News

WNCG alumnus Dr. Qi Lei has received the 2021 Oden Institute Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her winning dissertation, “Provably effective algorithms for min-max optimization," proposes optimization algorithms to find the equilibrium point of two-player zero-sum games. Read the dissertation abstract and find the link to the full text via the University of Texas Libraries. At WNCG, Lei was advised by Prof. Alex Dimakis; she was co-advised by Dr. Inderjit Dhillon from the University of Texas Department of Computer Science.

Prof. Andrea Alù has been elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society for “seminal contributions to electromagnetic theory and applications, nano optics, plasmonics, and metamaterials.” Election to Fellowship in the American Physical Society is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the membership and is recognition by peers of the person’s outstanding contributions to physics.

Prof. Andrea Alù was recognized as an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society (APS). This award recognizes scientists who have been exceptionally helpful in assessing manuscripts for publication in APS journals. The highly selective Outstanding Referee program annually recognizes the top 150 of the roughly 60,000 currently active referees.