SCIENCE

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has chosen 11 faculty members at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Faculty Fellows for 2005-2006. The Faculty Fellows program, now in its seventh year, extends opportunities in advanced computing and information technology to UIUC faculty. In addition to financial support, Faculty Fellows have access to NCSA's high-performance computers, visualization and virtual reality environments, data analysis software, and other advanced information technology tools, as well as opportunities to collaborate with NCSA staff. Awards are administered through NCSA's Campus Relations office, directed by Radha Nandkumar. The program is jointly funded by NCSA and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. “This program is a strategic asset to the University and to NCSA,” says NCSA Director Thom Dunning. “The range and diversity of the projects being undertaken by the Faculty Fellows illustrates the broad impact that advanced information technology can have in research and education.” UIUC Vice Chancellor for Research Charles Zukoski also praises the program: “Researh collaborations built between NCSA and faculty fellows are increasingly important as foundations for strategic campus initiatives in areas such as translational biomedical research, materials research, and environmental science.” For the first time this year, several fellowships have been extended into a second year, in order to allow researchers to build on promising results and achieve even greater progress. The four researchers continuing their fellowships are: * Youssef Hashash, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, “Large-scale numerical simulations via reconfigurable computing. An application using discrete element modeling of granular material.” * Sharon Tettegah, Department of Curriculum and Instruction (with co-principal investigator Carolyn Anderson, Department of Educational Psychology), “Visualization of vignette and statistical models: An integrated approach.” * Donald Wuebbles, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, “Data mining and visualization of climate and air quality datasets.” The seven new fellows for 2005-2006 are: * Yoram Bresler, Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Bioengineering, “High-Performance computing for dynamic biomedical imaging.” * Matthew Hudson, Department of Crop Sciences, “Deciphering intergenic DNA – the next challenge in genome biology.” * Laxmikant Kale, Department of Computer Science, “Faucets: on-demand resource allocation on computational grids.” * Momcilo Markus, Center for Watershed Science, “Data fusion, data mining, pattern recognition and regional classification of the water quality data in the midwestern United States.” * Chad Rienstra, Department of Chemistry, “Cyberinfrastructure for NMR data acquisition and analysis.” * Susan Kieffer, Department of Geology, “Dynamics of catastrophic volcanic eruptions and dusty gas flows in ‘urban canyons’.” * Kelly Swanson, Department of Animal Sciences, “Predictive data mining of complex nutrigenomic datasets.” For more information on NCSA’s Office of Campus Relations and the NCSA/UIUC Faculty Fellows Program, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/AboutUs/People/Divisions/divisions37.html.