Rice awarded more than $2.4 million in state grants

Rice
awarded more than $2.4 million in state grants

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News Staff

Despite deep
cuts in research-and-development spending by state lawmakers,
Rice science-and-engineering faculty have won 14 grants
worth more than $2.4 million from the state’s Advanced
Technology Program and Technology Development and Transfer
Program.

Rice’s ATP
and TDTP funding will help pay for a wide range of studies
in areas as diverse as computer-aided drug design, materials
science testing, computer networking, software design, Internet
optimization, environmental bio-remediation, nanotechnology
and biomedical engineering.

“Considering
the way state R&D budgets were cut, we had a phenomenal
year,” said Tony Elam, associate dean of the George
R. Brown School of Engineering. “The Advanced Research
Program was killed altogether, which made competition all
the greater for the reduced funding available in ATP and
TDTP.”

Overall, Rice
won 13 percent of all ATP and TDTP funds this year, second
only to The University of Texas at Austin’s 22 percent.
The University of Houston was third with 7 percent and Texas
A&M University garnered 3 percent. Moreover, Rice led
in success rate, winning 18 percent of the grants it applied
for, followed by
UT–Austin’s 12 percent, U of H’s 7 percent
and A&M’s 6 percent.

The ATP and TDTP
programs are designed to promote the state’s economic
growth and diversification by increasing the number and
quality of scientists and engineers in Texas, including
minorities and women, enlarging the technology base for
industry, creating new projects and services and attracting
new industries to Texas.

Rice projects
funded this year include:

• Robert
Cartwright, professor of computer science — a unit
testing framework for concurrent programs

• Alan Cox,
associate professor of computer science and in electrical
and computer engineering — efficient multithreading
for network services

• Peter
Druschel, associate professor of computer science and in
electrical and computer engineering, and Rudolf Riedi, assistant
professor of statistics and electrical and computer engineering
— a scalable architecture for ad hoc networking and
services

• Frank
Dunning, the Sam and Helen Worden Professor of Physics and
Astronomy — development of an ultracompact electron
spin polarimeter for magnetic materials characterization

• Lydia
Kavraki, associate professor of computer science, and Cecilia
Clementi, assistant professor of chemistry — development
of geometric tools for computer-aided drug discovery

• Edward
Knightly, professor in electrical and computer engineering
and computer science, and Tze Sing Ng, assistant professor
of computer science — accelerating the World Wide Web
via integrated Internet and IDC performance optimization

• Knightly
and Behnaam Aazhang, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor in Electrical
and Computer Engineering — enabling technologies for
developing wireless transit access points

• Matteo
Pasquali, assistant professor in chemical engineering, and
W. Edward Billups, professor of chemistry — macroscopic
arrays of functionalized single-walled nanotubes

• Robert
Raphael, the N.T. Law Assistant Professor in Bioengineering
— molecular interactions between phosphatidylcholine
and NSAIDs

• Walid
Taha, assistant professor in computer science, and Ron Goldman,
professor of computer science — advanced languages
techniques for device drivers

• Frank
Tittel, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor in Electrical and
Computer Engineering, and Robert Curl, University Professor,
the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Professor of Natural
Sciences and professor of chemistry — development of
compact gas-sensor technology based on quartz-enhanced photoacoustic
spectroscopy

• Moshe
Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational
Engineering and professor of computer science — scaling
up formal verification technology

• C. Herb
Ward, the Foyt Family Professor in Civil and Environmental
Engineering and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology
— bioremediation of DNAPL source zones

• Jennifer
West, associate professor in bioengineering and chemical
engineering — bioactive vascular grafts.