Professor receives foundation award

Yu 5th at UA in 2 years to earn grant

Shui-Qing “Fisher” Yu, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, speaks in his lab at the UA Engineering Research Center.
Shui-Qing “Fisher” Yu, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, speaks in his lab at the UA Engineering Research Center.

— In his research laboratory, University of Arkansas engineering professor Shui-Qing “Fisher” Yu pointed out some pieces of high-tech equipment that he found on eBay.

Yu stressed that the instruments, paid for by the university, work fine and they were more affordable than what is typically found on the retail market.

After landing a prestigious federal grant, Yu probably can look beyond an online auction site for funding his lab.

He recently was awardedfunding through the Faculty Early Career Development Program, better known as a CAREER award, by the National Science Foundation.

Yu is an assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering in the College of Engineering. The grant will provide $400,000 over five years to fund Yu’s research of bismuth, a relatively unexplored material system.

The award is one of the highest honors given by the foundation to junior faculty members. Recipients are selected based on high-quality research and the integrationof that research with education initiatives in the context of the university’s mission, according to the foundation.

There have been more than 400 CAREER grants made in each of the past several years, according to the foundation. Yu is the fifth UA professor to receive the grant in the last two years and the 18th overall since they were first given in 1996.

There are also professors at UA who received the award at another institution and have brought the funding with them, such as Susanne Striegler, a new associate professor in the chemistry and biochemistry department.

Striegler received the award in 2008 while at Auburn University in Alabama.

Jim Rankin, UA’s vice provost for research and economic development, said his office is busy preparing applications for the grants for the foundation’s next funding cycle.

“We are encouraging faculty to apply for them, not only me but the deans and the department heads and the provost,” Rankin said. “It’s quite an honor. It gives them a chance to really jumpstart their research.

“It was a great to see Fisher Yu get the award.”

Yu joined the UA faculty in 2008. He said he’s on the cutting edge of the potential use of the element bismuth in lasers.

“For this research, we are really, really ahead of other people,” Yu said. “There are some lasers similar to the technologies I’m going to use, but they don’t use bismuth. It potentially can create lasers with high power, high efficiency and high reliability.”

The National Science Foundation expects its CAREER award winners to become experts in their field, Yu said. In the long term, he hopes to establish a UAaffiliated start-up company that would commercialize his findings.

For now, he leads a research team of eight graduate students and two post-doctoral researchers whom he shares with another faculty member. One of his doctoral students, Dongsheng Fan, has contributed significantly to the project, Yu said.

The grant will provide funding for his graduate students and include involvement from undergraduates, he said.

Brady Cox, an assistant professor of civil engineering at UA, received a five-year, $421,600 CAREER awardin 2011 for his research into the layering and engineering properties of soil under a building site.

His work provides information for designing structures that will resist earthquake damage. He has become a national expert on the effects of earthquakes on buildings and infrastructure.

“We want to make sure we have good information that is used in the design of our structures,” he said.

Most of the grant pays for monthly stipends and tuition for his graduate students, he said. It also supports his field work at sites across the United States.

“The CAREER award is an amazing thing,” he said. “You have the opportunity to focus on a topic of your choice and to integrate that with education. Most of the research grants that we apply for are for a much shorter time frame.”

Cox recently accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Texas at Austin, and his grant will follow him there. He was just named by President Obama as one of the 96 recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awardfor Scientists and Engineers.

Cox and the other awardees will be honored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy at a reception in Washington D.C. on Tuesday. He is the first professor from UA to be selected for the presidential award.

Across the state, Brandon Kemp is blazing a trail for faculty research at Arkansas State University at Jonesboro. This year, Kemp became the first ASU professor to receivea CAREER award.

Kemp, an assistant professor of electrical engineering,landed a fiveyear, $400,000 grant to further his exploration of fundamental interactions between light and materials.

“For me, itmeans more for the broader impact for ASU and the College of Engineering and northeast Arkansas than it means for me individually,” said Kemp, a Jonesboro native who graduated from ASU in 1997.

After earning a doctorate in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007, Kemp worked in private industry for three years before returning to Jonesboro to help start a master’s program in engineering.

He developed the curriculum for ASU’s master’s-level engineering courses and was a founding member of the school’s Center for Efficient and Sustainable Use of Resources.

“ASU strives to be a research-centric university and the College of Engineering strives to have a big role in this,” he said. “This award elevates the university and the College of Engineering as a major player of doing real research on a national and international level.”

With his CAREER award, he hopes to attract graduate students from both within and outside the university, Kemp said.

“A lot of our students go outside the state to go to graduate school and I’m a perfect example of that,” he said.

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Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 07/26/2012

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