Several faculty members from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department are now recipients of new sponsored research grants. Dr. Andrew Cohen, Dr. Adam Fontecchio, and ECE's most recent additional to its faculty, Dr. Fei Lu, will begin exciting new research endeavors in the coming months.
Dr. Andrew Cohen
Dr. Cohen serves as principal investigator (PI) on a grant titled, "A spatiotemporal map of signaling processes controlling human stem cell renewal and differentiation," which has been funded by the Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP). The funding is $350,000 per year for three years. HFSP funds international and inter-disciplinary research that combines engineering and quantitative approaches with biology and life sciences. Dr. Cohen's project will use computational analysis of live cell microscopy movies to understand the intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms of how cells choose their fate in human disease and development. The co-PIs on this project include Professor Olivier Pertz at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and Professor Rafael Carazo Salas at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. "This is an incredibly exciting award that reflects very highly on Drexel and on the ECE Department," said Dr. Cohen. "I am both humbled and grateful for the opportunity to do this work."
Dr. Adam Fontecchio
Dr. Fontecchio, Director of the Center for the Advancement of STEM Teaching and Learning Excellence (CASTLE) is co-investigator on "Research on Experiential STEM Curricula for Authentic Learning Experiences (RESCALE)," which is funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation for $275,000. This is a foundational Drexel Presidential Priority; Dr. Fontecchio and his co-director at CASTLE, Dr. Jennifer Stanford, collaborated with Drexel President John Fry to pursue this project.
Dr. Fei Lu
Dr. Lu, an assistant professor with ECE who joined the faculty in fall 2018, has been awarded $500,000 for a two-year grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency--Energy (ARPA-E) through the Building Reliable Electronics to Achieve Kilovolt Effective Ratings Safely (BREAKERS) program. He is the sole investigator at Drexel. The project is titled, "Resonant Solid State Breaker Based on Wireless Coupling in MVDC Systems." Dr. Lu's proposed research "aims to design a significantly more efficient, fast, low-cost, compact, and reliable circuit breaker for medium-voltage direct-current (MVDC) power systems."
We would like to extend our congratulations to these ECE faculty members on their great accomplishments!