Three ECE faculty win Early Career Development Awards from NSF

Three COE electrical and computer engineering assistant professors have received year 2000 Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation. They are Yogesh Gianchandani, Susan Hagness and Amit Lal. (Hagness and Lal are also members of the Biomedical Engineering Department.) NSF established these awards to help scientists and engineers develop simultaneously their contributions to research and education early in their careers.

Left to right: Amit Lal, Yogesh Gianchandani and Susan Hagness, winners of 2000 CAREER awards. (38K JPG)

Hagness will develop highly accurate and efficient computational electromagnetics algorithms for modeling the propagation of light in photonic microstructures. With transmission rates moving into the terabit-per-second regime to meet the ever-increasing demand in fiber-optic communications, interest in micrometer-sized optical devices has increased enormously.

Lal's research focuses on using ultrasonic pulses to address two challenges in making MEMS more practical: to free stuck surface micromachines to solve in-use adhesion problems, and to actuate hinged surface micromachines to enable massively parallel assembly and actuation.

Gianchandani is developing a new class of electrothermal microactuators that promises a 100-fold increase in force while requiring one tenth the drive voltage of other thermal actuators. The proposed actuators will leverage deformations caused by localized thermal stresses to efficiently produce large forces without compromising displacement.