CAREER Winners National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards support the research and educational development of young scholars expected to become leaders in their fields. With only about 400 per year given out across all disciplines, the grants are among the most competitive NSF awards, and so far this year, three are from Rice.
Bridging the Gap
Imagining Better Imaging
Mathematics and Mentoring
When Amina Qutub turned her attention from the chemistry of oil to the myster ies of the brain, she liked what she saw. An assistant professor of bioengineering, Qutub is working to understand brain processes using methods that bridge the gap between computational biology and clinical application. Her research may lead to new treatments for victims of stroke and neurodegenerative diseases. Qutub’s research has progressed from work to understand the bloodbrain barrier to a focus on the way the body responds to hypoxia — or lack of oxygen. With her computational background, she’s uniquely positioned to look at the way brain cells behave when they lack oxygen, such as after strokes or during neurodegeneration. The goal is to know how cells process information and to learn to direct how they make decisions, especially under stressful conditions like hypoxia. “We want to know what makes cells more responsive so they can be more vi able under hypoxic conditions,” Qutub said. “In the case of a stroke, for in stance, we might learn to regrow areas of the brain.”
How molecules get from here to there in vari ous environments is a fundamental question Rice University chemist Christy Landes would love to answer. Now Landes, the Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator and an assistant professor of chemistry, will get the chance to do so with the help of the National Science Foundation CAREER grant. Landes and her group will develop state of-the-art single-molecule spectroscopic techniques to help researchers understand and control the transport of molecules across charged polymer membranes, particularly at water/membrane interfaces. The work has implications for energy and water purification applications. It’s also a departure from the biomolecular research for which Landes is already known. Last year, she imaged protein-binding process es using a unique mathematics tool developed at Rice for a project that advanced research into memory, learning, and the roots of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and stroke. She said the project is perfectly suited for Rice because it involves chemistry, physics, materials science, environmental science and applied mathematics. “I’m interested in lots of things,” Landes said, “and I like my students to learn in an interdisciplinary environment.”
Danijela Damjanovic liked numbers from an early age, and mathematics felt like a natural choice for a career. It wasn’t a conventional choice for a young woman, and often she was the only woman in her classes. Now, she wants to use her CAREER Award to help young women who might want to become mathemati cians as well as to support her research and teaching. Damjanovic studies dynamical sys tems — objects together with their evolu tion in time. “One of the main goals is to understand not only the current state of the objects under consideration, but also past and future behavior,” she said. “Does a small perturbation of that system mimic the behavior of the simple system?” Damjanovic asked. “Or, after a perturba tion, do new phenomena arise?” Each spring, Damjanovic plans to offer a semester-long extracurricular science course for high school women that lets them work together on prob lems and projects and gives them a chance to interact with women who have built prominent careers in math and science.
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