Faculty win NSF grants

This year, five Boston College faculty members have received early-career awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) recognizing and supporting their commitment to scholarship and education.

Five assistant professors - Steve Bruner (chemistry), Vidya Madhavan (physics), David Martin (computer science), Noah Snyder (geology and geophysics) and Stella Yu, a Clare Booth Luce assistant professor of computer science - have been awarded this high distinction.

These Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards are given to junior faculty members who display potential for leadership in their field and effectively incorporate research and education in their work.

The awards also include substantial grants. The five professors collectively have been awarded $2.5 million in NSF CAREER funding to support their research, which they will receive over a span of five years.

The achievement of earning five CAREER awards this year is notable, since prior to this, BC faculty had only received a total of five CAREER awards over the past 12 years and never more than two in a single year. Vice Provost for Research Kevin Bedell told The Chronicle that this puts BC in the company of top-rated national research institutions and is a significant achievement not only for the individual professors but for BC.

"It's truly a reflection of the quality of our faculty and the increased emphasis we as an institution are placing on research and education," said Bedell.

Each individual grant will support the faculty member's research project and its wider educational application. Some recipients, such as Madhavan, hope to use their research to increase both the number of students interested in and education about their fields of knowledge.

Madhavan received her CAREER award for her work in the field of physics, and will use her $500,000 grant to study magnetic semiconductors that carry spin-polarized electrons.

"Spin" is a property that electrons have in addition to charge, and it is the microscopic, quantum mechanical equivalent of a classical, macroscopic magnet.

Scientists hope that this property will lead to a new kind of electronics, known as "Spintronics," which could utilize both the charge and spin of electrons for faster information transmission that requires less current.

Madhavan said she hopes that her research will further the understanding of magnetism in semiconductors at atomic scales, and this may bring scientists one step closer to achieving Spintronics.

Madhavan also plans to devote part of her grant to setting up education and outreach programs for science teachers as well as school children.

"In the long term, I hope I will be able to find a way to increase the number of students interested in physics or physics education," Madhavan said in an e-mail.

Like Madhavan, Bruner's research will also involve the microscopic, but at the molecular level. Bruner was awarded $575,000 for his work in chemistry, and he will use the grant to study how therapeutic drugs are naturally produced by plants and microorganisms.

Using a combination of chemical and biological approaches, he will study the protein machines responsible for the biosynthesis of natural products. These natural products can be found in traditional medicines and are utilized in a majority of clinically-used pharmaceuticals, Bruner's research could potentially revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry.

"An understanding of the mechanism of natural production will be used to develop novel and more efficient ways of producing useful therapeutics through environmentally friendly approaches,"Bruner said in an e-mail.

Snyder was granted around $430,000 for his work in geology and geophysics for the purpose of investigating the history and physical processes of several rivers in northern Maine. These rivers are the habitat of the last remaining populations of the endangered wild Atlantic salmon.

Snyder's project intends to increase understanding about how ongoing and future changes, such as reforestation, stream restoration, fish reintroduction, and dam removal, will affect channel shape and habitat.

Snyder hopes to involve students in his work through their participation in team field work during the summer, attendance of lab meetings, and for credit or paid research during the school year.

"What I think is neat about this project is that students can work in teams in the field and see how science can be applied to real land-use decision making processes," said Snyder.

The project is designed to allow undergraduates to become involved in the research early in their careers at BC, but Snyder is also interested in the actual future application of his findings.

"Tangibly, there will be published papers, certainly many with BC students as co-authors," said Snyder. "But I also hope that the research is useful and used by land managers and non-profit groups working on habitat restoration in Maine rivers."

While Snyder, Bruner, and Madhavan's works are centered on the physical sciences, Martin and Yu received grants for their proposed research in computer science. Martin was awarded $500,000 to fund his work on creating "visual intelligence" in computers.

He is working on building machines that can view an image, understand what they are looking at, and respond intelligently to its content.

Martin is trying to find a universal "mid-level" representation of visual information, which falls somewhere between the high-level conscious experiences humans have and the pixels of an image.

Yu will be using her grant of $500,000 to find new solutions to problems in computer vision by integrating art and science.

Yu will be looking at ways in which computers might be given the ability to understand three-dimensional images and translate them by organizing pixels into groups that correspond to visual surfaces.