MEMS student wins Kennedy fellowship

MEMS student wins Kennedy fellowship

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Arta Sadrzadeh, a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, has won the second annual Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Award, which supports graduate students involved in high-performance computing.

	ARTA SADRZADEH

Founded with a $150,000 grant last year by the supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc., the fellowship is named in honor of the late Ken Kennedy, a Rice computing pioneer who founded the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (formerly the Computer and Information Technology Institute) and served on Cray’s board of directors.

Sadrzadeh works in the lab of MEMS professor Boris Yakobson. His research is focused on modeling and simulation of nanostructures and studying their geometrical, mechanical and electronic structures and electron-transport properties. ”One exciting example was our prediction and investigation of the electronic structure of pure boron fullerenes and nanotubes,” he said. ”While the nanotubes have already been synthesized, the boron buckyball has yet to be realized experimentally.”

He said boron nanostructures may find applications in targeted drug delivery, neutron cancer therapy and hydrogen storage.

He and Yakobson have also studied the use of carbon nanotubes as electro-chemical gas sensors and they are investigating the potential of quantum wires for long-range energy transmission.