President Clinton named Steven W. McLaughlin as a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). One of sixty PECASE recipients in 1997, Professor McLaughlin will receive $500,000 over five years to support his research on optical recording systems.
Steven W. McLaughlin is an Assistant Professor in the School of ECE at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received the B.S.E.E degree from Northwestern University in 1985, the M.S.E. degree from Princeton University in 1986, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1992, all in electrical engineering. He joined Georgia Tech in September 1996. During 1992-1996 he was with the Electrical Engineering Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology. From 1987-89 he was with Booz, Allen and Hamilton, and from 1985-1987, and during the summers of 1990 and 1992, he was with AT&T Bell Laboratories.
He received the NSF CAREER award in 1997, an NSF GOALI award in 1995 and the NSF Research Initiation Award in 1993. His work has also been supported by General Electric, Western Digital Corporation, Harris Corporation, and Optex Communications.
He currently serves as the Publications Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He also chairs the Information Theory Society Ad-hoc Committee on the 50th Anniversary Index where he is responsible for the Information Theory digital library. He also serves a Publications Chair for the 1998 International Conference on Communications (ICC).
His research interests are in the area of communication and information theory including coding for constrained channels, signal processing and coding for high density magnetic and optical recording channels, source coding (quantization and compression), and combined source-channel coding.
The IEEE has announced that Richard E. Blahut is the recipient of the 1998 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal "for contributions to error-control coding, particularly by combining algebraic coding theory and digital transform techniques." The Alexander Graham Bell Medal, sponsored by Lucent Technologies, is given for exceptional contributions to the advancement of communications sciences and engineering. Professor Blahut, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and research professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will receive the medal in an award ceremony later this year.
The IEEE has announced that Oliver M. Collins is the recipient of the 1998 IEEE Judith A. Resnik Award "for the development of coding for space communications which contributed to the success of the Galileo mission." The IEEE Judith A. Resnik Award, sponsored by the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems, Control Systems, and Engineering in Medicine and Biology Societies, is given annually for contributions to space engineering. Professor Collins will receive the award of a bronze medal and $3,000 at the 1998 International Symposium on Information Theory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Professor Collins is currently an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. He received the B.S. degree in engineering and applied science in 1986, and the M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1987 and 1989 respectively, all from the California Institute of Technology. He was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University from 1989 to 1995 before joining the faculty at Notre Dame.