Junior faculty recognized

Six receive prestigious career advancement awards

Six junior faculty members have received career advancement awards from the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS).

They are as follows:

* David August, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Ron Weiss, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, received Emerson Electric Company E. Lawrence Keyes '51 Faculty Advancement Awards;

* Jeffrey Carbeck, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Clarence Rowley '95, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and K. Ronnie Sircar, assistant professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, each received a Howard B. Wentz, Jr. Junior Faculty Award; and

* Mona Singh, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received the Alfred Rheinstein '11 Faculty Award.

David August

The Princeton/ Von Neumann architectural model contributes a great deal of power and flexibility to modern computers. Yet it is also easily exploited by users with ill intentions.

Professor August will use this award to investigate programming language and computer architectural mechanisms to address this problem. By separating the single memory space into multiple cryptographic domains, the benefits of the Princeton Von Neumann architectural model can be enjoyed without the security concerns.

The funding will support the work of a graduate student and provide the necessary equipment.

Professor August earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1993 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1999 from the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Ron Weiss

Ron Weiss is developing an engineering discipline to program cell behaviors with the same ease and capability with which computers and robots are currently programmed.

This is accomplished by creating synthetic gene networks that instruct cells to perform computation, communications, and signal processing.

Application areas include programmed tissue engineering, the synthesis of pharmaceutical products, embedded intelligence in materials, biological sentinels that can sense and affect environmental conditions, human therapeutics, and molecular fabrication of biomaterial.

Professor Weiss joined the SEAS faculty as assistant professor in the fall of 2001.

He earned his B.A.s in computer science and economics from Brandeis University in 1992, his S.M. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2001.

While working on his Ph.D., Professor Weiss was participating in research on microbial robotics and amorphous computing. He also participated in a research project studying content routing systems.

Professor Weiss was inducted into the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society at MIT and won the Michtom Award for Outstanding Achievement in Computer Science at Brandeis.

Jeffrey Carbeck

Jeffrey Carbeck's research group is developing a new microscale technique--microscale steady-state kinetic analysis (MicroSKA)--that enables the rapid and parallel study of the rates of biochemical reactions involving proteins, while avoiding many of the limitations of current microscale approaches. Their approach results from the application of fundamental principles in chemical engineering and reactor design to current problems in proteomics.

Professor Carbeck joined the faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor in the spring of 1998. He earned his undergraduate degree in materials science and engineering in 1990 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his Ph.D. from MIT in polymer science and technology in 1995.

Prior to coming to Princeton, he was a postdoctoral research assistant at Harvard University.

Clarence Rowley

Clarence Rowley's research addresses the modeling and control of complex systems, combining the traditional disciplines of fluid mechanics, dynamical systems, and control theory.

His work is inherently multidisciplinary, and the unrestricted funds from the Howard B. Wentz award will make possible collaborations with other researchers that would not be possible inside the narrow scope of more traditional funding sources.

Professor Rowley joined the SEAS faculty in the fall of 2001 as an assistant professor. He received both his M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

While an undergraduate at Princeton, Professor Rowley was a member of Tau Beta Pi and he won the Dike award for Excellence in Independent Research in 1995.

He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship from Cal Tech in 1995 and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

K. Ronnie Sircar

K. Ronnie Sircar will use his Howard B. Wentz award to facilitate his research projects on engineering problems arising from finance and economics.

These include better understanding of market volatility and its effect on complex portfolios; design and valuation of employee stock options; microeconomic modeling of investor activity; and management of risks arising from derivative securities in markets with uncertain and rapidly evolving volatility.

The work will involve mainly graduate and some undergraduate students, and seek to benefit their training and education in techniques of probabilistic and computational modeling and financial data analysis.

Professor Sircar joined SEAS in the fall of 2000 as an assistant professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering. Previously, he was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan.

He received his Ph.D. in scientific computing and computational mathematics from Stanford University in 1997, and holds a master's degree with distinction in mathematical modeling and numerical analysis from Oxford University. Dr. Sircar earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Oxford University in 1992.

He is coauthor of a new book titled Derivatives in Financial Markets with Stochastic Volatility from Cambridge University Press.

Mona Singh

Mona Singh's research within computational biology focuses on deciphering genomic data at the level of proteins, the workhorse molecules of the cell. She is particularly interested in developing algorithms for genome-level prediction of protein-protein interactions.

Protein-protein interactions play a central role in many cellular functions, including DNA replication, transcription and translation, signaling cascades, metabolic pathways, and protein trafficking and secretion.

Since a genome contains a complete "parts list" of an organism, the recent wealth of whole-genome data allows scientists to begin to address exhaustively the problem of determining and predicting which proteins can interact with each other.

Thus far, much of the work on predicting protein structure and protein-protein interactions has focused on the coiled coil motif.

Professor Singh's group has developed highly effective sequence-based methods for identifying whether a given protein sequence can take part in a coiled coil structure, and they are developing novel computational technique s to predict whether two coiled coil proteins interact with each other, and if so, what the nature of this interaction is.

She joined the faculty in the Department of Computer Science in 1999 from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, where she was a postdoctoral fellow.

She received her undergraduate degree and a master's degree in computer science from Harvard University, both in 1989. Her 1995 Ph.D., also in computer science, is from MIT.

About the awards

The Emerson Electric Company E. Lawrence Keyes '51 Faculty Advancement Award is intended to promote the recruitment and the retention of junior faculty members in the SEAS by providing annual awards in support of research and teaching.

The Howard B. Wentz, Jr. Faculty Award assists younger, promising faculty members who are good teachers.

The Alfred Rheinstein '11 Faculty Award goes to a young faculty member who has shown exceptional promise to assist them in furthering his or her research.