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9/7/2006 12:13:00 AM

NSF awards will support development of three faculty members

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Assistant professors Eugene Zubarev, Mark Embree and Scott Rixner have won Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Awards from the National Science Foundation.

CAREER grants support early career development of junior faculty and are among the most competitive grants awarded by the NSF, which gives only about 400 of the five-year grants annually across all disciplines.
CAREER grants typically range from $400,000 to $500,000 and are designed to support the early career-development activities of scholars who are likely to become academic leaders in their field.

ZUBAREV

Zubarev, the Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator and assistant professor in chemistry, won support for his efforts to create new nanoparticles and nanostructures using the hydrophobic effect, the tendency of some materials to repel water molecules.
Some of the most basic building blocks in biology — including the membranes that encase all living cells — are amphiphiles, compounds that consist of ordered arrangements of both water-repelling and water-attracting components. Zubarev has already pioneered a range of techniques to create an entirely new class of synthetic amphiphiles that can be useful in both molecular electronics and biomedical science. The CAREER funding will pay for continued investigations and for a comprehensive K-12 outreach program.

The CAREER research program of Embree, assistant professor of computational and applied mathematics, seeks to answer fundamental questions about some of the most important algorithms used to solve large-scale linear algebra problems. Solving such problems is necessary in a number of applications, like solving the complex fluid dynamics associated with systems as diverse as artificial hearts, chemical-process containers or jet aircraft. Though the efficient solution of such problems is essential to high-fidelity mathematical modeling, and the nation’s fastest computers devote many cycles to this challenge, several of the most important algorithms are unreliable and incompletely understood. Embree hopes to gain insights that will lead to more rapid and reliable algorithms.

RIXNER

His research program will be complemented with educational efforts that include mentorship programs for graduate students and undergraduates, as well as the development of a new graduate course and the broad public dissemination of educational material for numerical analysis through Connexions, an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web.

Rixner, assistant professor of computer science and in electrical and computer engineering, will use his CAREER funding to develop new architectures for computer networking that make efficient use of next-generation multiprocessor technology.

EMBREE

Modern operating systems rely largely on increasing processor performance to keep pace with the rising demand for network communication. To date, exponential gains in microprocessor performance have always allowed processing power to keep pace with increasing networking demands. However, the complexity of modern microprocessors will prevent such continued performance growth. Instead, chip manufacturers have begun to provide multiple processors on a single chip to make up for the loss in performance growth of individual processors.

Rixner hopes to find ways to restructure the interfaces between computer hardware and software within the network subsystem to allow networking performance to continue to scale with these new single-chip multiprocessors. He also intends to use the project to expose undergraduate and graduate students to system-level networking issues in computer systems and architecture courses.