied Mathematics Faculty Award Winner Wayne Shu Wayne has a GPA of 3.98 and has been on the Dean’s list every semester in his tenure at Columbia. His applied mathematics presen-tation was on “Data Compression and Gam-bling.” He will start working at Google this summer, and has promised to return to pres-ent a seminar about his life in industry in an effort to promote “math” being “applied.”Applied Physics Faculty Award Winner Seth Davidovits Seth is one of the best students we have had in our Applied Physics program. He worked in Prof. T. S. Pedersen’s CNT lab, where he made MiniCNT glow brighter than ever and explained some puzzling data from that de-vice which had perplexed other bright stu-dents. He has been the SciCortex APAM clus-ter administrator for over a year, has served as Vice President of the CU Engineers With-out Borders, and has been on the Dean’s list every semester. He was accepted at several top graduate schools and will enter the Ph.D. program in Princeton where he plans to study computational plasma physics. Seth is the re-cipient of the SEAS Illig Medal, a prestigious Department of Energy Computational Sci-ence Graduate Fellowship, and is this year’s SEAS class valedictorian! For more informa-tion, see: http://www.apam.columbia.edu/announcements/10_Valedictorian.htmlMaterials Science and Engineering: Francis B. F. Rhodes Prize Winner Grace Chen Grace is an accomplished pianist and flautist and has performed with the CU Wind Ensem-ble. She has worked with Prof. I. C. Noyan’s group on the theory of line broadening for the past four semesters, which evolved into her senior thesis. She loves mathematics and was awarded a scholarship to attend the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA in the summer of 2009. She has been on the Dean’s list every semester in her tenure at Co-lumbia. After graduation she will be attending the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She hopes to specialize in pat-ent law.2010 Simon Prize Award Winner: Jeremy Hanson STUDENT NEWSThe Robert Simon Memorial Prize is awarded annually by the APAM Department to the graduate student who has completed the most outstanding dissertation. This year, Dr. Jeremy Hanson, was the recipient of this award. Dr. Hanson received a B.Sci. degree in Ap-plied Mathematics, Engineering, and Phys-ics from the Univ. of Wisconsin (Madison) in May 2004. In September 2004 he started his Ph.D. studies in APAM. He received his M.S. degree in May 2005 and was also recognized with the SEAS Extraordinary Teaching Assis-tant Award in 2005. He joined the High Beta Tokamak Research Group in the Columbia Plasma Physics Laboratory, led by Profs. G. A. Navratil, M. E. Mauel, and T. S. Pedersen, as a Graduate Research Assistant in June 2005.In his Ph.D. thesis, “A Kalman Filter for Ac-tive Feedback on Rotating External Kink In-stabilities in a Tokamak Plasma,” Dr. Hanson reported for the first time the simulation and experimental optimization of a Kalman filter active feedback control algorithm for n=1 tokamak external kink modes. The external kink is one of the key instabilities that limit the performance of future fusion energy toka-mak systems, and active feedback control of this instability will be essential. The feedback control algorithms employed need to dis-tinguish the unstable kink mode from noise due to other magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) activity. The Kalman filter contains an inter-nal model that captures the dynamics of a rotating, growing n=1 kink mode. This model is actively compared with real-time