June 3, 2004

Six receive NSF Early Career awards

Six faculty members have received Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation.

They are Robert P. Dick, Franz M. Geiger, Teri Wang Odom, Karl A. Scheidt, Karen Smilowitz and Ying Wu.

The CAREER program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards for new faculty members. The CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.

Dick, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, will use the CAREER award primarily to pay the tuition and stipend of a student who will work with him to determine how to automatically analyze, design and control computers.

His CAREER project, “Analysis, Design, and Synthesis of High-Performance, Low-Power, Real-Time Embedded Systems,” will be funded at about $450,000 for five years from the Embedded Systems Program of NSF.

Geiger, assistant professor of chemistry, will use his CAREER award for “Investigation of Physical and Chemical Processes at Liquid/Solid Interfaces Relevant to Chromium Contamination in the Environment” and outlines a multidisciplinary laboratory approach for studying the chemistry that goes along with the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

The project addresses the question of how toxic chromium species commonly found in contaminated soil and aquatic environments interact with aqueous-solid interfaces.

Odom, assistant professor of chemistry and Dow Teacher-Scholar, will use her CAREER Award to focus on new chemical approaches to nanoscale transition metal chacogenide materials and the characterization of their complex electronic properties using scanning probe techniques.

The research project focuses on the synthesis of nanoscale transition metal chalcogenide materials and the study of their properties using local scanning probe techniques. The educational outreach concentrates on integrating research activities into the classroom through summer research programs for high school science teachers and courses on nanoscale science and technology.

Scheidt, assistant professor of chemistry, will use his CAREER award for research that combines several compounds in the presence of a small amount of a catalyst in “one pot” which provides a powerful approach to converting simple starting materials into more complex products with minimal waste. These compounds, called heterocycles, have wide application in the development of new pharmaceuticals.

Another aspect of the research is the synthesis of complex molecules with significant biological and structural properties.

Smilowitz, assistant professor of industrial engineering and management sciences with a joint appointment at the Transportation Center, will conduct research to develop operating strategies for goods movement. The research will explore the impact of introducing operational choice into vehicle routing and scheduling, considering a diverse set of applications in routing for goods movement in both industry and non-profit agencies, including intermodal drayage operations and interlibrary loan delivery, with the common theme of developing and evaluating innovative strategies.

Wu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a CAREER award for his proposal on “Visual Analysis of High Dimensional Motion: A Distributed/Collaborative Approach.”

His project will analyze high-dimensional motion (HDM) from video. HDM refers to various complex motions with high degrees of freedom, including the articulation of human body, the deformation of elastic shapes and the multi-motion of multiple occluding targets.