Four Faculty receive 2006 NSF Career Awards
Four College of Engineering faculty received National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards in 2005-2006.
Rajeevan Amirtharajah, M. Saif Islam and Bevan M. Baas, all assistant professors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Zhendong Su, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received the highly competitive award.
The CAREER Award supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.
Such activities build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
Rajeevan Amirtharajah
Dr. Amirtharajah's research focuses on powering electronic systems from environmental sources by harvesting energy from solar radiation or mechanical vibration. The goal is to reduce battery size and volume, decrease system maintenance costs and increase operating lifetime for portable or wearable electronics or wireless sensors.
Research under the new grant will include the exploration of circuit styles and signal processing architectures for energy harvesting sensors, enabling a trade off between system performance and available power. It will open new possibilities in long-lifetime sensors for monitoring critical infrastructure, health care and security applications.
Saif Islam
Dr. Islam's award supports the study of nano-wire based devices and circuits. Research under the new grant will continue the development of new types of devices and circuits that will be formed starting with a single atom.
The goal will be to minimize the device size and increase the density of devices in future electronic and photonic systems. Dr. Islam's bridging techniques will connect the devices to the rest of the world without using expensive and tedious interfacing techniques.
Zhendong Su
Dr. Zhendong Su's award is based on his proposal for an analysis framework that would improve reliability and security of national information system infrastructures.
Database and web applications contain critical faults that undermine their security and reliability. Many of these errors occur because of complex, dynamic interactions with outside environments. No tool or technique currently exists to prevent the introduction of errors, leaving applications susceptible to serious failure and security threats.
Bevan M. Baas
Dr. Baas received a CAREER award for his proposal titled, "Processors for the Computation of Future Digital Signal Processing Applications."
Applications requiring significant levels of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) are becoming increasingly commonplace, as, for example, in GPS receivers, Wi-Fi wireless networking, 3D medical imaging and cell phones.
As these applications become increasingly sophisticated and more frequently portable, their performance and power dissipation requirements often exceed the capabilities of modern DSP processors.
The goal of this research is to develop novel architectures, circuits, and software for high performance and low power DSP processors that meet the demands of emerging and future DSP applications, and that are also suitable for future semiconductor fabrication processes.