New CSE Research Scientist Earns Mentorship Recognition


The Undergraduate Research Office awarded Michael Mandel, CSE Research Scientist, an Outstanding Research Mentor award. This award, part of the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum is given "to recognize the clinical & research faculty, lecturers, post-doctoral researchers, and graduate students who also contribute extraordinary guidance to the undergraduate students who work with them." To receive the award Michael had to be nominated by an undergraduate(s) participating in the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum, and must demonstrate excellence in teaching and mentorship.

In this year's Denman, Michael advised Jordan Hawkins, a senior in Electrical and Computer Engineering, for his undergraduate honors thesis. The project was to replicate certain tasks that DJs do manually, via software processing it automatically. Specifically, he built systems that will smoothly transition between tracks in a playlist and create 'mashups' by combining parts of other songs.

Dr. Mandel joined Computer Science and Engineering in Autumn 2012. Prior to that he earned his BSc in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 and his MS and PhD with distinction in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2006 and 2010 as a Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Presidential Scholar. From 2009 to 2010 he was an FQRNT Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Machine Learning laboratory at the Université de Montréal. From 2010 to 2012 he was an Algorithm Developer at Audience Inc, a company that has shipped millions of noise suppression chips for cell phones.