FIU professors recognized with NSF CAREER awards

Nezih Pala, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Vagelis Hristidis, assistant professor in the School of Computing and Information Sciences, have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER awards.

The CAREER award recognizes and supports the early-career development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. NSF CAREER awards are highly prestigious and shape a faculty member’s entire career. This honor also indicates how competitive a faculty member is in his or her field.

Nezih Pala

Pala was honored for his research in “Nanoscale Multi-element Plasmonic Devices for Tunable Terahertz Detection Applications.” He is investigating a transformative plasmonic device technology to create the first tunable THz detectors operating at room temperature. The detectors developed by his group are micro/nano-scale semiconductor devices which can be easily integrated with semiconductor electronics to realize THz-spectrometer-on-chip for biological and chemical testing and “full-color” THz camera for environmental and security monitoring. Better understanding of THz-matter interactions in nanoscale is also expected to make energy harvesting possible in far infrared and THz range of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is currently not exploited as a widely available renewable energy source.

“There was a so-called “THz gap”– a lack of THz sources and detectors – until about ten years ago,” Pala said. “Although much progress has been made with intensive research in the last decade, we still lack compact tunable detectors to take full vantage of T-rays.”

“This part of the electromagnetic spectrum is important, and very unique applications are possible,” he added. “The technology can be used in chemical and biological sensing, DNA sequencing, and explosives detection.”

The NSF award, which will provide a total of $400,000 over the next five years, will support graduate and undergraduate students and research activities in Pala’s Integrated Nanosystems Research Lab (INSYST).

Vagelis Hristidis

Hristidis received his NSF CAREER award for “A Collaborative Adaptive Data Sharing Platform.” The focus of his research is to support users of a community to effortlessly exchange information.

After a hurricane disaster, government agencies, news media and businesses submit progress and status reports in the form of text documents. It is hard to accurately search such documents, as is the case for the public Web, due to the complexity of the natural language. Hristidis’ work will allow automatically annotating exchanged document using standardized terminology, which will allow accurately searching this data.

“This award will help us to investigate and create methodologies that will allow communities such as disaster management, research, or news organizations, to be more productive by minimizing the time to organize and explore their domain knowledge, and consequently maximizing the time to work on the core problems of the domain,” Hristidis said.

His five-year, $525,000 NSF award will support graduate and undergraduate students and research activities as well.

The College of Engineering and Computing now has ten career awardees. Nine faculty members have received NSF awards and one professor was honored with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) CAREER award, which represents about ten percent of the College’s tenured and tenure track faculty.

In addition to Pala and Hristidis, these distinguished faculty awardees are:

Tao Li, associate professor, and Jason Liu, assistant professor, in the School of Computing and Information Sciences have received NSF CAREER awards.

Raju Rangaswami, associate professor, received both an NSF CAREER award as well as a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) CAREER award.

Girma Bitsuamlak, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received his NSF CAREER award last year. And Amir Mirmiran, dean of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is a former NSF CAREER recipient.

Arvind Agarwal, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and Gang Quan, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, were also honored with NSF CAREER awards.