CAREER Paths

Virginia Davis, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Xiao Qin, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, have both been recognized as National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Development CAREER award winners. The CAREER award is NSF’s most prestigious honor, recognizing outstanding junior faculty members and supporting their research and outreach activities with funding for five years.

Davis has been granted $400,000 by the agency for her research, “Microstructure and Processing of Cylindrical Nanomaterial Dispersions.” She will explore how nanomaterials can be assembled into newer, more advanced materials, including macroelectronic devices, sensors, electro-optical devices and antimicrobial coatings. As part of her award, Davis will continue to mentor and educate future scientists and engineers through outreach activities, such as nanocamps for middle school girls and international research opportunities for chemical engineering undergraduate and graduate students.

Qin also received $400,000 for his research, “Multicore-Based Parallel Disk Systems for Large-Scale Data-Intensive Computing.” He will investigate parallel disk architectures that put substantial multicore computing power on disks. Qin will bridge the technology gap between multicore computing and parallel disk systems by addressing fundamental issues of multicore computing, data processing and performance analysis for dataintensive computing systems. If successful, Qin’s research will provide the first parallel disk system in which large parts of data and I/O processing are offloaded to multicore processors embedded in disk drives.