Nicoleta Serban, assistant professor of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Nick Feamster, associate professor in the College of Computing, represent two of eighty-five of the nation’s brightest young engineers who have been selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) 17th annual U. S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium.  Participants are engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in industry, academia, and government.  They were chosen from approximately 315 applicants and have been nominated by fellow engineers or organizations.

“The young engineering innovators of today are solving the grand challenges that face us in the coming century,” said NAE President Charles M. Vest.  “We are proud that our Frontiers of Engineering program brings this diverse group of people together and gives them an opportunity to share and showcase their work.”

The symposium will be held September 19-21 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, and will examine additive manufacturing, engineering sustainable buildings, neuroprosthetics, and semantic processing.  Alfred Z. Spector, vice president of research and special initiatives at Google, will be a featured speaker.

Dr. Serban received her B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Theoretical Statistics and Stochastic Processes from the University of Bucharest.  She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.  Dr. Serban's most recent research focuses on model-based data mining for functional data and spatio-temporal data with applications to industrial economics with a focus on service distribution.