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Three win CAREER awards
Three young faculty in the George R. Brown School of Engineering have received prestigious Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards from the National Science Foundation.
The highly competitive CAREER award, which provides funding for five years of research, recognizes a young researcher’s commitment to scholarship and education. Fewer than 20 percent of the proposals submitted to the annual competition are funded.
 Michael Diehl, assistant professor of bioengineering, received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California in 2002, and came to Rice in 2006. His CAREER award will support research into collective motor protein dynamics using integral biosynthetic and single-molecule approaches. The research will aid in drug-delivery applications and in understanding transport-related diseases.
Ramon Gonzalez, the William Akers Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, received his Ph.D. in biomolecular engineering from the University of Chile in 2001, and worked as a postdoctoral associate in microbiology and cell science at the University of Florida in 2001-2002. He came to Rice in 2005.
Gonzalez’s award will support his research into biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels. Gonzalez discovered that E. coli, the workhorse of biotechnology, can metabolize glycerol, a byproduct of biodiesel production that until now has proved almost worthless. With his colleagues, Gonzalez is using E. coli to anaerobically ferment the glycerol that results from turning soybeans or rapeseed into biodiesel fuel.
 Farinaz Koushanfar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California-Berkeley in 2005. She came to Rice in 2006.
Her CAREER award will aid Koushanfar’s work improving the effectiveness of wireless sensor networks (WSN), enabling them to operate in environments in which conditions are not known in advance. She will develop data-driven modeling methods, scalable modular structures, and application optimization algorithms that capture and operate on data supplied by WSNs.
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