Two Cornell faculty members were among this year's recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE), the Office of the White House announced recently.
Edwin C. Kan, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Greg Morrisett, assistant professor of computer science, were among 60 researchers who received the awards at a ceremony Oct. 24 in the White House Old Executive Building in Washington, D.C. The awards were presented by Neal Lane, the president's science adviser.
The PECASE award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers who are in the early stages of establishing their independent research careers. The awards are given to researchers who have received their Ph.D. degrees within the past five years. The Clinton administration established the awards in February 1996 to recognize some of the nation's finest junior scientists and to maintain U.S. leadership across the frontiers of scientific research.
"These extraordinarily gifted young scientists and engineers represent the best in our country," President Clinton said. "Through their talent, ability and dedication, they will quicken the pace of discovery and put science and technology to work advancing the human condition as never before."
Award winners are nominated by eight federal agencies. Kan's nomination was one of 20 from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Morrisett's was one of two from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The awards carry research grants of up to $500,000 over five years.
Morrisett joined the Cornell faculty in 1995 after receiving his Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University. His research focuses on the development of programming languages that can enforce computer security. In particular, he studies the problems presented by "mobile code" -- computer programs that travel across networks to be executed on a recipient's computer.
High-level programming languages like Java contain safeguards to prevent such code from taking malicious actions on the computers on which they are executed. Morrisett is developing ways to incorporate such safeguards into compact machine code.
Kan came to Cornell in 1997, after working as a research associate at Stanford University and in industry. Born in Taiwan, he received his B.S. degree from National Taiwan University in 1984 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988 and 1992, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He specializes in the design of integrated circuits, working on the development of circuits with elements as small as 20 nanometers (a nanometer is three times the diameter of a silicon atom) and on the incorporation of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) into integrated circuits.
In nominating recipients for the PECASE awards, the NSF also looks for faculty members who are working to improve the educational process, and Kan hopes to reorganize courses in chip design in Cornell's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
"I'm looking at ways to have a more reasonable sequence and better affinity of courses," he said. "Right now it's impossible for a student to take all the courses. For knowledge to progress, we'll have to condense it."
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