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Three Presidential Fellows Begin Graduate Work

For the first time, Columbia Engineering's Graduate School welcomed Presidential Distinguished Fellows as part of the incoming class. The fellowships, established last year for incoming Ph.D., D.E.S. and M.S./Ph.D. students, include full tuition plus an annual stipend of $24,000 for three years, including three months of summer research. They are offered to the top candidates from all departments and were chosen by faculty from the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics in addition to Engineering.

"This was the most competitive applicant pool our School has ever seen," said Thomas Rock, Assistant Dean for Graduate Student Services. "It was not only the largest but also of the highest quality."

Dean Rock believes that the Fellowships are responsible for this year's excellent results. "They enabled us to be more competitive with the other top engineering schools, such as Stanford, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Those are schools where there are many cross-applications with Columbia and, in years past, we have lost excellent students because we were not able to offer comparable stipends and opportunities."

This year's winners have taken differing routes to reach the Morningside Campus. Mehmet Ozgun is a graduate of the University of Southern California in electrical engineering. George Patounakis, also an electrical engineering major, is a graduate of Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ, and Mark A. Rice is a chemical engineering major from the University of Kansas.

For all three, New York is a new experience. Mehmet Ozgun had adopted the ways of the West Coast while at USC.

"I love to drive and I miss my sports car," he said, "I'm not a subway kind of guy, and I'm just getting settled." But on the positive side, he notes that, because people are not all in cars, it is easier to get to know them. His first impression of Columbia is of the friendliness of the people and the international nature of both the student body and the city itself.

Ozgun designed a high frequency 500 MHz pulsar while at USC, worked at Applied Micro Circuits Corp. in San Diego with a CMOS analog group, and was a teaching assistant of a junior level electronics course generally taught by entry or mid-level graduate students. He intends to pursue his interest in circuits at Columbia, hoping to combine a career in industry and academia.

Mark A. Rice, a chemical engineering major from the University of Kansas, came to the East Coast for the first time to see Columbia, among other graduate schools. His interest is in biomedical and biotechnical engineering. Rice did research at the University of Colorado in an NSF-sponsored project on tissue engineering and investigated the effects of adding a synthetic polymer to Fibrin Glue constructs used to grow cartilage. An avid Ultimate Frisbee player, he has joined Columbia's team for practice at Baker Field.

George Patounakis, an electrical and computer engineering major from Rutgers, was involved in research labs from the beginning of his first year, working with virtual reality, automatic name placement on maps and surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter modeling.

He is co-author of three papers that discuss virtual reality-based training for the diagnosis of prostate cancer and the analysis of SAW properties of epitaxial ZnO films grown on R-Al203 substrates. During his undergraduate research, he gained considerable background and experience in piezoelectric device physics and computer simulation and modeling.

"These three Fellows have truly outstanding academic records both in the classroom and as researchers," said Dean Rock, "and we are happy to have been in the enviable position of having to choose from so many exceptional applicants."

This Issue