School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
September/October 2020

Applied Physics joins SEAS

On July 1, the Department of Applied Physics (AP) became a member of the School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS). The move will help the university carry out a set of large-scale strategic investments in science and engineering. AP is a crucial link between physics and engineering, said SEAS dean Jeffrey Brock ’92, making SEAS an ideal home for the department. AP and SEAS have already shared a long and productive history, and the move, Brock said, means that “collaborations will surely be all the more fruitful and better resourced.”

A new way to clean water

Researchers led by Jaehong Kim, the Henry P. Becton Sr. Professor and chair of chemical and environmental engineering, have found a promising technology for clearing water of pollutants: a new nanoparticle that converts light to heat. The gold nanoparticle, half of which is coated with silica, could lead to new technologies that can rid water of trace amounts of contaminants that are resistant to conventional treatments. It was created as part of the Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), an organization that includes Yale and numerous other partners and aims to develop off-grid water treatment systems that both protect human lives and support sustainable economic development. 

Paper honored for standing the test of time

Joan Feigenbaum, the Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science, received the Test of Time Award for 1995–2006 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Feigenbaum won for “Decentralized Trust Management,” a paper published in 1996 that she coauthored with Matt Blaze and Jack Lacy. The award is based on the idea that it’s impossible to know how important a paper is at the time of its publication, and recognizes works that have since had an outsized influence on the field. Among other criteria, the award is given for papers that “initiated major new research directions and led to new work and even entire new research fields that otherwise would not have emerged.”