Three faculty members earn prestigious research awards

Princeton NJ -- The National Science Foundation has granted CAREER awards, its most prestigious early-career research grant, to three Princeton faculty members. David August, Jeffrey Carbeck and Evgenii Narimanov received five-year grants each worth about $375,000.

The CAREER program supports young, tenure-track faculty members "who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century," according to the National Science Foundation. It supports proposals that include a combination of research and teaching initiatives and that are likely to serve as the basis for a lifetime of work in both areas.

August, assistant professor of computer science, received a grant to develop techniques and tools to aid the design of computer processor systems. The tools would include computer simulations that show how a contemplated design might perform. Such tools could shorten the length of time it takes to design processors and improve the feedback between initial design decision-making and final product performance.

Carbeck, assistant professor of chemical engineering, plans to develop miniature devices like computer chips that catalog all the proteins made by a particular cell and then analyze how the proteins interact. The question of what proteins are present in a cell and how the proteins function has become a key problem in biology following the completion of genome projects. Carbeck's work will combine aspects of biology, chemistry, chemical engineering and materials science.

Narimanov, assistant professor of electrical engineering, will use the grant to study the resonances and scattering of light in certain kinds of non-electrically-conducting materials. The research is important in the field of photonics, in which light replaces electricity as a means for transmitting and processing information.