Faculty Outstanding Achievement Awards
Posted On: February 10, 2008
Description:
Jun Suzuki and
Ethan Bolker of the Computer Science Department have won College of Science and Mathematics Outstanding Achievement Awards for their accomplishments in the 2006/2007 academic year.
Professor Suzuki won his award for research. His work falls into two broad areas: software engineering, in particular, model driven development, and computer networks, in particular, biologically-inspired software designs to increase autonomy and adaptability of networks. Last year Professor Suzuki’s publication record included 18 papers that appeared in conference proceedings, four posters presented at conferences, one journal article and one book chapter. In addition, seven publications were accepted: three in journals, one book chapter, and three in conference proceedings, and six additional articles were submitted. Every one of these articles has at least one of his students as a co-author. In the past three years, five of Professor Suzuki’s conference proceedings articles with students have won best paper awards at the conferences where they were presented. Professor Suzuki has received a series of grants from three industrial funders: OGIS International, Electric Power Development Company, and Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry.
Professor Bolker won his award for teaching. In the years since 2002, when he first taught our graduate software engineering course, he has worked with Professor Brian White (Biology) to develop a suite of open-source Java programs for undergraduate education in biology, This software, Molecular Genetics Explorer (MGX), has been recognized in Science’s Magazine’s Netwatch column: “From Gene to Green”, Science, August 2, 2007.” Professors Bolker and White have recently published a description of this software and its successful use in the classroom in the peer reviewed journal Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education. The result is that MGX is regularly in use here at UMass Boston and freely available to the world as open source software downloadable from
http://intro.bio.umb.edu/MGX/. Several hundred biology students at UMass Boston have already used the MGX software. In addition, for several years, Professor Bolker has visited classrooms at the J. P. Manning Elementary School, leading a Mathematics Club and working with students and teachers. He is writing It’s Elementary: Math for Grades One to a Zillion, a book about what he, the students and the teachers have learned about mathematics, teaching and learning.
