HERSCHEL L. SEDER, A&S ’39, was a trustee of the university for 20 years. During his term as trustee, he served on the advisory committees of the Whiting School of Engineering, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
His most significant contribution to Johns Hopkins University was the pivotal role he played in pioneering the university’s expansion into the field of biomedical engineering and, subsequently, the university’s international leadership in biomedical engineering research and education.
Mr. Seder was chairman and president of the Milwaukee Valve Company. His contributions to the valve industry were many and he was honored with induction into the Professional Plumbing, Heating, Cooling and Piping Hall of Fame and with the Lifetime Achievement Award, given by Supply House Times magazine. His company was recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as the Midwest Regional Subcontractor of the Year and was cited by the military for its contributions to Operation Desert Storm.
Mr. Seder and his wife, RUTH A. SEDER, were very active in fundraising activities for the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and for United Cerebral Palsy, where Mr. Seder served on the board. They were honored nationally in 1983 with the Humanitarian Award from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Ruth Seder was active in the Brandeis University Women’s Committee on both the local and national levels. She also was a trustee of the Jewish Woman’s Foundation of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, and she was involved with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. Mrs. Seder passed in 2002, followed by Mr. Seder in 2014. They are survived by four children and nine grandchildren.
Held by René Vidal
RENÉ VIDAL is a professor of Biomedical Engineering and the inaugural director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS) at Johns Hopkins University. He holds secondary appointments in the Departments of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering, and is a faculty member of the Center for Imaging Science (CIS), the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM), and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR).
Vidal’s research focuses on the development of theory and algorithms for the analysis of complex high-dimensional datasets, such as images, videos, time-series, and biomedical data. He has pioneered the development of methods for dimensionality reduction and clustering, such as Generalized Principal Component Analysis and Sparse Subspace Clustering, and their applications to face recognition, object recognition, motion segmentation, and action recognition. He has also helped create new technologies for a variety of biomedical applications, including detection, classification, and tracking of blood cells in holographic images, classification of embryonic cardio-myocytes in optical images, and assessment of surgical skill in surgical videos. His current major research focus is on understanding the mathematical foundations of deep learning and its applications in computer vision and biomedical data science.
Vidal is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the IAPR, and he has received numerous awards for his work, including the 2012 IAPR J.K. Aggarwal Prize, the 2009 ONR Young Investigator Award, the 2009 Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2005 NFS CAREER Award, and best paper awards in computer vision (JVCI 2015, ICCV-3DRR 2013, PSIVT 2013, ECCV 2004), controls (CDC 2012, CDC 2011) and medical robotics (MICCAI 2012).
