Professors Receive Sloan, Rosenbaum Fellowships

Professors Receive Sloan, Rosenbaum Fellowships

BY LIA UNRAU
Rice News Staff
May 28, 1998

Three Rice professors have been selected as Sloan Research Fellows for 1998-2000,
and another professor has received the Rosenbaum Visiting Fellowship of the
Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University in
England.

Sarita Adve, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, Alan
Cox, associate professor of computer science, and Alexander Rimberg, assistant
professor of physics, have each been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship by
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Richard Baraniuk, assistant professor of electrical
and computer engineering, is the 1998 Rosenbaum Fellow.

One hundred Sloan fellowship recipients were chosen from more than 400 nominations.
Candidates are involved in physics, chemistry, computer science, mathematics,
neuroscience and economics, or in a related interdisciplinary field.

Fellows are chosen on the basis of their "exceptional promise to contribute
to the advancement of knowledge," according to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The foundation’s goal is to support young professors in North America who have
demonstrated special creative ability in their fields.

Awarded unrestricted grants of $35,000 for a two-year period, Sloan fellows
are free to pursue whatever lines of research are of most interest to them.

For Adve, her research interests lie in the area of computer architecture,
building and designing computers, especially parallel computer systems, in which
several processors are used for one problem. Because the memory system is slower
than the powerful processors in such systems, Adve is working to get the full
potential out of the processors by making the memory system work smarter and
interact better with the processor. She also develops simulation technology
to better evaluate computer designs, and she studies the programmability of
high-performance systems, and the trade-off between high performance and ease
of programming.

Cox’s research interests include parallel processing, computer architecture,
distributed systems, concurrent programming and performance evaluation. He is
currently involved in the design and implementation of TreadMarks, a software
distributed shared memory system running on a network of workstations. He has
also worked on FASTLINK, a project to provide fast sequential and parallel genetic
linkage analysis software. These projects played an instrumental role in the
discovery of the gene for Parkinson’s disease, and a number of research institutions
around the world use them for genetic research.

Rimberg’s area of research focuses on electrical transport measurements on
nanoscale structures, which have unusual electrical and magnetic properties.
He is working to understand the basic physics that occur on very small scales
where quantum mechanics come into effect. To deal with the push to make transistors
and other electronics smaller, Rimberg is working to help understand what happens
to electrical transport when electronic devices are miniaturized. Using electron-beam
lithography, he fabricates precisely controlled nanoscale structures from normal
metals, superconductors and semiconductors, and measures the transport properties.

Baraniuk will travel to Cambridge this summer to participate in a six-month
program in nonlinear and nonstationary signal processing. The Isaac Newton Institute
is an international research institute supported by the London Mathematical
Society and established as part of the University of Cambridge.

Baraniuk’s research in signal and image processing involves developing new
methods for analyzing and processing time-varying signals. In addition to time-frequency
representations, such as the wavelet transform, Baraniuk is also investigating
new processing tools based on physical concepts beyond time and frequency. These
new tools may advance the state-of-the-art in signal processing applications
for geophysics, radar and sonar, imaging, computer networks, advanced communication
systems, machine fault monitoring and nanotechnology.