School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
September/October 2018

Rocket Club wins award

The Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association (YUAA) won Ford and Zipcar’s “Students with Drive” competition. The award includes a $5,000 Zipcar credit, a $10,000 donation to YUAA, and a $10,000 donation to Yale’s general scholarship fund, which will support current and future students at Yale and in the greater New Haven community. For the past year YUAA—which has about 80 active members—worked on numerous projects, including a hybrid rocket, a tiltrotor plane with vertical takeoff and landing, a radio-controlled solar plane, and the multiyear effort of building and launching a CubeSat miniaturized satellite.

Roboticist honored

Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, was selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering’s 24th annual US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. Engineers aged 30 to 45 were selected for the event for their exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. The participants—from industry, academia, and government—were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations. Kramer-Bottiglio’s research focuses on new and innovative ways to make things by building mechanisms and systems that exploit the properties of soft materials, such as extreme deformability and responsiveness to external stimuli.

Professor wins Facebook research award

Ruzica Piskac, assistant professor of computer science, has received a Facebook “Communications and Networking” research award with her proposal “Automated Repair and Verification of Firewalls.” The award carries up to $50,000 in funding and includes an invitation to visit Facebook headquarters. Piskac’s team of researchers developed FireMason, the first tool that can not only detect errors in firewall behaviors, but also automatically repair the firewall. Once computer administrators observe problems in a firewall, they can provide input/output examples that comply with what they want the firewall to do. Based on the examples given, FireMason automatically synthesizes new rules for the existing firewall.