Three receive CAREER awards

The recipients are Moses Charikar, Maria Pino Martin, and David Walker.

Moses Charikar

Professor Charikar's research interest is theoretical computer science. He is broadly interested in the design and analysis of algorithms, with an emphasis on approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems, on-line algorithms and algorithmic techniques for massive data sets.

His CAREER-funded project is titled Approximation Algorithms--New Directions and Techniques.

Professor Charikar joined the Princeton faculty in the fall of 2001 as assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science.

He came to Princeton from Stanford University, where he earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 2000. He earned his bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, where he triple-majored in technology, computer science, and engineering.

During his education at Stanford, he was awarded the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, the Computer Science Schlumberger Fellowship, and the Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship.

He also won the Best Student Paper Award at the 31st Association for Computing and Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Theory of Computing.

Earlier this year he received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

Maria Pino Martin

Professor Martin's research interests include the study of fundamental physical phenomena in transitional and turbulent flows, with a particular interest in the interaction between nonequilibrium chemical reactions and unsteady fluid motion.

Her research efforts include theory, numerical simulation, data analysis, and validation against experiments.

Her CAREER-funded project is titled Numerical Simulations of Transitional and Turbulent Hypersonic Flows.

The aim of this research is to develop new computational tools that capture the real flow physics via a better understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena, and bridging these new tools and production codes that are used for practical engineering applications.

Professor Martin came to Princeton in the fall of 2001 from the Center for Turbulence Research/NASA Ames Research Center at Stanford University, where she was a research associate.

She received her bachelor's degree from Boston University in 1994, where she was vice president of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society. Professor Martin earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1999.

David Walker

Professor Walker's research interests are the theory, design, and implementation of modern programming languages.

Specific research topics include certifying compilation, typed intermediate languages, typed assembly language and proof-carrying code; logic and type systems for reasoning about safety properties, memory management, aliasing and distributed computing; and language-based security and run-time security monitoring.

His CAREER-funded project is titled Programming Languages for Secure and Reliable Computing.

Professor Walker joi ned the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor in the fall of 2002.

He came to Princeton from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. He received his undergraduate degree in computer science from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and his master's degree and Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University in 1999 and 2001, respectively.

While at Cornell, Professor Walker received the Computer Science Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.

CAREER awards were created by the NSF to encourage the early development of academic faculty as both educators and researchers.

Four are promoted, one is reappointed

Professor

Sanjeev Arora and Edward Felten have been promoted to professor in the Department of Computer Science, effective July 1, 2003.

An expert in theoretical computer science, Professor Arora studied for two years at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his B.S. in 1990. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994, the same year he joined the Princeton faculty as assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1999.

Professor Arora won the ACM Doctoral

Dissertation Award and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award in 1995, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1996. In 1997 he was named a David and Lucile Packard Foundation fellow. Recently, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award in Computer Sciences and Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

He is on the editorial boards of Information and Computation and the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization. Professor Arora's research interests are theoretical computer science, specifically, computational complexity, uses of randomness in computation, probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs), and computing approximate solutions to NP-hard problems.

Professor Felten's research focuses on computer and communications security, especially relating to consumer devices and software; the impact of the law on technology; operating systems; internet software; the security of mechanisms for distributing executable content over the Internet; the interaction of security with programming languages and operating systems; distributed computing; and parallel computing architecture and software.

He is director of the University's Secure Internet Programming Lab.

Professor Felten joined the Princeton faculty as assistant professor in 1993 and was promoted to associate professor in 1999. He received his 1985 B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology and his 1993 Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington. He received a National Young Investigator Award in 1994.

Associate professor

Also in the Department of Computer Science, Adam Finkelstein and Thomas Funkhouser were promoted to the tenured rank of associate professor, effective July 1, 2003.

Professor Finkelstein joined Princeton in February 1997 as assistant professor. He teaches courses in nonphotorealistic rendering, computer animation, general computer science, and computer graphics.

Previously he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington. A 1987 graduate of Swarthmore College, he earned his master's degree in 1993 and his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Washington.

His research interests are in computer animation, surface textures, and nonphotorealistic rendering. In 2000 he received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and an NSF CAREER award. In 2001 he received an Emerson Electric Company E. Lawrence Keyes '51 Faculty Advancement Award.

Professor Funkhouser joined the Princeton faculty in the spring of 1998 as assistant professor. Previously he was a technical staff member at Bell Labs.

A 1983 graduate of Stanford University, Dr. Funkhouser earned his master's degree in 1989 from the University of California at Los Angeles, and his Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of California at Berkeley.

His research interests are research computer graphics, three-dimensional modeling, data visualization, lighting and acoustic simulation, collaborative systems, distributed computation, and multimedia databases.

He received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1999, an NSF CAREER award in 2000, and an Emerson Electric Company E. Lawrence Keyes '51 Faculty Advancement Award in 2001.

Reappointed

In the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Maria Garlock has been reappointed as assistant professor for a three-and-one-half-year term, effective Feb. 1, 2003.

Professor Garlock joined the Princeton faculty in the fall of 2002. She came to SEAS from Lehigh University, where she earned her Ph.D. in structural engineering.