Three Faculty Win NSF CAREER Awards
8-7-09

The National Science Foundation has recognized three new engineering faculty at Oregon State University with prestigious CAREER Awards, each of which carries grant support of more than $400,000 for future research by the faculty members.

Thinh Nguyen, Ted Brekken, and Bechir Hamdaoui, assistant professors in the OSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), were recognized.

“Having three CAREER Award winners this year in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is an indicator of the exceptional faculty that we have been able to attract to OSU,” said Karti Mayaram, acting head of the School of EECS. “Their research and educational activities will advance technology and ultimately improve the quality of life for everyone.”

Nguyen will use his $450,000 award to develop network coding theories and practices to make the Internet and wireless networks much faster and more reliable. This network coding approach will radically change the way information is transmitted, and will have lasting effects on many current applications. “Think of YouTube for example,” said Nguyen. “People can currently subscribe to tens of thousands of personalized YouTube channels that are not available with satellite or cable TV.

Unfortunately, the quality of these channels is not very high. I want to enable the transmission of fast, reliable, and high resolution videos over wireless networks and the Internet—simultaneously for millions of people—the same way people currently watch cable or satellite TVs.”

Brekken’s $400,000 grant will allow him to conduct research to develop ways to deliver electricity from renewable resources (such as wind, wave, or solar energy) to the power grid. With fossil fuels, the energy is “dispatchable,” meaning the amount of power can be turned up or down as needed. With renewable energy, we are at the mercy of the wind, waves, or sun. “If a system is 100 percent reliant on wind energy, for example, we’ll get zero percent power if the wind isn’t blowing,” said Brekken. He will explore the complementary nature of the various resources to develop ways to deliver an increasing percentage of diversified energy sources to the power grid. Ultimately, Brekken’s research may allow us to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel-based power.

Hamdaoui was awarded $400,000 to develop techniques and design algorithms for next-generation wireless cognitive networks. Over the past decade, wireless-based services, devices, and networks such as cell phones, Wi-Fi networks, GPS, and television have witnessed enormous success, creating a shortage of wireless bandwidth resources. Hamdaoui explains that this foreseen shortage is not so much due to the scarcity of bandwidth, but due to the inefficient, static nature of FCC’s (Federal Communications Commission) current spectrum allocation policies and regulations. Hamdaoui envisions that more flexible, liberal spectrum allocation methods are to be adopted in the near future to address this shortage problem: bandwidth will be accessed and shared dynamically by network entities and end-user devices themselves with little to no involvement of any centralized regulatory bodies. Hamdaoui is investigating new paradigms that exploit new, advanced communications technologies to enable opportunistic and dynamic bandwidth sharing, thus improving bandwidth efficiency.

The CAREER award is the NSF’s most prestigious award for new faculty members, designed to recognize and support the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. Each award carries a substantial grant to support the faculty member’s research projects that stimulate the discovery process in which the excitement of research is enhanced by inspired teaching and enthusiastic learning.