ALU M NI Two elected to National Academy of Engineering
Cynthia Hipwell
John Treichler
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R ICE EN GIN EERIN G
Two Rice University engineering graduates, M. Cynthia Hipwell and John R. Treichler, were elected this year to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Hipwell was cited by the NAE for “leadership in the development of technologies to enable areal density increases in hard disk drives.” Areal density in a hard drive refers to the quantity of bits of information that can be stored on the surface area of magnetic disks. The Academy singled out Treichler for his “contributions to digital signal processing and its applications to national intelligence gathering.” Hipwell earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Rice in 1992. She went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. That same year, she went to work for Seagate Technology, the data-storage company that developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD) in 1980. Much of Hipwell’s tenure at Seagate was spent as part of teams that developed new head-disk interface technologies, including air-bearing design, head-disk integration and spacing metrology. As a result of her work for Seagate, Hipwell is the author or co-author of 15 U.S. patents. Since last September, Hipwell has been vice president of engineering for Bühler, Inc., in Plymouth, Minn., a Swiss-owned company that develops facilities, equipment and services for processing foods and manufacturing advanced materials. Treichler is now the president of Raytheon Applied Signal Technology of Sunnyvale, Calif. He earned B.S. and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Rice in 1970, and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1977. After leaving Rice, Treichler served for four years in the U.S. Navy, attaining the rank of lieutenant. In 1977 he joined ARGOSystems, and in 1984 founded Applied Signal Technology Inc. The company, which builds advanced signal-processing equipment for the U.S. government, is now a business unit of Raytheon Inc. It develops technologies employed by the U.S. and its allies for use in foreign intelligence collection. Treichler’s research has also found applications in many commercial products, including advanced high-speed modems, broadcast high-definition television, wireless telephones and modern WDM (wavelength-division multiplexing) fiber optic transmission systems. The key paper enabling these breakthroughs, “A new approach to multipath correction of constant modulus signals,” was published in the IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in 1983. In it, Treichler describes a now widely used technique for blind signal equalization known as the constant modulus algorithm. The paper has been cited more than 1,300 times. Much of Treichler’s work remains classified for reasons of national security. Hipwell and Treichler were among the 80 new members and 22 foreign members elected this year to the NAE, bringing the total U.S. membership to 2,275 and the number of foreign members to 232.