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René Vidal, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Vision Dynamics and Learning Lab, is the recipient of a 2009 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award for "An Optimization Framework for Simultaneous Object Categorization and Segmentation." The Young Investigator Program exists to recognize outstanding new faculty members at institutions of higher education, support their research, and encourage their teaching and research careers.
Noah Cowan, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jeff Gray, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Rachel Karchin, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering are the recipients of 2009 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards, given in recognition of young scientists' commitment to research and education.
Cowan’s award for "Sensory Guidance of Locomotion: From Neurons to Newton's Laws" will support his research in the ways nervous systems transform sensory signals into motor commands to guide locomotion. This research provides a scientific foundation for the development of biomorphic robots for critical applications such as disaster recovery, space exploration, and security and may lead to enhanced neural prostheses and brain-machine interfaces.
Gray's CAREER Award for "Structure Prediction of Proteins on Solid Surfaces" will support the development of computational tools that can accurately predict the structure of proteins when they interact with interfaces—tools that are invaluable to the growth and evolution of devices at the interfaces of biology and solid-state nanotechnology. Jeff’s award will also support an educational outreach program for middle and high school students in Baltimore, including the development of new course materials that will be distributed nationally.
Karchin's CAREER award for "Modeling Missense Mutation Research" will enable the development of computational models for missense mutant function prediction that will be used to explore the importance of biological context in protein response to missense mutation (such as loss or gain of activity). Additionally, the award will fund an outreach program for high school students (targeting groups underrepresented in science), to introduce them to the field of computational biology.