Four engineering faculty receive national awards

Four College of Engineering faculty members have received 1999 Faculty Early Career Development Awards from the National Science Foundation.

Civil and environmental engineering assistant professors Gregory W. Harrington and Daniel R. Noguera, and electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Akbar Sayeed each have received four-year, $210,000 awards; and mechanical engineering assistant professor Jaal Ghandhi has received a $235,000 four-year award.

Harrington is researching water treatment processes that remove disinfectant-demanding substances to determine how effectively disinfectants such as ozone and chlorine remove dangerous levels of Cryptosporidium species. He will use completely mixed flow-through reactors to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative disinfectants, and from his results he will develop mathematical models which can be used to design water-treatment disinfection processes. The Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene will provide the Crypto species and evaluate the results.

Noguera hopes to develop a more efficient method of removing nitrogen from wastewater than is possible with conventional methods. His results will provide insights into engineering processes and systems design to reduce adverse effects of excessive nitrogen discharge into environmental waters.

By varying engine-air induction and fuel-injection strategies, Ghandhi will study the mixing rate’s effect on combustion and pollutant formation in an internal combustion engine employing direct in-cylinder injection of gasoline, a promising technology for future engines. He will use laser-based measurements to assess the mixing processes’ role.

Ghandhi also will restructure an existing instrumentation laboratory course to use a problem-based approach.

Sayeed will study wireless communication systems, particularly code-division multiple access systems. Global information infrastructure is rapidly evolving, and digital signal processing plays a central role in wireless communications because the physical network layer requires increasingly sophisticated processing.

The NSF awards were established to help scientists and engineers develop their contributions to research and education early in their careers. NSF awards $200,000 to $500,000 for a period of four to five years to junior-level faculty at colleges and universities. The 1999 awardees were selected from more than 1,600 applicants.