RISING
STARS
Andrew J. Oxenham and Linda
E. Sugiyama
2003 May Issue 3
Scientific and technological inquiry in RLE is enriched by the
efforts of a select group of world-class researchers who, while
not on the MIT faculty, make extraordinary contributions to RLE
programs. The Institute recently recognized the achievements of
two of the members of the RLE research staff by promoting each to
the rank of Principal Research Scientist. MIT reserves this position
for those demonstrating unique scholarly accomplishments and who
direct their own research programs.
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Andrew J. Oxenham is a member
of RLE's Sensory Communications Group. He received a BMus in music
and sound recording with first class honors from the University
of Surrey in 1992 and a PhD in experimental psychology from the
University of Cambridge in 1995. From 1995 to 1997, Oxenham was
a Wellcome Trust International Prize research fellow at the Institute
for Perception Research at Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He became
a research scientist in the department of Speech-Language Pathology
and Audiology at Northeastern University in 1997 before coming to
MIT in 1999 when he joined RLE. In addition to his RLE position
as Principal Research Scientist, Oxenham is a member of the Speech
and Hearing Bioscience and Technology Program of the Harvard-MIT
Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His primary research
interests revolve around auditory perception and cognition, or psychoacoustics,
which involve the behavioral study of sound processing in the human
auditory system. In 2001, Oxenham was honored with the R. Bruce
Lindsay Award of the Acoustical Society of America, granted to young
researchers making important contributions to the field of acoustics.
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Linda E. Sugiyama is a member
of RLE's High Energy Plasma Physics Group. She received a BS in
applied mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in
1975 and a PhD in mathematics from MIT in 1980. She became a postdoctoral
associate in RLE in 1980, joining the RLE research staff in 1983.
Sugiyama's research has centered on a continuing interest in many-body
interacting systems, with a focus on the physics of plasmas in magnetic
fields and on the development of magnetically confined plasmas for
thermonuclear fusion. Because of the complexity of these many-body
systems, a great deal of Sugiyama's work has been directed toward
advancing and using computational models for simulating their behavior.
A major recent direction for her research has been efforts to simulate
a confined plasma's time evolution of a two-fluid magnetohydrodynamic
model, in which the electronics and ions are treated separately,
rather than the more conventional single-fluid approach. Sugiyama,
widely known and respected in the field of plasma physics, is also
active in professional organizations, such as the American Physical
Society for which she serves as a member of the Committee on Women
in Physics.
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