Five assistant professors in Cornell University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering have received Faculty Early Career Development Program grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). They are Mark Heinrich, Edwin Kan, Rajit Manohar, Bradley Minch and Norman Tien. All of the grants are for more than $200,000 over four years.

All eight of the electrical and computer engineering school's assistant professors have received NSF Early Career awards since 1997.

Heinrich's research, which will be supported by a $257,000 NSF grant, involves parallel computer architecture, data-intensive computing, cache coherence protocol design, hardware/software co-design and multiprocessor simulation methodology. He received both his M.S. (1993) and Ph.D. (electrical engineering, 1998) from Stanford University.

Kan's research, supported by a $210,000 NSF grant, includes nanoscale electronic devices and interconnects, MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) applications for system-on-a-chip, smart material synthesis and multi-scale geometry server. He obtained both his M.S. (1988) and his Ph.D. (1992) in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Manohar's research interests include asynchronous VLSI (very large scale integration) design, asynchronous computer architecture, low-power design and the use of concurrency theory for the design of reliable and robust asynchronous systems. He received both his M.S. (1995) and Ph.D. (1998) in computer science from the California Institute of Technology.

Minch's research interests include the design of analog and digital integrated circuits, analog integrated circuits for low-voltage, low-power analog signal processing, the use of floating-gate MOS transistors to build both adaptive information processing systems and "smart" interfaces for MEMS sensors, and the building of silicon models of neural computation. He received his Ph.D. (1997) in computation and neural systems from the California Institute of Technology.

Tien's research interest is the development of innovative silicon MEMS devices. This includes the design of actuators, sensors and mechanical structure and the development of the necessary fabrication technologies. He also is interested in the biomedical applications of MEMS. He obtained his M.S. (1984) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his Ph.D. (1993) at the University of California at San Diego.