Three OSU Profs Win Combined $1.3 Million For Research

Story Posted: Wed, Jun 14, 2006

By Gregg Kleiner, 541-737-9684
SOURCE: Ron Adams, 541-737-3101

CORVALLIS – The National Science Foundation has recognized three new engineering faculty at Oregon State University with prestigious CAREER Awards, each of which carries grant support of more than $400,000 for future research by the faculty members.

Alan Fern and Eugene Zhang, professors in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and mechanical engineering professor Jay Kruzic were recognized.

“To have three CAREER Award winners this year in the College of Engineering indicates we’re attracting talented new faculty to Oregon State,” said OSU Dean of Engineering Ron Adams. “They are recognized for research that will ultimately improve life, and in the process potentially lead to new companies and new jobs for Oregon.”

Fern will use his $500,000 award to advance the capability of computers to learn from experience, and to advance the applicability of structured machine learning to a wide range of interpretation and decision making problems.

“We will demonstrate the advances in a number of challenging application domains ranging from learning to accurately interpret video of American football based on previous viewing experience to learning to improve decision making in complex planning problems based on previous problem-solving experience,” Fern said.

Zhang was awarded $400,000 to explore the design and control of time-dependent vector and tensor fields, which will benefit a range of computer graphics and scientific visualization applications, including weather prediction and tsunami simulation, building and aircraft design and testing, electromagnetic simulation, fingerprint analysis, special effects for movies and games, computer-generated arts, shape and motion analysis and editing, and education.

Kruzic’s $400,000 award will help him develop better design tools for predicting and avoiding fatigue failures in advanced structural materials that are used in a wide range of applications, from biomedical implants to turbine engines. His project will also focus on education, recruitment and retention of students in engineering and science, particularly underrepresented groups like women and minorities. He will create mentoring opportunities from the high school to the graduate level that will encourage students to gain a strong connection to these fields and see first hand the positive social benefit of their work.

The CAREER award is the NSF's most prestigious award for new faculty members, designed to recognize and support the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. Each award carries a substantial grant to support the faculty member's research projects that stimulate the discovery process in which the excitement of research is enhanced by inspired teaching and enthusiastic learning.