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2006

Professor of Environmental MicrobiologyJared Leadbetter, Biology graduate student Elizabeth Ottesen, and their colleagues announce a new and efficient way of revealing guild-species relationships in complex microbial communities. The approach allows them to discover connections between bacterial cells from natural samples, and the activities encoded by genes. Read more...

To digest wood, termites are dependent on the 200 or so diverse microbial species that call termite guts home. Most of these beneficial organisms have never been cultivated in the laboratory. This has made it difficult to determine precisely which species perform the numerous, varied functions relevant to converting woody plant biomass into a material that can be directly used as food and energy by their insect hosts. The breakthrough approach of Professor Jared Leadbetter and his collaborators is to use microfluidic devices, in which thousands of individual cells harvested from the environment can be distributed into separate chambers prior to any gene-based analysis, so that each can be studied as an individual. Read more...

Charles S. Shapiro of San Francisco State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory gave a seminar titled "Massive Releases of Radioactivity - A Retrospective Look" on Wednesday, November 29 at 4:00 p.m. in 142 Keck. Shapiro has devoted decades to studying the human and environmental consequences of exposure to radioactivity, including atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.

On December 1, students in the course Engineering Design of Products for the Developing World presented the work they have conducted this term. This course focuses on designs for people earning less than a dollar a day, particularly in rural Guatemala.

Avi Wigderson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University gave the James R. and Shirley A. Kliegel Lecture in Engineering and Applied Science on Monday, November 20, 2006, at 2:00 p.m. in Ramo Auditorium. His talk was entitled "The Power and Weakness of Randomness (When You Are Short on Time)".

Michelle Effros, Professor of Electrical Engineering, and colleagues at three other universities have been awarded a $6.5 million grant by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a large-scale research effort to develop theory for analyzing and designing communication systems in ad hoc wireless networks of mobile devices. Networks of this type are used in field communications by soldiers and first responders. This latest 'DARPA Grand Challenge' may also lead to improved security, automated homes and highways, biomedical applications, and ubiquitous access to multimedia data and entertainment. A key goal is giving a network the intelligence to detect when it is near full capacity so that it can treat different kinds of messages (distress calls, for example) with higher priority than others (routine surveillance video feeds) when capacity becomes scarce. Another critical area is how to prolong the lifetime of networks with battery-powered nodes that cannot be recharged, for example, nodes embedded in structures or deployed in a remote location. Beyond that, a central question will be how to design a network to be as secure as possible within performance constraints. Other potential innovations could include developing new ways to route information around the network and methods for transmitters to cooperatively allocate resources such as power and bandwidth, either to bolster the network's stability or to optimize its performance.

The Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) hosted a Workshop on the Frontiers of Computational Science and Engineering at Caltech on Saturday, November 18. The goal of this forward-looking workshop is to help develop a strategic vision for further developments of computationally enabled research, Institute-wide.

SISL Fellow A. Kevin Tang (PhD '06) has won the the first prize of the George Dantzig Dissertation Award given by INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences). The award is given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. He finished his dissertation, "Heterogeneous Congestion Control Protocols," in the Networking Lab with his advisor, Professor Steven Low.

Christof Koch, Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems, is featured in the October 23 issue of "U. S. News & World Report". The special report, "Is There Room for the Soul? New Challenges to Our Most Cherished Beliefs About Self and the Human Spirit," examines various theories about the nature of consciousness and the human species. The article discusses Koch's work with the late Francis Crick on the biological basis and neural correlates of consciousness.

Professor Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is being honored as one of "America's Best Leaders" by "U.S. News & World Report", in collaboration with Harvard University's Center for Public Leadership. Elachi and 19 other leaders are featured, including U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Thad Allen; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. CEO Warren Buffett; former U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; and world-renowned architect Frank Gehry.

Research scientist David Boyd and his colleagues, including David Goodwin, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, have invented an ingenious new method for depositing tiny amounts of materials on surfaces. The technique, known as plasmon-assisted chemicalvapor deposition, will add a powerful new tool to the existing battery of techniques used to construct microdevices. The process is simple to implement and requires only a small laser, about as powerful as a green laser pointer. The ability to write micron-scale or smaller structures directly, without need for lithographic patterning and etching, while also keeping the substrate cool outside the small laser spot, opens up new possibilities for the types of structures that may be easily fabricated. Read more...

Part 4 of the Caltech Archives' Documenting Earthquakes virtual exhibit is now up. This module features rare historical earthquake images and accounts from the George W. Housner book collection.

Translating Engineering and Hard Science Skills into Business Success, Dr. Alexis Livanos (President, Northrop Grumman Space Technology) and Mr. Peter Kaufman (Chairman and CEO, Glenair) will describe what they have learned about applying engineering and hard science skills to leadership and team-building. October 17, 10:30 am, Lees-Kubota Lecture Hall. All welcome; lunch to follow.

A new $4.4-million grant from theNational Science Foundation will allow a research team, lead by Michael Dickinson, Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, to develop techniques to turn brain cells on and off in animals as they go about their daily activities, allowing the scientists to understand the details of how brain activity lead to complex behaviors. The five-year program is aimed at solving one of the remaining great challenges facing biologists---understanding the mechanistic basis of complex behavior. The work will focus on fruit flies, which are a powerful model system understood extremely well at the genetic level. Read more...

Michael Hochberg and Tom Baehr-Jones, along with Axel Scherer, the Neches Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, and Physics, and collleagues at the University of Washington, have developed a new silicon and polymer waveguide that can manipulate light signals using light, at speeds almost 100 times as fast

Part 3 of the Caltech Archives' Documenting Earthquakes virtual exhibit is now available. This section is about Charles Richter and the development of the magnitude scale.

Team Caltech has qualified as a Track A team to participate in the Urban Challenge, the third DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle competition. As a Track A team, Caltech, led by Richard Murray, Thomas E. and DorisEverhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Caltech will receive up to $1 million in technology development funds as we achieve key technical milestones. In the final event, on November 3, 2007, at an undisclosed location in the western U.S., robotic vehicles will attempt to complete a 60-mile course through traffic in less than six hours, operating under their own computer-based control. To succeed, vehicles must obey traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles. Also among the 11 teams qualifying for Track A status is the Golem Group, an independent team formed by several Caltech alumni including Maribeth Mason, Richard Mason, Jim Radford, Jason Meltzer, Eagle Jones, and current students Robb Walters and Deepak Kumar.

Caltech scientists have produced the largest astronomical image ever in order to inspire the public with the wonders of space exploration. Called The Big Picture, the image has been reproduced as a giant mural in the new exhibit hall of the landmark Griffith Observatory. The data used to construct the image were obtained in the course of over 20 nights at the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar in 2004 and 2005. Several hundred gigabytes of raw data were then distilled to produce a 7.4-gigabyte color image, using cutting-edge technology at Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research. "We wanted to inspire the public and convey the richness of the deep universe and its understanding, and to do it with a real scientific data set," says Professor of Astronomy George Djorgovski. "We are doing research with these data, but there is also a sense of beauty and awe, which is important to communicate, especially to young people."

Guruswami Ravichandran, the John E. Goode, Jr. Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, will receive an honorary degree, Docteurs honoris causa (D.h.c) from the Paul Verlaine University, Metz, France in recognition of his pioneering contributions to the mechanical behavior of materials under extreme conditions and for promoting international collaboration with researchers at that University. He will be receiving this honor in a special ceremony on October 10 at the Arsenal in Metz.

The experimental visualization of three proposed types of earthquake rupture, including the "self-healing" pulse rupture, hasfor the first time been achieved and demonstrated using ultrahigh-speed photography, providing up to two million photographs per second, and dynamic photoelasticity combinedwith laser vibrometry. The experimental results of Professors Rosakis and Ravichandran, withcolleague andformer GALCIT graduate student George Lykotrafitis, reported and discussed recently in Science, could impact how we respond to earthquakes and other disasters. Read

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded an $18-million grant for creation of a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at the California Institute of Technology. According to Marianne Bronner-Fraser, the Ruddock Professor of Biology at Caltech and principal investigator of the five-year program, the goal will be to image and mutate every developmentally important gene in vertebrates--that is, animals with backbones. The work will be performed together with co-investigators Sean Megason and Scott Fraser from theDivision of Biology, and Niles Pierce, an assistant professor of applied and computational mathematics and bioengineering. The researchers will use new "in toto" imaging and genetic tagging tools invented by Megason and Fraser and new molecular detection methods being developed in the Pierce lab to analyze gene expression and function in the developing embryos. They will digitize this molecular data on a genomic scale by capturing thousands of time-lapse videos as the animals develop.

Reporting in the journal Lab on a Chip, Professor Changhuei Yang and his coauthors describe a novel device that combines chip technology with microfluidics. Although similar in resolution and magnifying power to a conventional top-quality optical microscope, the optofluidic microscope chip is only the size of a quarter, and the entire device--imaging screen and all--will be about the size of an iPod. The new optofluidic microscope is one of the first major accomplishments to come out of Caltech's Center for Optofluidic Integration. Read more...

Professor Chris Umans has been nameda recipient of the 2006 Okawa Foundation Research Grant. This prize (which carries a $10,000 award) honors top young researchers working in the fields of information and telecommunications. The grant awardees will be honored by the Okawa Foundation on October 5 in San Francisco.

When it comes to tiny motors, the flagella used by bacteria to get around their microscopic worlds are hard to beat. Composed of several tens of different types of protein, a flagellum rotates about in much the same way that a rope would spin if mounted in the chuck of an electric drill, but at much higher speeds--about 300 revolutions per second. Grant Jensen, Assistant Professor of Biology, Gavin Murphy, a graduate student in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, and Jared R. Leadbetter, Associate Professor of Environmental Microbiology have succeeded for the first time in obtaining a three-dimensional image of the complete flagellum assembly of a bacteria using a new technology called electron cryotomography. Reporting in Nature, the scientists show in unprecedented detail both the rotor of the flagellum and the stator, or protein assembly that not only attaches the rotor to the cell wall, but also generates the torque that serves to rotate it. The accomplishment is a tour de force within the field of structural biology, through which scientists seek to understand how cells work by determining the shapes and configurations of the proteins that make them up. The results could lead to better-designed nanomachines.

A team of physicists, mathematicians,and electrical engineers has figured out a trick to keep light pulses from diverging or focusing as they travel over a distance. Using a multi-layer sandwich of glass plates alternating with air, the scientists have provided the first experimental demonstration of a procedure called "nonlinearity management." This technique could be useful in future generations of devices involving optical switching and optical information processing, for which precise control of laser pulses will be advantageous. Reporting in the July 21, 2006, issue of Physical Review Letters, the researchers demonstrate that a laser beam passing through multiple layers of glass and air can be made to last much longer than if it had passed through only one type of medium. Mason Porter and Martin Centurion, postdocs from the Center for the Physics of Information, Demetri Psaltis, the Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Panayotis Kevrekidis, Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst are the principals of this investigation. Read more...

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded $5.6 million to Caltech for the creation of the Center for Integrative Study of Cell Regulation. The center will merge Caltech's existing expertise in computation and in cell biology for the pursuit of new knowledge in the biological sciences. The founding director is Mary Kennedy, the Allen and Lenabelle Davis Davis Professor of Biology, and the co-director of the center is Mark Stalzer, executive director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR). The types of problems the center scientists and engineers will work on will include development of algorithms for identifying, locating, and determining the shape and orientation of key proteins in high-resolution cryo-electron microscopic images of cells, and creation of computer programs to simulate complex biochemical signaling pathways in neuronal synapses. Read more...

Professor John Dabiri's research on jellyfish highlighted in the Pasadena Star News. "Jellyfish are going to save the world in three different ways."

NSF has awarded $11.97 million for Distributed Data Analysis for Neutron Scattering Experiments (DANSE) to Caltech. The project is led by Brent Fultz, Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics, with co-principal investigators Michael A. G. Aivazis and Ian S. Anderson. This work is aimed at designing new materials for a huge variety of applications in transportation, construction, electronics, and space exploration. Read more...

Caltech has teamed up with theenergy company BP to look for better and cheaper ways of producing solar cells. The Caltech solar nanorod program will be directed by Nate Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor and Professor of Chemistry, and Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science. Atwater's group will investigate ways of creating silicon-based single-junction and compound semiconductor-multijunction nanorod solar cells using vapor-deposition synthesis methods that are scalable to very large areas. Read

The Howard Hughes MedicalInstitute has awarded $1.5 million to Caltech for support of interdisciplinary undergraduate science education programs. The funding will be used to pioneer several new programs, including a training program in synthetic biology (the application of engineering design principles to the construction of biological systems), a course- and lab-development assistance program in science and engineering, a series of interdisciplinary undergraduate lab courses, and a precollege outreach program directed at local public schools. The program will be co-directed by Christina Smolke, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Douglas Rees, Dickinson Professor of Chemistry. EAS faculty who will be involved in these programs include Richard Murray, Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Michael Elowitz, Assistant Professor of Biology and Applied Physics, Erik Winfree, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computational and Neural Systems, and Rob Phillips, Professor of Applied Physics and Mechanical Engineering. Read more...

Doctoral student Andrea Armani andKerry Vahala, Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics, report that an optical microresonator can be configured to detect heavy water. The technique is 30 times more sensitive than any other existing method. The device is shaped like a mushroom and was originally designed three years ago to store light for future opto-electronic applications. With a diameter smaller than that of a human hair, the microresonator is made of silica and is coupled with a tunable laser. The detection method could be helpful in the fight against international nuclear proliferation. Read more...

Congratuations and best wishes to all graduates and their families! Caltech Commencement 2006.

The EAS Division welcomes Jean-Lou Chameau, the president-elect of Caltech. Chameau is the provost and vice president for academic affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He succeeds David Baltimore, who is stepping down from the presidency after nearly nine years in the post; Baltimore will remain at the Institute, where he intends to focus on his scientific work and teaching. Chameau will take office on or before September 1. Read more...

EAS Division Chair David Rutledge has named Anthony Kelman as the Henry Ford II Scholar Award this year. The Fordaward goes to the engineering student with the best academic record at the end of the third year of undergraduate study, and is accompanied by a $5,000 prize.

Following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking is Jerry Marsden, one of 44 scientists that have just been elected to the Royal Society of the UK.Marsden, the Carl F Braun Professor of Engineering and Control and Dynamical Systems, is being recognized for his fundamental contributions to a very wide range of topics such as Hamiltonian systems, fluid mechanics, plasma physics, general relativity, dynamical systems and chaos, nonlinear elasticity, nonholonomic mechanics, control theory, variational integrators and solar system mission design. His recent research has played a part in NASA missions to the moons of Jupiter.

The ASCIT Teaching Awards were recently announced, with EAS professors Ali Hajimiri and Niles Pierce among those honored for their exceptional teaching. Kudos!

Peter Schröder, Professor of ComputerScience and Applied and Computational Mathematics, has been recognized with a HumboldtFoundation Research Award. The award is given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, and recognizes outst anding international scientists with substantial career achievement.

Michael Ortiz, the Dotty and Dick Hayman Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, will give the Penner Distinguished Lecture at UC San Diego on May 15. His topic is Multiscale Modeling of Materials: A Challenge in Predictive Science.

New results in this week'sissue of Science from a team of biologists and engineers led by Mory Gharib, the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Bioengineering, show that the embryonic vertebrate heart tube is a dynamic suction pump. In other words, blood flows by a dynamic suction action that arises from wave motions in the tube. The findings could lead to new treatments of certain heart diseases that arise from congenital defects. The lead author of thepaper is Gharib's graduate student Arian Forouhar. According to Gharib, the new results show once and for all that "the embryonic heart doesn't work the way we were taught." Scott Fraser, the Anna L. Rosen Professor of Biology and Professor of Bioengineering, adds that the study shows the promise of advanced biological imaging techniques for the future of medicine. "The reason this mechanism of pumping has not been noticed in the heart tube is because of the limitations of imaging," he says. "But now we have a device that is 100 times faster than the old microscopes, allowing us to see things that previously would have been a blur. Now we can see the motion of blood and the motions of vascular walls at very high resolutions." Read more...

Beverley McKeon has joined the Division as Assistant Professsor of Aeronautics. Her research areas include manipulation of wall-bounded flows; physics and control of canonical flows; smart morphing skins for flow control; and adaptive biomimetic surfaces. Chin-Lin Guo has also recently joined the Division as Assistant Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics. His research interests focus on modeling collective

The work of Professor Jared Leadbetter is covered in the April 12th edition of the L.A. Weekly - Gut Reactions: How the contents of a termite's stomach may revolutionize your car...

Building on years of research on the way that blood flows through the heart valves, Mory Gharib, Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering, and his colleagues have devised a new index for cardiac health based on a simple ultrasound test. The index provides a new diagnostic tool for cardiologists in searching for the very early signs of certain heart diseases. The researchers show how ultrasound imaging can be used to create an extremely detailed picture of the jet of blood as it squirts through the cardiac left ventricle. Previous work by the Caltech team members has shown that there is an ideal length-to-diameter ratio for jets of fluid passing through valves, which means that any variation from this ratio is indicative of a heart that pumping in an abnormal manner.

Emmanuel Candes, Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics, has won the Alan T. Waterman Award. The annual awardrecognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35 in any field of science or engineering supported by the National Science Foundation. The Waterman Award, the highest honor awarded by the National Science Foundation, recognizes candidates who have demonstrated exceptional individual achievements in scientific or engineering research of sufficient quality to place them at the forefront of their peers. Criteria include originality, innovation, and significant impact on the field. In addition to a medal, the awardee receives a grant of $500,000 over a three year period. Read more...

In commemoration of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the landmark developments that followed it, the Caltech Archives is presenting a new digital exhibit, Documenting Earthquakes: A Virtual Exhibit in Six Parts. This virtual exhibit is replete with historical earthquake information, archives, rare photographs, and personal accounts, from as early as the 1500s to modern times. With beautifully illustrated renderings and excerpts from rare-book collections, the site is presented in an easy-to-navigate, user-friendly format. Compiled from materials in the Caltech Archives' own collections, the six-part interactive exhibit will be presented serially, over the course of the next several months.

The Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI) at Caltech hosted the second workshop on Biological Large-Scale Integration (BioLSI-2) on April 10-12 in Winnett. BioLSI-2 is a working meeting focusing on universal challenges that currently confront the research community pursuing large-scale-integration of heterogeneous microfluidic systems and biosensors.

Professor Noel Corngold has been selected to receive the 2006 Arthur Holly Compton Award by the American Nuclear Society. This award was established in 1966 to recognize and encourage outstanding contributions to education in nuclear science and engineering.

Neuroscientists for the first time have located single neurons that are involved in recognizing whether a stimulus is new or old. The discovery demonstrates that the human brain not only has neurons for processing new information never seen before, but also neurons to recognize old information that has been seen just once. Ueli Rutishauser, a graduate student in Computation and Neural Systems, is the lead author of the paper in Neuron describing this research.

Richard M. Murray has been named the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems. He has also recently won the Feynman Teaching Prize.

Henry Petroski, the Aleksandar S.Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University, will give the second annual Wouk Lecture at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 30 in Beckman Institute Auditorium. Petroski will explore the interplay between success and failure in the design of long-span suspension bridges. The historical record shows that success was achieved through the careful study of past failures, and that failure ultimately resulted when models were created with an increasing disregard for fundamental caveats.

Dr. Paul Rothemund, senior research fellow in computer science and computation and neural systems, has devised a way of weaving DNA strands into any desired two-dimensional shape or figure, which he calls "DNA origami." This new technique could be an important tool in the creation of new nanodevices. (Hear NPR's interview with Dr. Rothemund.) Reporting in the March 16th issue of Nature, Rothemund describes how long single strands of DNA can be folded back and forth, tracing a mazelike path, to form a scaffold that fills up the outline of any desired shape. To hold the scaffold in place, 200 or more DNA strands are designed to bind the scaffold and staple it together. Read more...

Marc Bockrath, AssistantProfessor of Applied Physics, has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. Sloan Research Fellowships are designed to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. Each fellow is free to use the award to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of the most compelling interest to him or her. The Fellowship lasts two years and carries a grant of $45,000.

Professor Ali Hajimiri and former graduate students, Dr. Xiang Guan and Professor Hossein Hashemi (USC) received the Best Paper Award for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits for their article titled: "A Fully-Integrated 24GHz Eight-Element Phased Array Receiver in Silicon" for its groundbreaking nature in enabling a new generation of communication devices and on-chip radar. Also at International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February 2006, a team of Caltech graduate students supervised by Professor Hajimiri reported a complete phased-array radar transceiver with on-chip antennas at 77GHz showing an unprecedented level of mm-wave integration in silicon.

Three EAS professors have been awarded three of the 30 program awards from the federal Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program. The awards will bring in $3 million in funding each year for the next five years. The principal investigators for the three programs,respectively, are Guruswami Ravichandran, the Goode Jr. Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, for "mechanics and mechanisms of impulse loading"; Pietro Perona, Professor of Electrical Engineering, for "learning to recognize for visual surveillance"; and Richard Murray, Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, for "specification, design, and verification of distributed embedded systems."

Dale I. Pullin has been appointed the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics.

Daniel I. Meiron has been appointed the Fletcher Jones Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Computer Science.

Scientists are making great strides toward the creationof a new generation of personalized pharmaceuticals. On January 18, 8:00 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium, William A. Goddard III will discuss the progress that has been made and where it might lead in his Watson Lecture,"The Coming Revolution in Pharmaceuticals." Goddard is the Charles and Mary Ferkel Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science, and Applied Physics and director of the Materials and Process Simulation Center.

Paul Dimotakis, John K. Northrop Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Applied Physics, has been appointed the Chief Technologist of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Mory Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering, has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in recognition of his many distinguished contributions to the field as well as his involvement with critical issues affecting medical and biological engineering.

Richard M. Murray, Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, has been named the new Director of Information Science and Technology. Professor Murray will start full-time in April 2006. In the interim, Professor Leonard Schulman, the new Associate Director of IST, will be managing the day-to-day activities. Hats off to Shuki Bruck for serving as the founding Director of IST!