March 29, 2007

Two faculty receive NSF awards for early career development

Honors for Wojciech Olszewski, Suzan van der Lee

An economist and a seismologist from Northwestern have received Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation, the agency’s most prestigious award for new faculty members.

They are Wojciech Olszewski, assistant professor of economics, and Suzan van der Lee, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, both in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

Olszewski received a CAREER award for his proposal titled “Economic Theory, Testing of Theories.” One important area of Olszewski’s research is testing empirically probabilistic theories. He studies tests that reveal if a potential expert is knowledgeable about the actual data generating process (such as with weather forecasts). Olszewski studies only empirical tests — tests that give a verdict based on the potential expert’s theory and observed data.

Another area of Olszewski’s research focuses on repeated games with private monitoring. His objective is to find the range of possible equilibrium outcomes for repeated games with imperfect private monitoring — to provide simple and “robust” equilibria, if possible. Imperfect private monitoring refers to situations where individuals involved in ongoing strategic relationships can never be certain what their partners think about them. It is very common in real life, says Olszewski, but the models of imperfect private monitoring are known for their intractability.

In her research, Van der Lee scrutinizes field and permanent-network seismic data to unravel some of the dynamics of solid Earth. After an earthquake, the entire Earth shakes imperceptibly. For example, the central United States slowly swayed about two centimeters after the Sumatra-Andaman Islands tsunami earthquake in 2004. The size, shape and especially the timing of such seismic waves are not only determined by the earthquake source but also by the structures in the Earth’s interior. Van der Lee records such seismic waves and “translates” the records into images of the Earth’s interior structures. In a sense, Van der Lee says, she uses the seismic waves to remotely sense the Earth’s interior, much like making CAT scans and ultrasound images.

Van der Lee received a CAREER award for her proposal titled “Estimating Temperature and Water Content of the North American Mantle from Geophysical Observations.” She will use the award to investigate the amount, whereabouts and role of hydrogen in the Earth’s upper mantle. Hydrogen, even if present in fractions of a percent, significantly affects the mantle’s viscosity and thus the flow patterns of mantle rocks. Because the mantle’s hydrogen content is very hard to estimate, Van der Lee will first develop a new method for the simultaneous analysis of different types of seismic data, which should facilitate the search for hydrogen atoms buried hundreds of kilometers below the Earth’s surface.

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. The minimum CAREER award size is $400,000 for a five-year period.

Three other Northwestern faculty -- Fabian Bustamante, Dongning Guo and Bryan Pardo, all from the department of electrical engineering and computer science in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science -- also received 2007 NSF CAREER awards. They were reported in early March.