Three Maseeh College faculty receive the 2020 CAREER award from NSF

Three Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science faculty receive the 2020 CAREER award from NSF. The NSF CAREER award is the most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty. The five-year grant supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to help lead advances in the mission of their department and organization.

Ehsan Aryafar is an assistant professor in Computer Science. His CAREER award proposal, Design, Analysis and Applications of mmWave Full-Duplex Wireless, aims to study communication algorithms, prototyping new radios and network architectures that enable and support full-duplex in mmWave bands.

Alex Hunt is an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering. His CAREER award proposal, Understanding the role of sensory feedback in gait stability through neurorobotic modeling, aims to construct a comprehensive model of locomotion that unifies current theories, and to provide a more complete picture of how the neural system, body, and external environment interact. The application of neuroscience to robotics lags capabilities and knowledge in each field; this work remedies this by unifying the state-of-the-art in both fields. Robotics will be advanced through the development of neural controllers that copy the nature of what makes animal locomotion robust and adaptive. Neuroscience will be advanced through the embodiment of neural models on a physical system. These advances will lead to improved treatment and rehabilitation methods for disorders that affect locomotion, and robotic systems that can be used in unstructured environments and assistive contexts.

Fang Song is an assistant professor in Computer Science. His Foundations of Emerging Technologies (FET): CAREER award proposal, Algorithms, cryptography and complexity meet quantum reductions, aims to the pursuit of understanding the strengths and limits of quantum computing and making it accessible via a novel route, reductions, which are procedures that effectively relate one problem to another.