ECE’s Mohanram recognized with NSF CAREER Award

ECE’s Mohanram recognized with NSF CAREER Award

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Kartik Mohanram, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, has received a prestigious Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation.

KARTIK MOHANRAM

CAREER grants support research and education development plans of junior faculty and are among the most competitive grants awarded by the NSF, which annually gives about 400 across all disciplines. The five-year grants range from $400,000 to $500,000 and are designed to support transformative research activities of scholars likely to become academic leaders in their field.

”I am interested in ways to improve reliability in computing,” Mohanram said. “This concern used to be confined to such areas as banking and the military, but it now is entering the popular psyche. An hour of downtime can cost millions of dollars.”

His research focuses on preventing ”soft errors” resulting from such single-event effects (SEEs) as solar flares. Most often, the first component to be compromised is memory, followed by logic.

”Our object is to develop ubiquitous, low-cost, highly reliable computing by expanding into areas that lack the financial resources for custom solutions. We want to protect mainstream commodity systems,” Mohanram said.

Mohanram received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas in 2003. He joined the Rice faculty that year as well.