Two Rice engineering school professors named 2009 Sloan Fellows

Two Rice engineering school professors named 2009 Sloan Fellows

BY DWIGHT DANIELS
Special to Rice News

Eugene Ng and Wotao Yin, assistant professors in the George R. Brown School of Engineering, have been awarded prestigious 2009 Sloan Research Fellowships.

	EUGENE NG		WOTAO YIN

They were among 118 faculty members the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation selected this year from hundreds of nominees at more than 60 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Recipients are working on the research frontiers of physics, chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics and neuroscience.

Ng, who holds appointments in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, was recognized for research in developing new network models, network architectures and holistic networked systems. He hopes the work will lead to future global computer network infrastructure.

Ng won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2005. He received a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Washington in 1996. He earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 and 2003, respectively.

Yin holds an appointment in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics and studies numerical optimization and its applications in inverse problems, such as compressed sensing, image processing, computer vision and machine learning. He is also conducting research in combinatorial optimization, especially network flow problems that arise in scientific computing and industrial applications.

Yin earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Nanjing University in 2001. He received a master’s degree in operations research from Columbia University in 2003; in 2006 he was awarded a second master’s degree and a doctorate, both in operations research. While studying at Columbia, he worked as a researcher in optimization for medical imaging and computer vision for Siemens Corporation. He won an NSF CAREER Award last year.

”I am so pleased that the Sloan Foundation recognized these outstanding young researchers,” said James Coleman, Rice’s vice provost for research. ”The Sloan fellowships target individuals who are truly on the frontier of scientific innovation. Faculty members like Eugene and Wotao produce cutting-edge research and have a commitment to integrating research and education that will ensure Rice reaches the research and education goals set forth in the university’s Vision for the Second Century.”

Ng and Yin join a distinguished list of Rice faculty members who have won Sloan Research Fellowships, including Nobel laureates Robert Curl and the late Richard Smalley. Eugene Zubarev, the Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator and assistant professor of chemistry, won a fellowship last year.

Sloan Research Fellows receive two-year, $50,000 grants that may be used in a largely unrestricted manner. The fellowships are among the most highly sought, due both to the lack of restrictions on the funds and the prestige of the awards. The fellowship program was established in 1955 as part of the legacy of Alfred P. Sloan, a former president and CEO of General Motors.

–Dwight Daniels is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.