The CAREER award honors teachers and scholars who are likely to become academic leaders in the future. Since 2000, UCF faculty members have received 22 CAREER awards.

2008 Recipients:

  • Enrique Del Barco, assistant professor, Department of Physics. Del Barco will develop the necessary experimental and educational tools for the study and understanding of the quantum dynamics of nanometer-sized molecular magnets under a broad range of experimental conditions.
  • Andre Gesquiere, assistant professor, NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Chemistry. Gesquire will address the issues of light absorption and conversion of absorbed light to free charge carriers in active conducting polymer materials for solar energy conversion and will develop a new class of composite nanoparticles that will be studied in a device environment.
  • Saiful Khondaker, assistant professor, NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Physics. Khondaker will develop a novel design engineering technique for parallel fabrication of controllable, scalable and reproducible single-electron transistor (SET) devices using carbon nanotubes (CNTs).
  • Stephan M. Kuebler, director, Nanophotonic Materials Group, and assistant professor, Department of Chemistry, College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL). Kuebler will investigate processing, deposition and growth phenomena relevant to preparing 3-D optical multi-scale metallodielectric materials (MDMs) and develop predictive capabilities that relate the resulting nano- and micron-scale structure of MDMs to their electromagnetic properties and performance, enabling new devices and applications.
  • Nina Orlovskaya, assistant professor, Mechanical, Materials & Aerospace Engineering. Orlovskaya will create an integrated research and educational project to develop hard and tough boron carbide and aluminum-magnesium boride-based laminates with controlled compressive and tensile stresses in separate layers.
  • Pawel Wocjan, assistant professor, School of Electrical and Computer Science. Wocjan will work to discover novel ways of harnessing quantum phenomena to advance the computational capabilities of information processing devices. This research provides a deeper understanding of the computational capabilities of information processing devices operating in the quantum regime.
  • Lei Zhai, assistant professor, NanoScience Technology Center and the Department of Chemistry. Zhai will investigate how to increase the efficiency of organic electronics by building ordered polymeric structures. Conductive polymers, i.e. plastics that can conduct electricity, have been proved to be very promising in replacing inorganic materials such as silicon in electronics.
  • Huiyang Zhou, assistant professor, School of Electrical and Computer Science. Zhou will introduce novel architectural support for bug detection, bug isolation to find the relevant bugs based on the cause-effect relationship between the potential bugs and the program failure, and bug validation to generate quick fixes to the isolated bugs, thereby forming a complete process of automated debugging.