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The University of Washington’s Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology Program, which has enlisted scientific luminaries such as British physicist Stephen Hawking to encourage teenagers with disabilities to pursue careers in technical fields, has won a 1997 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.

Doctors needing chemical analyses such as blood tests to make life-saving diagnosis and treatment decisions soon won’t have to lose precious time waiting for results to come back from the lab. New hand-held sensor technology developed at the University of Washington will allow physicians to bring a sophisticated “laboratory” directly to their patients for instant, on-site chemical analysis.

When engineers at the University of Washington set out to create a vehicle that is cleaner and safer to operate than gas or electric cars, they jokingly named it the smogmobile after a L’il Abner cartoon depicting a car fueled by air pollution. But the vehicle developed by the UW team almost lives up to its name. Running on liquid nitrogen, the smogmobile generates no harmful emissions and actually creates an opportunity for pollutants to be removed from the air as its fuel is produced.

and recyclable.

Materials science and engineering, a fundamental but often low-profile part of manufacturing, is the subject of a new summer institute at the University of Washington that aims to give high school and community college teachers new tools for designing laboratory projects that turn their students on to science and engineering.

Victor Mills, who graduated from the UW in 1926, helped build The Procter & Gamble Co. into a manufacturing giant by revolutionizing the process for making Ivory soap and developing consumer staples such as Jif peanut butter, Duncan Hines cake mixes, Pringles potato chips and, yes, Pampers disposable diapers. Retired since 1961, Mills lives in Tucson with his wife, Ruth, and will turn 100 on March 28.

Top computer science students from Stanford, MIT and Harvard were no match for a team of three University of Washington students who were runners up at the Association for Computing Machinery’s annual International Collegiate Programming contest Sunday (Mar. 2) in San Jose.

Researchers are now developing new technology and software that allows computer users to simply speak or hand-write commands. These and other innovative computer-user interfaces will be demonstrated 7 to 10 p.m. Nov. 6 at the University of Washington as part of an international symposium on user interface technology and software.

An innovative temperature-measuring instrument developed with the assistance of a University of Washington engineering professor has yielded improvements in processing semiconductors that may lead to faster, cheaper computer chips.

David Salesin, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the UW. Salesin is the only professor at the UW and possibly in the nation to have received a Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research Young Investigator awards and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Salesin’s most recent achievement is having eight full-length research papers accepted for publication at the 1996 SIGGRAPH conference.