De Neufville's contributions recognized by TRB
Professor Richard de Neufville, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Engineering Systems Division, will receive the Francis X. McKelvey Award from the Transportation Research Board (TRB), a division of the National Research Council, at its annual meeting in January. The McKelvey Award recognizes individuals whose work has contributed to the betterment of the aviation industry. In this case, it honors de Neufville's lifelong achievements in education, research and consulting in airport planning, design and management.
Doyle wins Pioneers of Miniaturisation prize
Patrick S. Doyle, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, was recently awarded the 2008 Pioneers of Miniaturisation prize, given out by the the Royal Society of Chemistry through the Lab on a Chip Journal. The $5,000 award is for young to mid-career scientists for extraordinary or outstanding contributions to the understanding or development of miniaturised systems.
CEE's Clune receives top engineering undergraduate student award
Graduate student Rory Clune is winner of Britain and Ireland's most prestigious award for science and engineering undergraduates: the GKN Award for the Science, Engineering and Technology Student of the Year.
The GKN Award (named for the British engineering firm) is given to the top student out of 15 winners of Science, Engineering & Technology Student (SET) Awards. Clune won the SET award in the mechanical engineering category -- Bentley Motors Award for the Best Mechanical Engineering Student -- for his undergraduate work at University College Cork on shape optimization of stainless steel coronary stents.
He and his research advisor, Denis Keliher, who was named Lecturer of the Year, received their awards at a ceremony in London on Sept. 26. Clune began his graduate study in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in September on an MIT Presidential Fellowship.
Transportation alumnus wins top paper award
Emmanuel Carrier, who earned a PhD in transportation earlier this year, won the Anna Valicek Medal from the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operations Research Societies in September for his paper describing his modeling of the behavior of airline passengers.
The paper is based on Carrier's doctoral research, which models how different categories of airline passengers choose itineraries and fares. For example, for some business travelers, schedule is the most important factor in decision-making; for other business travelers and most leisure travelers, ticket price is more important. Ultimately airlines can use this model to help make decisions for pricing and revenue management.
Moshe Ben-Akiva, the Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Peter Belobaba, principal research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, supervised Carrier's thesis research. Carrier now works in Kirkland, Wash., at AI Systems, a company that develops software for airlines.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 22, 2008 (download PDF).
