Two Cornell engineering professors receive prestigious Lockheed awards

By David Brand

Two professors in the College of Engineering have received prestigious $50,000 awards from the 2004 Lockheed Martin University Research Grants Program.

Apsel

Campbell

The two recipients are Alyssa B. Apsel, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mark Campbell, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

According to Nader Mehravari, senior technical staff member in the Advanced Technology Department at Lockheed Martin Federal Systems facilities in Owego, N.Y.: "It is very unusual for the corporation to award more than one grant to a given university per year. Moreover, this is the third year in the row that a Cornell faculty member has received one of these grants from Lockheed Martin."

Thomas Avedisian, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was an award recipient in 2003 and 2002.

Apsel is an expert on merging high-speed CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) circuits with photonics. Her research focuses on building high-performance opto-electronic computational microsystems. She received a Lockheed Martin award for her project "Resonant Monolithic Photodetectors and On-Chip Waveguides for Integrated Optoelectronics."

Also, Apsel is the recipient of a $400,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Award. The Faculty Early Career Development Program offers the NSF's most prestigious award for new faculty members. The program recognizes the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. Apsel received the NSF award for her project "Designing with Light -- Comparative Analysis and Design of Optical Interconnects for Chip-to-Chip Communication."

Apsel earned her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 2002.

Campbell is an expert in autonomy for complex aerospace systems, such as multiple satellites and autonomous aerial vehicles. He received his Lockheed Martin award for his project "Cooperative Information Seeking for Uninhabited Vehicles."

He earned his Ph.D. in control and estimation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.