Congratulations Rana Soltani-Zarrin
ETHEL ASHWORTH-TSUTSUI MEMORIAL:
Each year Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) sponsors an awards program that recognizes the research and mentoring efforts of women on the Texas A&M campus. These awards are offered in honor and remembrance of Ethel Ashworth-Tsutsui, a long time member of the faculty of the Biochemistry Department here at Texas A&M University. Dr. Tsutsui was a founding member of WISE and cared deeply about the retention and recognition of women in our graduate programs.
Women graduate students are invited to apply for these awards. Faculty members are encouraged to nominate deserving individuals.
2016 Ethel Ashworth-Tsutsui
Memorial Lecture and Awards Ceremony
Dr. Nancy Amato will present the lecture on November 21st at 4:10 p.m. in 302 HRBB.
Awards recipients will be recognized after the lecture.
Nancy M. Amato is Regents Professor and Unocal Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University where she co-directs the Parasol Lab. Her main areas of research focus are motion planning and robotics, computational biology and geometry, and parallel and distributed computing. Amato received undergraduate degrees in Mathematical Sciences and Economics from Stanford University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, respectively. She was program chair for the 2015 IEEE Intern. Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and for Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. She is an elected member of the CRA Board of Directors (2014-2017), is co-Chair of CRA-W (2014-2017), and was co-chair of the NCWIT Academic Alliance (2009-2011). She received the 2014 CRA Haberman Award, the inaugural NCWIT Harrold/Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award in 2014, the 2013 IEEE HP/Harriet Rigas Award, and a Texas A&M AFS university-level teaching award in 2011. She received an NSF CAREER Award and is a AAAS Fellow, an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow.
Amato’s lecture is free and open to the public. A brief abstract of the lecture is as follows: Motion planning has application in many domains such as robotics, animation, virtual prototyping and training, and even protein folding and drug design. Surprisingly, sampling-based planning methods have proven effective on problems from all these domains. In this talk, we describe sampling-based planning and give an overview of some variants developed in our group. We describe in more detail our work related to virtual prototyping, crowd simulation, and protein folding. For virtual prototyping, we show that in some cases a hybrid system incorporating both an automatic planner and haptic user input leads to superior results. For crowd simulation, we describe techniques for evacuation planning and for evaluating architectural designs. Finally, we describe our application of sampling-based motion planners to simulate molecular motions, such as protein and RNA folding.
The awards are presented by Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) to highlight research and mentoring efforts by women on the Texas A&M campus in honor and remembrance of Ethel Ashworth-Tsutsui, a longtime faculty member of the Texas A&M Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics. Tsutsui was a founding member of WISE and cared deeply about the retention and recognition of women in the university’s graduate programs. Both the awards and the event are sponsored by WISE, the College of Science, the Division of Research, the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies, the Office of the Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity and the Department of Chemistry.
Women In Science and Engineering at Texas A&M
is an organization of graduate students, staff and faculty from various science and engineering backgrounds. The group was created to address specific problems faced by women in non-traditional fields.
For more information about the lecture or other outreach events and women’s programs in the College of Science, please contact Nancy Magnussen at (979) 845-5587 or nancy@science.tamu.edu.
The Ethel Ashworth-Tsutsui Memorial Award for Research
Established to honor women graduate students who have demonstrated excellence in research. Nominees must be women graduate students currently enrolled in a graduate program at Texas A&M University. They must have completed at least two semesters of graduate study at Texas A&M University and be enrolled for at least six semester credit hours during the semester in which they are nominated. Nominations may be made by the candidate or by a Texas A&M University faculty member. Award recipients will receive a $500 monetary award, certificate and plaque.
The Ethel Ashworth-Tsutsui Memorial Award for Mentoring
Established to honor women graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and research staff who take action to encourage and support women graduate students at A&M University. Graduate student nominees must have completed at least two semesters at Texas A&M University and currently be enrolled. Nominations may be made by a peer or by a Texas A&M faculty member. Award recipient will receive a $500 monetary award, certificate and plaque.