Default | NEWS

10/2/2008

Rice among nation’s top CAREER grant recipients
Second in fiscal ’08 in National Science Foundation awards to young scientists

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Rice University’s appeal to talented young faculty can be easily quantified with one glance at the National Science Foundation’s awards list.

Rice tied for second place among private American universities in the number of CAREER Awards given out last year, with funding coming to seven professors who are just beginning to make their marks here and in the scientific community.

	JAMES COLEMAN

“National Science Foundation CAREER Awards are the most prestigious grants that young faculty members can get in the basic sciences,” said Vice Provost for Research James Coleman. “They also celebrate the ability of faculty to integrate research and teaching.

“The fact that we’ve done so extraordinarily well in these awards speaks to the tremendously high quality of faculty we have been hiring. And it also speaks to the commitment of those faculty to integrating research and education that is a hallmark of Rice.”

CAREER grants support the early development of junior faculty who seem likely to become academic leaders in their fields of study. The five-year grants are worth up to $500,000, and are among the most competitive at NSF, which awards only about 400 of the grants across all disciplines each year.

Rice was second to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which garnered 10 awards for fiscal 2008. Cornell University tied for second with Rice, followed by Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford.

Coleman noted the percentage of Rice faculty members who got CAREER Awards far outstrips that of any other institution on the list.

The Rice winners and their projects:

Leonard Duenas-Osorio, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, “Reliability Assessment and Risk Mitigation for Smart Interdependent Infrastructure Systems.” Duenas-Osorio looks at the interdependence of power grids, telecommunications, natural gas lines and water distribution in modern cities, a field of study that has obvious value in post-Ike Houston.

Shelly Harvey, assistant professor of mathematics, “Algebraic Methods in Low-Dimensional Topology.” Harvey’s specialty, knot theory, is useful in designing treatments for cancer that involve the knotting of cellular DNA, and in astrophysics, which uses advanced math to describe the “shape” of space-time.

Lanny Martin, associate professor of political science, “Government Policy Responsiveness in Multiparty Parliamentary.” Martin’s grant is allowing him to study just how responsive multiparty democracies are to the electorate.

Kartik Mohanram, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, “Design Optimization for Robustness to Single-Event Effects.” By single-event effects, Mohanram means things like solar flares that can wreak havoc on computer systems. Where military and banking systems already have such expensive protection, he is working on low-cost solutions for the rest of us.

Fenglin Niu, associate professor of Earth science, “Seismic Imaging of the Earth’s Mid-Mantle, the Deep Inner Core and Stress Transients.” His work on earthquake-warning systems has made them sensitive enough to detect minute geological changes hours before impending quakes.

Walid Taha, assistant professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering, “Multi-stage Programming for Object-Oriented Languages.” One of Taha’s recent projects involves the development of programming languages, tools and methods for software designers to guarantee physical safety for those who interact with such machines as robots.

Wotao Yin, assistant professor of computational and applied mathematics, “Optimizations for Sparse Solutions and Applications.” Yin’s work on compressed sensing, a new form of data compression that has found a complementary technology in Rice’s single-pixel camera research, could ease the high cost of data acquisition.