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 Recent awards top $1.5 million Research grants totaling over $1.5 million, recently won by faculty in the College of Engineering, will explore a broad range of issues from adding value to food products and commodities to increasing the data storage capabilities of computers and ensuring the reliability of its components and control mechanisms. Supported by a $200,000 National Science Foundation grant, ChE Professor Jacqueline V. Shanks along with researchers at Rice University, are focusing on ways to genetically alter an important amino acid pathway for the production of tryptophan in plant tissue. This cross-disciplinary project in biochemical engineering, plant genetics, and bioengineering will train students to use molecular and engineering approaches for solving key problems in plant metabolic engineering, an area with few trained students in the United States. The goal of plant metabolic engineering is to improve the quality of key crops that include not just food for human and animal consumption, but commodities such as plastics, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. Ashraf Bastawros, AEEM professor, and Abhijit Chandra, ME professor, will investigate the material removal process in the layering of silicon wafers. The three-year $325,400 NSF grant will help researchers better understand the chemical and mechanical planarization technique used to flatten and polish these layers. High-speed microprocessors are indispensable for use in a variety of applications from computer graphics and visualization to internet and information technology systems. A $206,000 NSF grant will enable Gyungho Lee, ECpE associate professor, to improve the architecture of microprocessors by expanding the data bandwidth in wide-issue processors commonly used in high-performance computer systems. Lee’s research will focus on improving hardware and software support in memory pipeline to vastly increase the amount of information that these processors can access. Using magnetoelectronics technology to increase the data storage capabilities of computers is a research area that is being explored by ECpE Professor David Jiles. Thanks to a $530,000 grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust, Jiles and scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory will establish a magnetoelectronics laboratory in the Metals Development Lab on campus. Much of the work in the new lab will involve using an ion-beam deposition system to produce materials in the form of thin films that will expand the data storage capacity on a computer’s hard drive. The dependability of computer systems and networks relies heavily on research in the area of fault tolerance and reliability of components and control mechanisms. Arun K. Somani, ECpE professor, will investigate fault-tolerant optical networks focusing on design, modeling, and development of algorithms for a fault and attack management system. In collaboration with George Washington University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the project has a total funding of $2.4 million, with over $470,000 coming to Iowa State to be used for research and graduate student support. Somani and colleagues will develop state-of-the-art open simulation environments to understand resources required to support a modern FAM system. |
