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Dr. Cranos Williams

Drs. Cranos Williams (PI), Terri Long (CoPI), James Tuck (CoPI), and Joel Ducoste (CoPI) have been awarded $999,754 by the National Science Foundation for research on Dynamic Regulatory Modeling of the Iron Deficiency Response in Arabidopsis thaliana.

The award will run from August 15th, 2012 to July 31st, 2017.

Research Abstract

Multicellular organisms such as plants react to abiotic stress with a multitude of physiological and molecular responses orchestrated by key regulatory proteins, or transcription factors. Experimental datasets, such as transcriptional profiles, are often used to identify critical, yet, uncharacterized transcription factors in these responses.  Limitations in these datasets caused by constraints in experimental perturbations and finite experimental resources are the reasons why traditional approaches have revealed few key regulating and controlling elements, particularly in model organisms such as Arabidopsis thaliana.  The PIs hypothesize that additional computer-based simulations from dynamic gene regulatory models can be used in combination with clustering approaches to expand the perturbation space and assess secondary and tertiary control mechanisms, leading to the identification of hidden regulatory relationships between genes and transcription factors. They propose to develop a novel modeling and parallel computing paradigm to identify previously uncharacterized regulatory components that control iron homeostasis in A. thaliana across multiple cell types.

The interdisciplinary approach proposed by these PIs presents a new paradigm that 1) unifies novel genomic experimental techniques, engineering modeling approaches, and parallel computing to clarify the role of known regulatory elements and 2) identifies new regulating components involved in iron homeostasis within and across different cell types. Their integration of systems engineering, plant biology, and computer engineering will help create new solutions to existing problems and encourages a vision for addressing challenging issues that have, to date, remained intimidating using traditional approaches. Their results will lead to methods for stretching critical resources and increasing crop yields to feed the projected 9 billion people in 2050 through development of plants that exhibit improved function in low nutrient soils, or plants that can contain elevated nutrient content.

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Dr. John Muth

Dr. Tania Paskova and Dr. John Muth have been awarded $383,532 by the National Science Foundation for research on III-Nitride LED Structures on Sidewall Grown Semipolar Facets.

The award will run from July 1st, 2012 to June 30th, 2015.

Research Abstract

The proposed research addresses a long-standing issue of growing importance to the nitride-based optoelectronic technology, namely the internal quantum efficiency of nitride emitters in green-yellow region, and how the nonpolar/semipolar alignment of the active device regions can help to improve the device performance.  An in-depth investigation will be undertaken to gain a comprehensive understanding of the basic properties of semipolar GaN/InGaN LED structures produced by lateral sidewall growth. The dominating growth mechanisms, the defect formation and evolution, the In and doping element incorporation efficiency, and the strain in structures with different semipolar orientations will be studied, aiming to establish the best approach for producing low-defect-density semipolar LED structures with enhanced internal quantum efficiency.

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Paul Franzon, Eric Rotenberg, Rhett Davis, James Tuck, Huiyang Zhou and Steven Lipa have been awarded $4,019,617 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency  (DARPA) for research on 3D-Enabled Customizable Embedded Computer.

The award will run from September 19th, 2012 to February 14th, 2018.

Research Abstract

The proposed effort will investigate new approaches to building ultra low power computers.

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(L) Adam Wilkerson - (R) Scott Clouse

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is pleased to announce that Adam Wilkerson and Scott Clouse, two students pursuing their PhD's in Electrical Engineering, are the recipients of Department of Defense SMART Scholarships.

The Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship for Service Program has been established by the Department of Defense (DoD) to support undergraduate and graduate students pursuing degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The program aims to increase the number of civilian scientists and engineers working at DoD laboratories.

Adam Wilkerson is pursuing his PhD in Electrical Engineering at NCSU after completing his Master's in pure mathematics from Indiana University, where his focus was on Algebraic Topology.

While finishing his PhD over the next two years, he will be working on analyzing social networks using techniques in algebraic topology beyond graph theory. These techniques are a combination of ideas derived from the social science and network community and ideas developed in the study of sensor network deployments over the last 15 years. The idea is that pairwise relationships in a social network don't determine all the social structure within that group, and that higher-dimensional  data will shed some light on these holes in our understanding of human interactions.

After that, he'll be working in Huntsville, AL, studying sensor network deployments and continuing his social networks research.

Hamilton Scott Clouse is pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering at NCSU with an emphasis on pattern recognition. In the field of remote sensing, measurements are made from a distance with sensors of various modalities. Scott's work centers on the combination of phenomenological understanding and signal/image processing techniques to extract high-level descriptions of scenes observed in this manner. These data are of great dimensionality and, under the direction of Dr. Hamid Krim, Scott focuses specifically on geometric analysis techniques for such high-dimensional data.

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Cyborg Insect Networks for Exploration and Mapping

Alper Bozkurt, Edgar Lobaton and Mihail Sichitiu have been awarded $880,000 by the National Science Foundation Cyber-Physical Systems Program for their research on "CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Cyborg Insect Networks for Exploration and Mapping (CINEMa)". The total award amount is $1,000,000 as an additional award of $120,000 was granted to Ty Hedrick at UNC-Chapel Hill Biology Department as a part of this research effort. The award will run from October 1st, 2012 to September 30th, 2015.

Research Abstract

Autonomous navigation in unknown and dynamic environments has been a major challenge for synthetic mobile robotic agents. On the other hand, insects can easily solve such complex navigational problems and demonstrate remarkably stable and optimized locomotion skills in almost any environment. This project aims to develop a mobile sensor network where insects are used as mobile biological-robotic (biobotic) nodes. Insects, in fact, build a "natural" sensor network through the use of their biological sensing organs and release of chemical, mechanical and optical cues to communicate the information to the rest of the group. In the scope of this project, a novel cyber-physical communication network will be established among the individual insect in addition to the aforementioned natural one. For this, insects will be equipped with synthetic electronic sensors to sense additional cues, neuromuscular stimulation systems to direct the control of the insect and microcontrollers with radios to establish an RF link between the insects. This novel network will enable operation of insect biobots in complicated and uncertain dynamic environments for applications such as environmental sensing and search-and-rescue operations after natural disasters.

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