News Release

Innovative young Yale engineers selected for NAE's 2004 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium

Grant and Award Announcement

Yale University

Two Yale engineers are among 86 of the nation's brightest young engineers selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) 10th annual Frontiers of Engineering symposium.

Ainissa Ramirez and Erin Lavik will participate in the three-day event, which will bring together engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing cutting-edge engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. The participants -- from industry, academia, and government -- were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations and chosen from a field of over 170 applicants.

Last year, both professors Lavik and Ramirez were named MIT's Technology Review Magazine among the world's 100 top young innovators under the age of 35 and were honored at the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT.

Lavik, an assistant professor in Yale's new interdisciplinary Biomedical Engineering Department, focuses her research on new approaches to repairing spinal cord injury and retinal degeneration. Ramirez, a materials scientist and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Yale, has developed novel materials for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) by exploring how materials thinner than a human hair behave mechanically; she has also discovered metals that can strongly bond with hard-to-bond surfaces, such as glass and diamond.

The symposium will be held at the National Academies' Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, Calif., and will explore topics in multiscale modeling, designer materials, engineering for extreme environments, and engineering and entertainment.

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