Hagness earns PECASE award

Assistant Professor Susan Hagness has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) 2000 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award, the nation's highest honor bestowed upon scientists in the early stages of their careers, was presented during a White House ceremony Oct. 24.

Hagness was recognized for both her research and teaching innovations and will receive a five-year, $500,000 award. She says we are reaching what she calls "the tera era," or an age in which transmission rates for fiber optic communications may break the terabit per second mark. (A terabit is 1 trillion bits per second.)

Nanotechnology is exploding nationally, and recent advances in materials technology and fabrication techniques are making it possible to design photonic microstructures that are fractions of the thickness of a human hair.

Hagness is working to understand how light travels within these structures, a key step before they can be applied in a new generation of integrated circuits. In the classroom, she is working to reverse the paradigm of "in-class lecture and out-of-class problem-solving." She uses interactive multimedia-based lectures, combined with small-group problem-solving sessions, to help students visualize and understand complex material.