News of Note From Pitt

• Engineering Professor Receives National Science Foundation CAREER Grant

• Pitt Business School Named Top 100 Social Media–Friendly School

PITTSBURGH—Behind the larger stories about the University of Pittsburgh are other stories of faculty, staff, and student achievement as well as information on Pitt programs reaching new levels of success. The following is a compilation of some of those stories.

Engineering Professor Receives National Science Foundation CAREER Grant

Yiran Chen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, has been awarded a five-year, $450,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation. The CAREER Program offers prestigious awards that support junior faculty members who demonstrate a great understanding of their fields through groundbreaking research.

The objective of Chen’s research is to leverage the unique properties of a memristor device—an emerging nano device that can remember electrical currents in a fashion similar to the way the human brain processes memory—to understand the synaptic behavior in electrical neural networks. The proposed neuromorphic computing circuit would act like a human brain that runs with high-power efficiency and could be manufactured at an ultralow cost.

Chen has been a member of the University’s faculty since 2010 and has more than 120 refereed publications, 69 granted U.S. patents, and multiple best-paper awards in the areas of postsilicon devices, very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design, low-power circuit and architecture, neuromorphic computing, and sensing technology.

Pitt Business School Recognized as a Top 100 Social Media–Friendly School

The University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business has been selected as a Top 100 Most Social Media–Friendly MBA School for 2013 by OnlineMBAPage.com. Staff at OnlineMBAPage.com compiled data from the social media accounts of more than 400 business schools, ranking them based on their presence and activity levels on social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pinterest, and Flickr. This is the first year the rankings have been issued.

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