ITHACA, N.Y. -- Two professors in the Cornell University College of Engineering have received prestigious $50,000 awards from the 2004 Lockheed Martin University Research Grants Program.

The two recipients are Alyssa B. Apsel, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mark Campbell, assistant professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

According to Nader Mehravari, senior technical staff member and manager of the IT Planning and Architecture Department at Lockheed Martin System Integration facilities in Owego, N.Y., "It is very unusual for the corporation to award more than one grant to a given university per year. Moreover, this is the third year in the row that a Cornell faculty member has received one of these grants from Lockheed Martin."

Thomas Avedisian, Cornell professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was a Lockheed Martin award recipient in 2003 and 2002.

Apsel is an expert on merging high-speed CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) circuits with photonics. Her research focuses on building high-performance opto-electronic computational microsystems. She received a Lockheed Martin award for her project "Resonant Monolithic Photodetectors and On-Chip Waveguides for Integrated Optoelectronics."

In addition, Apsel is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Award. The Faculty Early Career Development Program offers NSF's most prestigious award for new faculty members. The program recognizes and supports the early career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. Apsel received the NSF award for her project "Designing with Light -- Comparative Analysis and Design of Optical Interconnects for Chip-to-Chip Communication."

Apsel earned her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University in 2002.

Campbell is an expert in autonomy for complex aerospace systems, such as multiple satellites and autonomous aerial vehicles. He received his Lockheed Martin award for his project, "Cooperative Information Seeking for Uninhabited Vehicles." The project is designed to build a synergy between current Lockheed Martin programs in autonomous vehicles, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Unmanned Combat Armed Rotorcraft program, and two DARPA programs led by Campbell. These two programs focus on single-vehicle autonomy, such as adding robustness when faults and damage occur, and multiple vehicle autonomy, such as enabling cooperation among multiple vehicles for mission and trajectory generation. His recent work was flight tested by a company in Oregon in January 2004 on a small-scale autonomous aerial vehicle.

Campbell also is leading several Cornell student groups that are building satellites in a program called Ionospheric Scintillation Experiment Cubesat, or ICE CUBE. The first satellite is scheduled to be launched in October on a Dnepr rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and will be operated from the Cornell campus. The ICE CUBE science mission will measure scintillations, or disturbances, in the upper atmosphere.

Campbell earned his Ph.D. in control and estimation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.