NCSA NEWS

Former NCSA Faculty Fellows Win Presidential Early Career Awards

released November 7, 2000

Two NCSA Faculty Fellows from the 1999-2000 program year were named recipients of this year's annual Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers.

Youssef Hashash and Barbara Minsker, both with the civil and environmental engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, were among 59 young researchers to receive the PECASE at an Oct. 24 White House ceremony.

President Clinton established the awards program in February of 1996. Eight federal departments and agencies join together every year to nominate the most deserving young scientists and engineers. The agencies involved include the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. The NSF nominated Hashash and the DoD nominated Minsker.

Both Hashash and Minsker have received assistance in their research through NCSA's Faculty Fellows program, which is funded jointly by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and NCSA. The Faculty Fellows program gives members of the U of I faculty the opportunity to use NCSA's advanced computing, information, and visualization technologies in their research projects. The fellows also have an opportunity to collaborate with colleagues at NCSA and throughout the Alliance.

Hashash is developing an interactive Web-based tool that allows 3D rendering of states of stress and strain in engineering materials such as metals, plastics, concrete, and soils. This tool, called VizCoRe, is being developed as a workbench-style tool based on Java and html. Harry Hilton and Christine Beldica of NCSA's Computational Structural/Solid Mechanics group collaborate with Hashash on the VizCoRe project. Minsker and her colleagues are developing a parallel version of a computer modeling code used to determine risk management strategies for cleaning up contaminated groundwater. The code was ported to NCSA's NT supercluster with assistance from Faisal Saied, Sirpa Saarinen, and Bruce Loftis of NCSA's Scientific Computing Division.

In a White House press release announcing the PECASE winners, President Clinton stated, "these extraordinarily gifted young scientists and engineers represent the best in our country. 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."

 

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