Eight doctoral students at the University of Kansas have been selected to receive prestigious Madison and Lila Self Graduate Fellowships as they begin the 2008-09 academic year. Six of the students are pursuing doctorates in engineering. The graduate students are regarded as tomorrow’s leaders in their areas of research, which range this year from biomedical to engineering topics.

Four University of Kansas groups engaged in environmental sustainability activities will benefit when the 2008 “Proud to Be a Jayhawk” tailgating fundraiser gets under way. Two of the groups have strong ties to the KU School of Engineering.

Two University of Kansas School of Engineering professors were singled out and rewarded for their teaching excellence during the first week of the fall semester.

Hossein Saiedian, professor and associate chair of electrical engineering and computer science, and Michael Detamore, assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, were named Kemper Fellows. Each professor received word of the honor in front of their students during the opening minutes of their first class of the semester. A KU “surprise patrol” with representatives from the KU administration, Commerce Bank, KU Endowment and the School of Engineering, walked unannounced into each class to bestow the honor and deliver a $5,000 award to the professors.

p>As cell phones become mobile computers with broadband Internet access, University of Kansas researchers examine technologies that could aid in the widespread deployment of high-speed wireless access for the Sprint Nextel network.

KU’s Information and Telecommunication Technology Center is leading multidisciplinary research to correlate the performance of millimeter wave communication systems with weather events that can weaken signals and disrupt transmissions.