Purdue News
Purdue News
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May 12, 2000 Eight junior faculty at Purdue honored by NSFWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Eight Purdue University scientists and engineers are among 350 nationwide recently honored by the National Science Foundation with 1999 Faculty Early Career Development Awards. The award is the NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. Awards for 1999 range from $200,000 to $500,000 over four or five years. The recipients from Purdue are Jillian Buriak, Hicham Fenniri, Ananth Grama, Kihong Park, Chris Rasmussen, T.N. Vijaykumar, Carl Wassgren and David Yau. Career awards support exceptionally promising college and university junior faculty who are committed to the integration of research and education, said Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation. "We recognize these faculty members, new in their careers, as most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century." Purdue President Steven C. Beering said: "Within the past two years, Purdue faculty members have received 17 of these prestigious awards, an indication that the university is attracting some of the most exceptional young faculty in the nation. These brilliant young professors are an enormous asset to our students and to the Purdue community." Here are details about the 1999 Purdue awardees and their research: • Buriak, assistant professor of chemistry, is working to instigate a revolutionary approach towards catalysis design by interfacing catalysts with silicon computer chips. Using metal-based catalysts attached to silicon wavers, her research group is attempting to modulate the electronics of the metal catalysts at will by applying potentials to the chip surface. Buriak said this approach may improve upon existing catalysts used in industrial and pharmaceutical synthesis, and it could result in novel catalysts capable of carrying out very difficult reactions, such as water splitting and carbon dioxide reduction. Her group also is looking into applications such as sensors that could be placed inside the body and implantable devices to deliver drugs. • Fenniri, assistant professor of chemistry, is conducting research aimed at designing and synthesizing "self-assembled" architectures with a goal of developing nanoscale materials and artificial receptors that hold promise for a wide range of biomedical applications. Self assembly is a process by which components come together without human intervention to form an ordered, functioning system. "Controlling the states of matter at the atomic and molecular levels opens tremendous avenues in disciplines as diverse as medicine, materials science and nanotechnology," Fenniri said. His group is working with a new type of material that takes advantage of a new approach to chemical synthesis to build highly ordered assemblies from chemically programmed molecular modules. • Grama, assistant professor of computer science, is investigating ways to apply high-performance computing and networking to scientific and engineering applications. "The computational aspects of simulating a group of particles under various models of influence are at the core of a variety of key unsolved mysteries in science and engineering, including the origin of the universe, the structure and behavior of proteins, and physical properties of materials," she said. These computational techniques also can be used in emerging problems such as designing fast microprocessors, electromagnetic scattering, shielding, and wave propagation. Recent advances in a family of algorithms known as hierarchical multipole methods have enabled scientists to simulate systems that were difficult to produce even on the largest supercomputers. Her research focuses on some of the key issues associated with hierarchical multipole methods, and on developing techniques to apply these methods to various scientific problems. • Park, assistant professor of computer science, researches provisioning quality of service for the Next Generation Internet. "As with quality of life for people, information packets flowing on the Internet get depressed and unhappy if a required service level is not provided by the network," he said. The technical challenge, he said, lies in making on-the-fly, decentralized decisions about resource allocations so that the diverse requirements of millions of Internet users can be efficiently and fairly facilitated. Park's group adheres to the motto "network research, like rocket science, requires a fair amount of tinkering to achieve lift-off, but to reach the moon in one piece mathematics and our full powers of understanding must be made to bear." • Rasmussen, assistant professor of mathematics, computer science and statistics at Purdue's Calumet campus, is investigating how emerging analyses of student thinking, context problems, and symbol use can be coordinated to promote student learning of advanced undergraduate mathematics. His research seeks to build on and extend theory-driven work at the elementary and secondary levels to inform and guide the learning and teaching of university-level mathematics in the classrooms. • Vijaykumar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, studies computer hardware architecture and high-performance microprocessors. His group is investigating ways to improve the performance of computers by developing more flexible systems to bridge the gap between processor and memory speeds. "Today's computer systems use one or more processors to perform computations and memory to hold and supply data to the processors," he said. "Due to technological scaling reasons, processors are getting much faster than memory, but because processors can compute only as fast as memory can supply data, slow memories can slow down the entire system." His group is developing ways to isolate specific demands of each application and adapt the cache hierarchy to meet the application demand, even as the application is running. • Wassgren, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is developing models for describing the dynamics of granular materials. A granular material is an assembly of discrete, solid particles dispersed in an interstitial fluid or vacuum. By understanding the physics of granular materials, scientists may be able to design more efficient processing and handling systems for many industrial applications that involve the processing of pharmaceuticals, chemicals and food products. • Yau, assistant professor of computer science, is investigating ways to make complex network systems work smoothly and predictably for end users. "Folks who enjoy surfing the Internet may have noticed the increasing number and variety of applications that have some form of real-time requirements," he said. "For example, if you are listening to your favorite MPEG3 song being played over the Net, you want the audio to come to you uninterrupted." Yau and his group are studying ways in which different software and hardware components share responsibilities and yet work together in an integrated manner, and developing ways to improve upon these systems. Writer: Susan Gaidos, (765) 494-2081; sgaidos@purdue.edu Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu Sources: Jillian Buriak, (765) 494-5302; buriak@purdue.edu Hicham Fenniri, (765) 494-5241; hf@purdue.edu Ananth Grama, (765) 494-6964; ayg@cs.purdue.edu Kihong Park, (765) 494-7821; park@cs.purdue.edu Chris Rasmussen, (219) 989-2705; raz@calumet.purdue.edu T.N. Vijaykumar, (765) 494-0592; vjay@ecn.purdue.edu Carl Wassgren, (765) 494-5656; wassgren@ecn.purdue.edu David Yau, (765) 494-9027; yau@cs.purdue.edu
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