Three McCormick Professors Receive Prestigious NSF Award for Young Faculty

August 12, 2009

Three faculty members from the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science have received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. They are among eight recent recipients from Northwestern. The minimum CAREER award size is $400,000 for a five-year period.

Award recipients from McCormick are Robert Findler, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Mitra Hartmann, associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering, and Malcolm MacIver, assistant professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering.

The CAREER program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards for new faculty members. The program recognizes and supports early career development of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their respective institutions.

Findler’s research focuses on software engineering and programming languages. He studies the design of programming languages to enable better software design.

His CAREER award is for his proposal “Lightweight, Blame-aware Contract Checking.” Software contract checking is a technique for improving the reliability of software by peppering small, checkable facts into the program. When the facts turn out to be false, the contract checker can not only report an error in the software, it also can localize it to just a small part of the program, making it easy for software developers to track down the source of the error.

Hartmann uses the rat-whisker system as a model to understand how the brain seamlessly integrates the sense of touch with movement. Rats are nocturnal, burrowing animals that move their whiskers rhythmically to tactually explore the environment. Using only tactile information from its whiskers, a rat can determine all of an object’s spatial properties, including size, shape, orientation and texture. Hartmann’s research group is particularly interested in how sensory feedback is used in real time to guide motor activity and how movement enables sensory acquisition and perception.

In her CAREER award project, “The Virtual Whisking Rat: Linking Mechanics and Sensory Neuroscience,” Hartmann will use novel technologies to quantify how the whiskers move and interact with objects during rat exploratory behavior. She will develop a simulation system to model these interactions. Improved understanding of the rat-whisker system will provide insight into the general functional principles that govern the neural circuits mediating sensing and control.

MacIver’s research focuses on the interplay of biomechanics and the nervous system — neuromechanics, neuroethology, robotics and simulation — using weakly electric fish as a model system.

His CAREER award project is titled “The Interdependence of Animal Information Acquisition and Mechanics.” While the nervous system operates with information, the mechanics of the body and the environment in which the nervous system is embedded constitute a world of forces. Work on the mechanics of the body and on the nervous system is rarely undertaken in a joint fashion, in part because of the difficulty of comparing these quantities. There is no science of “infomechanics” — a theoretical umbrella under which neural information acquisition can be related to mechanics. MacIver’s goal is to uncover principles of infomechanics, using as a biological model system the Amazonian weakly electric fish, which can sense and move omnidirectionally.

- Megan Fellman