Four EECS Faculty recognized with College of Engineering Awards

Congratulations to the following recipients of 2011-12 College of Engineering Awards:

Prof. Jason Flinn received the Education Excellence Award in recognition of his consistently high rankings from students and his contributions to the curriculum. Prof. Flinn’s lectures are uniquely designed by integrating hands-on experiments and demonstrations of code that motivate students to learn new material, and his former industrial experience enables him to effectively make connections to the real world. His work in developing EECS 182 has given EECS a strong presence for the Informatics major at the university level. With his co-instructor Brian Noble, Prof. Flinn created the EECS 498 course “Cloud Computing in the Commute,” in which students work in multi-disciplinary groups to develop automotive software applications that unite sensors in the vehicle and cloud services via wireless networking.

Prof. Flinn conducts research in the areas of operating systems, mobile computing, storage, and distributed systems.

Prof. Ted Norris has led one of the country’s leading research groups in ultrafast optics and optoelectronics for nearly 20 years. He is accredited with the creation of the world’s most successful ultrafast table-top laser systems (marketed by numerous companies), and he has made numerous contributions ranging from fundamental optics to applications in biomedical optics. He is a founding member of the Michigan Nanotechnology Institute for Medicine and Biological Sciences (M-NIMBS), author of 5 patents, and founder of the spin-off company PhotonAffinity.Prof. Norris is Director of the newly-established NSF Center for Photonic and Multiscale Materials (C-PHOM), which brings together faculty from across the College of Engineering and University, as well as seven affiliated educational institutions and national laboratories.

Dr. Jeff Ringenberg received the Thomas M. Sawyer, Jr. Teaching Award for his outstanding activities as an educator, including his use of new methodologies and continuous efforts to improve the learning environments in his courses. In particular, he has incorporated active learning pedagogies to increase student collaboration and engagement in large lecture courses. His work is regularly published by the American Society of Engineering Educators and has been well received by his students. Overall, Jeff has had a significant impact on the College of Engineering’s student population; during the 2007-2011 academic years, he taught between one third to one half of all incoming first-year students in ENGR 101.

Dr. Ringenberg is the faculty advisor for the MSuite Collaborative, a cross-disciplinary student group that develops applications for mobile devices.

Prof. Kim Winick received a Service Excellence Award in recognition of several important service activities in recent years. He had a major role in developing the lab for EECS 216 (Signals and Systems), a course taken by all EE and CE undergraduate students. As the EE Chief Program Advisor since 2009, Prof. Winick devoted a significant amount of time advising students, and responding to their inquiries and concerns. This included students from Shanghai who were part of the newly-established SJTU-JI program. Finally, he served in various other key service roles, including EE:Systems graduate student financial aid chair and member of the ECE Executive Committee and the Rackham Graduate School Divisional Board.